What the Auschwitz Controversy Revealed About the Enemies of America and Israel

By Seth Mandel

Friday, January 10, 2025

 

If I ran a crisis communications shop and was asked what Poland could do that would create the absolute worst optics in the history of optics, the answer would be easy: Arrest the Israeli prime minister at Auschwitz. The resulting fallout would make the Blake Lively-Justin Baldoni public-relations war look like a backyard game of Capture the Flag.

 

And yet, those were the headlines for weeks: “Netanyahu will be arrested if he comes to Auschwitz memorial, Polish government confirms,” as the Jerusalem Post had it. Poland saw itself as obligated to arrest the leader of the Jewish state at the site of a concentration camp because… well because the International Criminal Court told it to do so.

 

Yesterday came the announcement that Poland decided to grant Netanyahu—and anyone from the Jewish state—immunity from ICC arrest, at least for the time being.

 

Now, the ICC is an “international court” the way the food court at EPCOT Center is an international court. Which is why I think the ICC, which issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, had the most to gain from Poland reneging on its “obligations.” Set aside the fact that the warrant is illegitimate because (for one) the ICC has no jurisdiction over Israel. Were the ICC to be the reason for the arrest of the leader of the Jewish state at Auschwitz—at Auschwitz, for Pete’s sake—it would be exposed as a threat to the democratic order and as a tool of the regimes that both deny the Holocaust and seek to repeat it.

 

Arresting Netanyahu at Auschwitz would bring irrevocable humiliation on every Western democratic member state of the ICC. And perhaps that’s exactly what the ICC deserves, for it would be quickly and not-so-quietly swept into the dustbin of history, from which it emerged in the first place.

 

Which is not to say the ICC will get away scot-free. Because the ICC has no jurisdiction over Israel’s conflict with Hamas, it is essentially interfering on behalf of enemy states and against the effort to save American hostages. So the Republican House has voted, appropriately, to sanction the court. “The bill instructs the president to freeze property assets and deny visas to any foreigners who materially or financially contributed to the court’s efforts to ‘investigate, arrest, detain or prosecute a protected person,’” reports the New York Times. “Protected persons are defined as all current and former military and government officials of the United States and allies that have not consented to the court’s jurisdiction, such as Israel.”

 

As the Times mentions, the effort to sanction the ICC died in the Democratic Senate. With Republicans back in the majority, the bill will likely pass the Senate and be signed into law by President-elect Trump after he takes office.

 

“This bill sends an incredibly important message across the globe,” Florida Republican Rep. Brian Mast said on the House floor. “Do not get in the way of America or our allies trying to bring our people home. You will be given no quarter, and again, you will certainly not be welcome on American soil.”

 

In an encouraging sign, 45 Democrats joined with Republicans to pass the bill. Meanwhile, the arguments from Democrats against the bill were more likely to help its passage than to hurt it. “Republicans want to sanction the ICC simply because they don’t want the rules to apply to everyone,” said Massachusetts Rep. Jim McGovern. “There is no international right to vengeance, and what we are seeing in Gaza is vengeance.”

 

This is pure gobbledygook. The “rules” of the ICC do not, in fact, apply to the United States, though McGovern is free to argue that the U.S. should join the ICC. The rules of international law and order do apply to the U.S. and our allies, and the ICC is in fact the party here ripping those rules to shreds. Additionally, even if McGovern sees the efforts to rescue American and Israeli hostages as “vengeance,” that is neither a crime nor, to be honest, an argument against the bill.

 

As for those who wanted Poland to arrest Netanyahu at Auschwitz, who wanted to have a grotesque spectacle with which to advance their own Holocaust inversion, they have revealed themselves to be nostalgic for a time when Auschwitz was more than a symbol.