When world leaders gather in Poland this January 27 to mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, one seat will be ominously empty. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, of all the leaders of the world, cannot set foot on Polish soil without risking arrest.
The reason is that the International Criminal Court has charged Mr. Netanyahu, and his former defense minister Yoav Gallant with war crimes and crimes against humanity. The Biden administration has called out the ICC’s lack of jurisdiction and “troubling process errors,” denouncing a decision “we fundamentally reject.”
Given the blowback, the president of Poland has called on the country’s prime minister to allow Netanyahu to attend in light of the “absolutely exceptional circumstances” of the gathering, which takes place on International Holocaust Remembrance Day. But the Polish government has done nothing to contest the ICC’s charges. And Netanyahu, who has not traveled to Europe since the charges dropped, has not received an official invitation.
It would be hard to contrive a crueler or more emblematic set of ironies.
Not only will a major commemoration of the slaughter of six million Jews take place in the presence of all major foreign leaders except those of the world’s only Jewish state, but two of the legal terms erroneously deployed against Israel—“crimes against humanity,” as in the ICC warrant, and “genocide,” as alleged by human rights organizations—were pioneered by two Polish-born Jews. Hersch Lauterpacht and Raphael Lemkin, both of whom lost family members in the Holocaust, developed these concepts for use in international legal proceedings after the war.