A leading Democratic politician said late last week that Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, is the worst leader of the Jewish people in more than 2,000 years.
Appearing on Politico’s podcast called “Playbook Deep Dive,” Representative Jerry Nadler of New York said that the Israeli prime minister has “got only one competitor for the worst Jewish leader in history, and that would be the Hasmonean king [John Hyrcanus II] who in the first century B.C., in order to help him in a factional dispute, invited in the Romans.”
The New York Daily News reported on the history of this further. They wrote that Hyrcanus II requested that his allies, the Romans, come to help him to defeat a rival faction of Jews. Ultimately, though, that move backfired. Over time, the Romans effectively subjugated the Jews.
Nadler didn’t stop his criticism of Netanyahu there, though. He added on the podcast:
“Netanyahu is doing everything he can to sabotage the peace talks, even at the cost of the hostages. … [Netanyahu] has every motive for keeping the war [in Gaza] going as long as possible.
“Because when the war is over, number one, there’ll be a commission of inquiry. Number two, there’ll be an election, and he’s polling at about 20%. And number three, he’ll have to face the felony charges that are outstanding against him.”
Nadler also specifically slammed the Israeli prime minister for insisting on “this Rafah operation, which is absurd. You can’t defeat that kind of an enemy that way, as we discovered in Mosul [Iraq] and, for that matter, in Vietnam. …
“The proper thing to do is exactly what the Biden administration is pushing, namely: Don’t go into Rafah, negotiate a case-fire deal in which Arab troops from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, other places come in and occupy Gaza; start rebuilding it and have them work with the Palestinian Authority to reform it so that you can eventually have a Palestinian Authority in charge of Gaza and the West Bank and have a two-state solution.”
That “two-state solution” is one idea that Netanyahu’s government has consistently shot down time and again. He specifically has said that the PA cannot be part of any leadership of a future Gaza after Hamas is eradicated and the war ends.
Criticism of Israel, and Netanyahu specifically, from the U.S. has ramped up over the last few months as the war continues to drag on. Concerns have arisen that Israel is not doing enough to protect civilian lives and that it’s being too aggressive in its war campaign.
At the same time, those criticisms have mostly stopped short of accusing Israel of committing war crimes. For his part, Naza did the same, saying that it was “absolutely invalid” to call Israel’s conduct in the Gaza war “genocide.”
As he said on the podcast:
“It is not a genocide. A genocide is the intentional eradication or extermination of a group of people, of an identifiable group — in this case, presumably, the Palestinians. There are a lot of casualties among the Palestinians.
“One might criticize the Israeli conduct of the war in terms of causing more casualties than needed. And that may be, but that’s not a genocide.”
