Netanyahu defiant that ‘not even the ICJ will stop us’

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has issued a defiant message to the international community, wherein he basically challenged the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to stop the apartheid state from achieving “total victory” in Gaza.

“Nobody will stop us-not The Hague, not the axis of evil and not anybody else,” said the far-right Likud leader using the official Prime Minister of Israel twitter account to mark 100 days of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. “We are continuing the war until the end – until total victory.”

The 74-year-old issued his defiant statement only a day after the ICJ at The Hague heard South Africa’s case against Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza. “We will restore security to both the south and the north [of Israel],” he added.

We will restore security to both the south and the north. Nobody will stop us – not The Hague, not the axis of evil and not anybody else.

— Prime Minister of Israel (@IsraeliPM) January 13, 2024

Netanyahu described South Africa’s case as a “hypocritical onslaught” before, somewhat predictably, evoking the Nazi Holocaust. Hamas’s attack, he claimed, “arose from the ashes of the Holocaust, at the behest of those who came to perpetrate another Holocaust against the Jews.” In doing so, he ignored his own advice and the advice of advocates of the occupation state not to make comparisons with the industrialised slaughter of six million Jews by European Nazis.

Such comparisons are even considered as anti-Semitism by the highly controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Jewish racism favoured by Israel and Zionist lobby groups. Equating Jews with the state of Israel is also considered to be anti-Semitic according to the IHRA, but this has not stopped Israel and its backers from comparing Hamas’s attack on 7 October with Nazis and equating Israel with all Jews. As many have argued, the definition exists primarily to silence critics of the occupation state and its racist ideology of Zionism.

Netanyahu went on to claim that German Chancellor Olaf Scholz viewed images of the Hamas attack and called the resistance movement “the new Nazis”. The Israeli prime minister was fact checked by X for the false claim. “Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany never said that,” corrected the social media site’s community note team. “This sentence was said by Benjamin Netanyahu when Scholz visited Israel following 7th October attacks.”

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