ISRAELI prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu “bears the primary responsibility” for the Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, a leading Holocaust scholar has said.
Writing in The New World magazine, Omer Bartov – an Israeli-born academic currently working as the Dean’s professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University in the US – said that Netanyahu must stand trial for genocide, or international law will be made a “mockery and irrelevance”.
Bartov argued that Israel may end up “sacrificing” Netanyahu – who is wanted for arrest by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for alleged crimes against humanity – to be punished for crimes in which much of the state infrastructure is implicated.
The Holocaust scholar noted that Netanyahu has technically been on trial for alleged crimes of severe corruption for the last five years, going on: “This was one reason that when he could no longer form a coalition with his usual partners, who got fed up with his lies, he turned to the far right and created the most extreme government in Israel’s history …
“This fear of justice by Netanyahu only intensified after the October 7 attack, a fiasco for which he bears the primary responsibility, both because he ignored the immediate warning signs and because he had spent years treating Hamas as a political asset and supplying it with Qatari money, since as long as Hamas ruled Gaza, Israel could keep up the posture that there was no one to speak with on the Palestinian side and thus that the occupation could and had to be managed rather than brought to an end through negotiations.
“What was urgently needed after October 7 was a state commission of inquiry to determine how such a tremendous blunder by the government, the security agencies and the IDF could have happened. But Netanyahu, fearing that his head would roll, has adamantly opposed this, saying that such matters should only be dealt with after the war ends.
Bartov, who in July made international headlines after writing in the New York Times that Israel was committing genocide in Palestine, further examined how Netanyahu might be put on trial for the “crime of crimes”.
He argued: “While vast numbers of people are complicit in genocide – and in the current case, governments that not only refused to stop the killing when they could, but kept supplying Israel with arms, economic assistance, and a diplomatic iron dome, are also complicit – the head of state must be seen as the primary culprit.”
Bartov went on: “When he is finally out of office, which will happen sooner or later, he may have to face justice in Israel for a list of crimes that will have only increased by then. Possibly, as happened in Serbia, it may be more convenient to hand him over to the ICC [International Criminal Court], where he will face charges of using famine as an instrument of war, murder, extermination, and genocide.”
He added: “Netanyahu may end up being the very first leader of a state allied with European powers and the United States, those states that always claimed to be the protectors of international law and human rights, found guilty of the crime of crimes, perpetrated with the connivance of those very same states.
“If anything can still save the regime of international law put into place after the defeat of Nazism from mockery and irrelevance, this might be the moment.”
Bartov is one of an increasing number of scholars and international experts to have concluded that Israel’s actions in Palestine are a genocide.
“Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. It sounds inconceivable. But it’s the truth,” the group said.
“Israel is taking deliberate, coordinated action to destroy the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
“Explicit statements by Israeli officials, combined with a consistent policy of destructive attacks and other practices of annihilation, prove beyond a doubt that Israel’s target is the entire population of Gaza.”
