Uncategorized
The sequel to the Holocaust novel ‘Boy in the Striped Pajamas’ is here. Its author has no regrets.
(JTA) – At one point in John Boyne’s new novel “All The Broken Places,” a 91-year-old German woman recalls, for the first time, her encounter with a young Jewish boy in the Auschwitz death camp 80 years prior.
“I found him in the warehouse one day. Where they kept all the striped pajamas,” she says.
The woman, Gretel, quickly realizes her mistake: that “this was a phrase peculiar to my brother and me.” She clarifies that she is referring to “the uniforms. … You know the ones I mean.”
Boyne’s readers are, in fact, likely to know what Gretel means, as “All The Broken Places” is a sequel to Boyne’s 2006 international bestseller “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.” At a time when other Holocaust books intended for young readers have been challenged or removed from some American schools, the enduring popularity of “Striped Pajamas” has conjured up love and loathing in equal measure for its depiction of Nazi and Jewish youths during the Holocaust. It has sold 11 million copies, appeared in 58 languages and in major motion picture form, and been the only assigned reading about Jews or the Holocaust for countless schoolchildren, mostly in Britain. Yet Holocaust scholars have warned against it, panning it as inaccurate and trafficking in dangerous stereotypes about Jewish weakness.
Speaking to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency from his Dublin home on Tuesday, the day “All the Broken Places” hit U.S. shelves, Boyne said he hoped readers would take his new book on its own terms — as a more sophisticated meditation on guilt, culpability and evil, for an adult audience rather than children this time. But he also wants to defend the original work that made him famous.
“I do feel it’s a positive contribution to the world and to Holocaust studies,” said Boyne, who estimates that he has personally spoken to between 500 and 600 schools about “Striped Pajamas.”
Not everyone agrees. A 2016 study published by the Centre for Holocaust Education, a British organization housed at University College London, found that 35% of British teachers used his book in their Holocaust lesson plans, and that 85% of students who had consumed any kind of media related to the Holocaust had either read the book or seen its movie adaptation.
That level of widespread familiarity with the book led many students to inaccurate conclusions about the Holocaust, such as that the Nazis were “victims too” and that most Germans were unaware of the horrors being visited upon the Jewish people, the study found.
A promotional image from the 2008 film adaptation of “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.” (Miramax)
As overall awareness of the Holocaust has decreased among young people especially, Boyne’s novel has become a casualty of its own success. Holocaust scholars in the United Kingdom and United States have decried the book, with historian David Cesarani calling it “a travesty of facts” and “a distortion of history,” and the Holocaust Exhibition and Learning Centre in London publishing a long takedown of the book’s inaccuracies and “stereotypes.”
“With the rise in antisemitism, such as it is in this country, and that so often manifests through trivialisation, distortion and denial of the Holocaust, this book could potentially do more harm than good,” Centre for Holocaust Education researcher Ruth-Anne Lenga concluded at the end of her 2016 study.
Boyne came to the Holocaust as subject matter purely on his own, having never been taught about the history growing up in Ireland. (He attended a Catholic school, where, as he has recounted publicly, he was physically and sexually abused by his teachers.) Reading Elie Wiesel’s “Night” as a teenager, Boyne said, “made me want to understand more.”
He would read many more Holocaust books during his twenties, from Primo Levi to Anne Frank to “Sophie’s Choice,” fascinated by the sheer recency of the atrocity. “How could something that seems like it should have happened, say, 1,000 years ago — because the death count is so enormous and so horrifying — how could that happen so close to the time that I’m alive in?” he thought. “And if it could, then what’s to stop it happening again?”
That fascination led to the publication, when Boyne was 33, of “Striped Pajamas,” which he’d always conceived of as a children’s story. In the book, Bruno, the 9-year-old son of a Nazi commandant, befriends Shmuel, a Jewish concentration-camp prisoner of the same age; it ends with Bruno donning the “striped pajamas” and following his friend into the gas chambers. Further driving home the fable conceit, an initial draft included a framing device of Boyne as a character reading the story to an audience of children, before an editor advised him to cut it.
During his writing process, Boyne said he was concerned with “the emotional truth of the novel” as opposed to holding to historical accuracy, and defended much of the book’s ahistorical details — such as moving the Auschwitz guards’ living quarters to outside the camp, and putting no armed guards or electric fences between Bruno and Shmuel — as creative license. A common critique of the book, that the climax encourages the reader to mourn the death of Bruno over that of Shmuel and the other Jews in the camps, makes no sense to Boyne: “I struggle to understand somebody who would reach the end of that book and only feel sympathy for Bruno. I think then if somebody does, I think that says more, frankly, about their antisemitism than anything else.”
He also justified his decisions by reasoning that a novel like his shouldn’t be the basis for Holocaust instruction.
“I don’t think that it’s my responsibility, as a novelist who didn’t write a school book, to justify its use in education when I never asked for that to happen,” he said. “If [teachers] make the choice to use a novel in their classrooms, it’s their responsibility to make sure the children know that there is a difference between what happens in this novel and what happened in real life.”
Boyne added that he was “appalled” by a recent JTA report about a Tennessee school district removing Art Spiegelman’s graphic Holocaust memoir “Maus” from its curriculum. If teachers are choosing between teaching the two books, he said, “‘Maus’ is better, no question about that. And a much more important book.” (Earlier this year, Spiegelman himself took a swipe at “Striped Pajamas” by telling a Tennessee audience that no schools should read Boyne’s novel because “that guy didn’t do any research whatsoever.”)
“The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” John Boyne’s 2006 bestseller, has been critiqued for the way it presented the Holocaust to children. (Illustration by Grace Yagel)
For the first decade of his book’s release, Boyne would frequently receive invites to speak at Jewish community centers and Holocaust museums. He met with survivors who shared their stories with him.
Over the years, more research has been published about the book’s popularity in the classroom, which has led to more scrutiny of its factual inaccuracies. Other authors, Holocaust researchers and some educators have come out forcefully against the book’s use in the classroom. At the same time, Boyne said, his invitations to Jewish venues dried up.
The author has also been known to exacerbate the issue by sparring with his critics, even when they are respected institutions. Most infamously, in 2020, Boyne got into a Twitter feud with the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, which said his Auschwitz-set book “should be avoided by anyone who studies or teaches about the history of the Holocaust.”
The back-and-forth was provoked after Boyne criticized what he saw as the crassness of more recent Holocaust novels, such as “The Tattooist of Auschwitz” by Heather Morris. Reflecting on the spat, Boyne said of the Auschwitz memorial, “I hope that they do understand that, whether my book is a masterpiece or a travesty, that I came at it with the very best intentions.”
Boyne conceived of the sequel shortly after finishing “Striped Pajamas.” It follows Bruno’s older sister Gretel as she lives in hiding after the war and successfully conceals her Nazi upbringing all the way into the present day. A preteen during the Holocaust, Gretel becomes gradually more aware of its horrors after seeing newspaper articles and documentaries and encountering former Resistance members and Jewish descendants of survivors (including one, David, who becomes her lover without knowing her true background).
Unlike “Striped Pajamas,” “All the Broken Places” is intended for adults. It’s filled with sex, violence, suicide attempts and bad language — and also some of the details of the Holocaust that were omitted from the first book. It mentions the Sobibor death camp by name, for example, and also takes the time to correct Bruno’s childish assumptions about the death camps being a “farm.”
But it tells the story from the perspective of a German who was directly implicated in the Holocaust. Throughout, Gretel reflects on her complicity in the Nazi regime, and her self-interest in hiding from authorities in the following years rather than trying to bring people like her father to justice. Missing from the book is any serious discussion of antisemitism as an ideology, and to what extent Gretel ascribes to it — though there is plenty of hand-wringing over postwar anti-German sentiment. In one shocking moment, a former S.S. lieutenant in hiding presents Gretel with a pair of Hitler’s eyeglasses and urges her to try them on; she is terrified to discover that this excites her.
The book’s reception has been mixed. While praised by publications including Kirkus Reviews (“a complex, thoughtful character study”) and the Guardian (“a defense of literature’s need to shine a light on the darkest aspects of human nature”), the New Statesman took Boyne to task for writing an “immoral” and “shameless sequel” that further erodes the “Jewishness” of the Holocaust.
At the behest of his publisher, Boyne has included an author’s note with “All The Broken Places” alluding to criticisms of “Striped Pajamas.” “Writing about the Holocaust is a fraught business and any novelist approaching it takes on an enormous burden of responsibility,” he tells the reader. “The story of every person who died in the Holocaust is one that is worth telling. I believe that Gretel’s story is also worth telling.”
Still, “Striped Pajamas” has its Jewish defenders. One, the 24-year-old composer Noah Max, is behind a new opera adaptation of the book, to be titled “The Child in the Striped Pyjamas.” It will debut in London in January; a recent story by the U.K. Jewish Chronicle helped convince the film’s rights holder Miramax to waive a $1 million licensing fee for the project.
A great-grandson of Jews who fled Vienna when the Nazis arrived, Max told JTA he’d initially read the book “years before I was capable of absorbing testimony,” and that it inspired him to seek out actual survivor testimonies and to begin composing the opera at the age of 19. He compared its message to Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ writings on moral relativism.
“Ultimately, the book motivated me to write an opera about the Shoah and integrate Holocaust education into my music,” Max said. “Any book capable of that is worthy of attention.”
Composer Noah Max (center) rehearses for his upcoming opera adaptation of “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” to premiere in January 2023. (Courtesy of Noah Max)
Max’s passion for “Striped Pajamas” inspired at least one Holocaust group to change its mind about its educational merits. The Holocaust Educational Trust, a London-based group that advocates British educators on how to teach the Holocaust, had as recently as 2020 declared that “we advise against using” the book in the classroom.
But following what Max described as “richly fulfilling conversations” about “the story’s symbolic and artistic worth,” the trust fully endorsed the opera and, he said, has begun to rethink its view of the book. (The group did not respond to a JTA request for comment.)
Even with 16 years of hindsight and the chance to rethink his bestseller, Boyne said he wouldn’t change anything. Reflecting on his youthful audience, he said, “If they weren’t reading ‘Striped Pajamas,’ it’s more likely they would be reading something that has no relevance to this subject at all.”
—
The post The sequel to the Holocaust novel ‘Boy in the Striped Pajamas’ is here. Its author has no regrets. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Global Antisemitism Sparks Surge in Aliyah From Western Countries as Jews Leave US, UK, France for Israel
New olim disembark at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport on the first charter aliyah flight after he Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks, arriving to begin new lives in Israel. Photo: The Algemeiner
As global antisemitism continues to skyrocket, Israel recorded a surge in Jewish immigration from Western nations specifically in 2025, despite an overall decline in Jews abroad moving to their ancient homeland.
Israel welcomed over 21,900 Jews from more than 100 countries this year amid ongoing hostility abroad. The figure represented a drop of about one-third from last year’s numbers, due largely to a steep dip in Russian emigration.
However, aliyah – the process of Jews immigrating to Israel – from the United States, France, the United Kingdom, and other Western countries surged sharply this year, according to data released Monday by Israel’s Immigration and Absorption Ministry.
This growing migration pattern comes as Jewish communities around the world, especially in Europe, have faced a troubling surge in antisemitic incidents and anti-Israel sentiment since the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Jewish leaders have consistently called on authorities to take swift action against the rising wave of targeted attacks and anti-Jewish hate crimes, ranging from the vandalism of murals and businesses to violent physical assaults, that their communities continue to face.
“Aliyah to Israel in 2025 is a moving testament to Jewish resilience and the strength of the Zionist spirit, even amid security and national challenges,” Jewish Agency chairman Maj. Gen. (res.) Doron Almog said in a statement.
“In the shadow of the war, thousands of young people and families chose to bind their fate with Israel and build a shared future here,” he continued. “Aliyah is Israel’s growth engine, demographically, socially, economically, and morally.”
Continuing a steady upward trend, arrivals from France jumped 45 percent this year to 3,300, up from 2,200 in 2024, while immigration from the UK rose almost 20 percent to 840 immigrants.
Ministry data also showed 420 newcomers from Canada, 220 from South Africa, and 180 from Australia.
These latest figures come as Jewish communities worldwide warn of escalating threats in the wake of a deadly attack on a Hanukkah celebration at Sydney’s Bondi Beach that left 15 dead and at least 40 injured.
Earlier this year, a string of deadly terrorist attacks also targeted Jewish communities abroad, including the Yom Kippur assault in Manchester that killed two Jewish men, the firebombing of a march for Israeli hostages in Boulder, Colorado – which killed one and injured 13 – and the murder of two Israeli Embassy staffers in Washington, DC.
According to Nefesh B’Nefesh (NBN), a nonprofit that promotes and facilitates aliyah from the US and Canada, overall North American immigration rose about 12 percent this year to 4,150 new arrivals, the highest annual total the organization has seen in four years.
“These olim [or new immigrants] underscore that aliyah is not solely a personal milestone, but a national and historic endeavor,” NBN executive director Rabbi Yehoshua Fass said in a statement.
“Together, these new olim are already helping to address Israel’s national needs and strengthen its future, and we recognize the significance of their decision to establish their lives in the State of Israel at this pivotal moment in the country’s history,” he continued.
Among all countries, Russia accounted for the largest number of immigrants in 2025, with about 8,300 arriving, continuing a trend seen every year since the 1990s. Yet, this figure represents nearly a 60 percent decline from 19,500 last year and is only a fraction of the 74,000 immigrants who arrived in 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The ministry also showed that about a third of all new immigrants during the year were aged 18–35, highlighting a continued trend of younger Jews making aliyah.
Since the start of the war in Gaza, the Israeli government has been working to boost the country’s capacity to attract and absorb rising numbers of new arrivals, introducing initiatives such as partnering with Israeli companies to provide immediate employment and offering a zero percent income tax rate for immigrants arriving in 2026.
Earlier this year, the government also unveiled a $46.4 million program to support immigrant integration and attract skilled Jewish candidates with in-demand expertise, including a reform to expedite professional licensing for new arrivals.
According to Jewish Agency data, roughly 30,000 Jews worldwide began the immigration process in 2025, with particularly significant increases seen in the UK and Australia.
Despite these figures, Israel still faces a net migration deficit, with more people leaving than arriving — a trend experts warn is expected to continue next year.
In 2024, approximately 80,000 Israelis left the country while only 24,000 returned, creating an unprecedented negative migration balance of almost 58,000 people, according to the Israeli Bureau of Statistics.
Uncategorized
Trump, hosting Netanyahu in Florida, says next phase of Gaza ceasefire plan will begin ‘as quickly as we can’
President Donald Trump repeated his claims that the next phase of the Gaza ceasefire plan is imminent ahead of a highly anticipated meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Monday in Florida.
While progress on the U.S.-brokered ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel in October has been slow moving, with both Israel and Hamas accusing the other of failing to uphold their end of the bargain, Trump appeared eager to find ways to speed up the peace process as he stood beside Netanyahu Monday afternoon.
When asked by a reporter how quickly Trump hoped to move into phase two of the ceasefire plan, he replied “as quickly as we can” before stipulating that the next phase was contingent upon Hamas disarming.
But later, when asked by another reporter whether the reconstruction of Gaza will begin before Hamas is disarmed, Trump replied, “I think it’s going to begin pretty soon,” adding that he and Netanyahu were “looking forward to it.”
“Look what a mess it is, and it’s been a mess for centuries, really, it’s been a mess for a long time. It seems to be born for that, but we’re gonna straighten it out,” said Trump of the enclave. “We’re already starting certain things, we’re doing things for sanitary conditions and others, but Gaza is a tough place. You know the expression ‘it’s a tough neighborhood,’ it’s truly a tough neighborhood.”
At another press conference following the meeting, which lasted roughly two hours, Trump said that Hamas would be given “a very short period of time to disarm.”
“If they don’t disarm as as they agreed to do, they agreed to it, and then they’ll be held to pay for them, and we don’t want that, we’re not looking for that, but they have to disarm within a fairly short period of time, withdrawing its force,” said Trump. Later, Trump said that the other countries who backed the ceasefire deal would “wipe out Hamas” if the terror group does not disarm.
Following the meeting, Trump also appeared to revive his past proposal for Palestinians in Gaza to voluntarily leave the enclave, a plan that received a chorus of condemnation when he first broached the subject in February.
“I’ve always said it, I said if they were given the opportunity to live in a better climate, they would move,” said Trump, referring to Palestinians in Gaza. “They’re there because they sort of have to be. I think it would be, I think it’d be a great opportunity, but let’s see if that opportunity presents itself.”
Over two months after all 20 living hostages were returned to Israel as part of the first phase of the ceasefire deal, the remains of only one deceased hostage, Ran Gvili, remain in Gaza.
The next phase, which would include Israel and Hamas losing authority in Gaza and the establishment of a “Board of Peace” to oversee the enclave’s future, is expected to begin once Gvili is returned.
“It’s the only one left, and we’re doing everything we can to get his body back,” said Trump of Gvili. “And the parents just said, hopefully he’s alive. And I said I’d love you to think that way.”
Later, Trump also repeated his false claim that no hostages were released from Gaza under the Biden administration. In November 2023, 105 hostages, mainly women and children, were released during a temporary truce.
Beyond pressure from Washington to initiate the next phase of the ceasefire, the pair were also expected to discuss a host of other topics, ranging from Iran’s alleged nuclear capabilities to Israel’s relations with Turkey and Syria.
When asked whether Trump would ask Netanyahu to sign an agreement with Syria amid tensions between the two countries, Trump responded, “I hope he’s going to get along with Syria.”
Following the meeting, Trump said that the was “sure” that Israel and Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa will “get along,” an assertion that Netanyahu appeared to back.
“Our interest is to have a peaceful border with Syria,” said Netanyahu. “We want to make sure that the border area right next to our border is safe. We don’t have terrorists, we don’t have attacks.”
Trump also appeared to respond positively when asked whether he expected Turkish forces to be stationed in Gaza, a proposal that Israel has sought to block. (Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been overtly hostile to Israel over the course of the war in Gaza.)
“I have a great relationship with President Erdogan, and we’ll be talking about it, and if it’s good, I think that’s good, and a lot will be having to do with Bibi,” said Trump. “We’re going to be talking about that, but Turkey has been great.”
Later during the press conference, Trump expressed his openness to launching an assault on Iran amid reports that the gulf nation is seeking chemical and biological warheads for its ballistic missiles. In June, the United States joined Israel’s conflict with Iran and bombed three sites in the country, a strike that it claimed had “obliterated” its nuclear capabilities.
“Now I hear that Iran is trying to build up again, and if they are, we’re going to have to knock them down,” said Trump. “We’ll knock them down. We’ll knock the hell out of them, but hopefully that’s not happening. I heard Iran wants to make a deal. If they want to make a deal, that’s much smarter.”
When asked by a reporter whether he sought to “overthrow” the Iranian regime, Trump replied, “I’m not going to talk about overthrow of a regime.” But when asked by a reporter whether he would support an Israeli attack on Iran if the country continues to develop ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons, Trump responded “absolutely.”
The meeting between Netanyahu and Trump also comes as Trump has called for Israeli President Isaac Herzog to pardon Netanyahu, who currently has three legal cases open against him, on charges of fraud, bribery and breach of trust.
Responding to a question about the potential for a pardon, Trump claimed that Herzog had said the pardon was “on its way.”
“He’s a wartime Prime Minister who’s a hero, how do you not give a pardon? You know, I think it’s a very hard thing not to do it,” said Trump. “I spoke to the president and he tells me it’s on its way. You can’t do better than that, right?”
Following Trump’s remarks, Herzog’s office issued a statement stating that there had been no talks between him and Trump since the American leader wrote to Herzog advocating for a pardon in November.
“There has been no conversation between President Herzog and President Trump since the pardon request was submitted,” Herzog’s office said in a statement.
At the end of the press conference, before the two leaders entered Mar-a-Lago in an embrace, Netanyahu responded to the only question posed to him: “What makes President Trump such a strong friend to the State of Israel?”
“I think Israel is very blessed to have President Trump leading the United States, and I’ll say leading the free world at this time,” said Netanyahu, reiterating his long-held praise for the leader. “I think it’s not merely Israel’s great fortune. I think it’s the world’s great fortune.”
Trump then took his turn at the question, telling reporters that the Israeli leader could be “very difficult on occasion.”
“Bibi’s a strong man. He can be very difficult on occasion, but you need a strong man,” said Trump. “If you had a weak man, you wouldn’t have Israel right now….Israel, with most other leaders, would not exist today.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Trump, hosting Netanyahu in Florida, says next phase of Gaza ceasefire plan will begin ‘as quickly as we can’ appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
It’s a classic trick of liars and crooks — and it’s shaping Israel’s response to war and disaster
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is trying a new technique to avoid accountability for the Oct. 7, 2023 attack: pretending — but not very convincingly — to invite it.
Netanyahu has spent more than two years blocking the establishment of an independent inquiry commission led by a Supreme Court justice, a step that has been normative following calamities in Israel since 1968. After Hamas invaded and massacred close to 1,200 people, kidnapping some 250 to Gaza, Israelis almost universally assumed this path would be followed.
Instead, Netanyahu’s government has recently moved to establish a government commission that would have representatives from both the coalition and opposition, politicizing a process that is supposed to be impartial. And amid these machinations came the most revealing and credible portrait yet of Netanyahu’s mindset immediately after the attack. Eli Feldstein, a former close aide and spokesperson to Netanyahu, said in a televised interview aired last week that right after the Hamas assault, Netanyahu’s first instruction to him was to figure out how he could evade responsibility.
“He asked me, ‘What are they talking about in the news? Are they still talking about responsibility?’” Feldstein, who now faces trial for allegedly leaking classified information, recalled. The “first task,” Netanyahu had in mind after the massacre, Feldstein said, was to stifle calls for accountability and craft messaging that would offset the media storm.
Even allowing for Feldstein’s legal complications, the story has the ghastly ring of truth— in part because of the entire inquiry farce.
A real inquiry would likely deliver harsh conclusions about Netanyahu’s misguided strategy of coddling Hamas; his failure to heed intelligence before Oct. 7; the staggering human cost of the war that followed; the failure to dismantle Hamas despite two years of brutal fighting; Israel’s growing international isolation; and Netanyahu’s repeated rejection of diplomatic exit ramps.
It is obvious that a commission dealing with such explosive matters must not be controlled by the very people it will judge. Yet that is exactly the system Netanyahu has engineered, while arguing that a state inquiry would be stacked against him. Most Israelis see the attempted whitewash clearly, and some three quarters of the public have consistently said they want a state commission.
Realistically, Netanyahu is hoping the opposition will refuse to appoint its own members or cooperate in any way, enabling him to campaign in the 2026 elections on the claim that his rivals blocked the inquiry. That is a shameless strategy — and entirely consistent with his system.
A complete failure
The facts that would confront any serious investigation are not controversial.
On Oct. 7, 2023, the Gaza border was left almost completely unprotected. This, even though warnings of an imminent attack were abundant. Senior security officials had grown alarmed amid multiple intelligence assessments suggesting Hamas could be planning an assault. In the weeks — and even days — before Oct. 7, Israel’s three top security chiefs sought urgent meetings with the prime minister. They wanted to warn him that the unprecedented internal rift he was driving through Israeli society with his judicial overhaul was inviting attack.
Netanyahu refused to meet with them.
Then terrorists breached the border with ease and overran communities. The state and military failed to respond in a timely or organized fashion.
What worked, in those first critical hours and days, was not the government. It was the efforts of citizens. Volunteers. Reservists who rushed south without orders. Individual officers who grasped the scale of the catastrophe and acted on instinct and conscience. For days, the country was in chaos. Many assumed the government would fall.
This was a total failure. And it was built on Netanyahu’s prior policy of deliberately empowering Hamas. For years, he facilitated Qatari funding into Gaza and treated its rule as strategically useful because it divided Palestinian leadership and weakened the Palestinian Authority. He aimed to ensure there would be no credible Palestinian interlocutor with whom the international community might pressure Israel to negotiate a two-state solution. The danger of Hamas controlling Gaza, he believed, was preferable to the risks that would be required to achieve peace.
Under those circumstances, the judgment of a serious inquiry, as regards the government, is not in doubt. That is why Netanyahu’s current strategy is not to totally avoid accountability, but rather to dissolve it — to spread guilt so thinly that it disappears.
A dangerous slide into surrealism
This is where the government’s current arguments slide from cynical to dangerous. Among the more surreal claims now circulating is the suggestion that Israel’s judicial system bears responsibility for Oct. 7.
On a recent television panel in which I participated, Environment Minister Idit Silman said, without the slightest shame, that the Supreme Court cannot be trusted to appoint a State Commission of Inquiry because the court itself must be investigated. He implied that the current president of the Supreme Court — appointed automatically by seniority, precisely to prevent politicization — is himself criminally suspect. This claim is absurd, unsupported and revealing. It exists for one reason only: to delegitimize the one institution capable of appointing an inquiry beyond the government’s control.
Netanyahu’s allies now argue that the public no longer trusts the courts, and therefore the courts lack legitimacy to appoint an inquiry commission. They are recasting past rulings that imposed even minimal ethical constraints on military conduct, or sought to prevent outright massacres of Palestinians, as contributing causes of Oct. 7.
The truth is that public trust in the Supreme Court, which historically ranked just below the military among Israeli institutions, only began eroding because of attacks by Netanyahu and his surrogates. Since a criminal corruption investigation against him was first announced, they have systematically attacked the police, prosecutors and the judiciary.
Now the government points to the damage it caused as justification for sidelining the court altogether. It is, quite plainly, sabotage of Israel’s democracy and rule of law.
An independent judiciary is a strategic asset. It is what allows Israel to argue credibly that it can investigate itself — and therefore that foreign courts need not intervene on questions of war crimes or human rights, which sadly abound. Undermine that credibility, and Israel weakens itself internationally.
But it’s not just the judiciary. The government also insists that the opposition must be investigated too, going all the way back to the 1993 Oslo Agreements that set up the Palestinian Authority — because they once sat in government. The civil service must be investigated as well — because it implements policy. Netanyahu-aligned social media accounts have been peddling absurd conspiracy theories about the Shin Bet helping Hamas on Oct. 7 in order to harm Netanyahu. The end message: Everyone must be investigated — which is another way of saying that since everyone is responsible, no one is especially responsible.
This is the classic trickery of liars and crooks: Everyone is guilty of something, so no one is uniquely guilty, especially not the leader who held power for most of the past 15 years. But the truth is that authority concentrates at the top, and so must accountability.
Netanyahu’s strategy rests on the assumption that he can fool enough of the people enough of the time to cling to power. It has often worked for him, to Israel’s great detriment. All we can hope is that this new scheme will be a bridge too far. If Netanyahu’s coalition is ousted in upcoming elections, the next government will establish a real inquiry. Justice, even if delayed, will ultimately be done.
The post It’s a classic trick of liars and crooks — and it’s shaping Israel’s response to war and disaster appeared first on The Forward.