Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been making the rounds on American media since the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor-general announced Monday that he’d seek a warrant for Netanyahu’s arrest. In an interview Tuesday night with MSNBC’s “The 11th Hour,” Netanyahu complained of the “false symmetry” that the ICC prosecutor had drawn in pursuing warrants against him and his defense minister with war crimes alongside several members of Hamas leadership.
“That’s like saying, ‘Well, I’m going to issue arrest warrants for’ — after 9/11 — ‘I’m issuing arrest warrants for George [W.] Bush, but also for Osama bin Laden,’” he told MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle. “And in World War II, ‘I’m issuing arrest warrants for FDR but also for Hitler.’ Thanks a lot. That’s a false symmetry and it’s totally absurd. It’s a travesty of justice.”
Netanyahu, a longtime student of U.S. politics, was clearly carefully crafting his message for his intended audience. In doing so, whether intentionally or not, the longtime Israeli leader was using the same rhetoric that former President Donald Trump has used to decry his legal troubles. Rather than pledge to cooperate and prove their innocence, Bibi and Trump attack the systems designed to hold powerful people accountable.
Netanyahu, a longtime student of U.S. politics, was clearly carefully crafting his message for his intended audience.
By centering American presidents in his analogy, Netanyahu shrewdly put on display his understanding of how U.S. policymakers think — that is, almost entirely about themselves. After all, it was American political leaders’ fears that caused the Senate to block ratification of the Rome Statute, the ICC’s founding document. Congress even passed a law in the aftermath of 9/11 and the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan that blocks almost all cooperation with the ICC and bans members of the U.S. military from being extradited to face charges in court in The Hague. And Netanyahu must know that drawing on American pride in winning World War II, and on outrage U.S. officials would have at Hitler comparisons, is rarely a bad bet.
Further, by invoking Bush and Roosevelt, Netanyahu is also attempting to obliquely warn America’s political elite that his fate could be their own if they don’t step in to aid him. It’s a point that Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., made Tuesday during a Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing with Secretary of State Antony Blinken. In his opening remarks, Graham warned that “if they’ll do this to Israel, we’re next,” which drew applause from anti-war protestors in attendance. “They tried to come after our soldiers in Afghanistan, but reason prevailed,” he continued, referring to ICC prosecutor-general Karim Khan’s 2001 decision not to focus on potential American war crimes there.
It was an especially striking shift from the senator. Just two years ago, Graham was working on ways to increase U.S. cooperation with the ICC. Of course, that position was voiced in the immediate shadow of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and was motivated by a desire to see President Vladimir Putin held to account. (Putin was charged at the ICC in 2023 for overseeing the abduction and deportation of children from Ukraine into Russia.) The idea of turning that same system back around on the U.S. and its allies, though, is more than Graham is willing to stomach.
Meanwhile, the idea that a system of justice is necessarily cruel or unfair if it casts its gaze on him has been part and parcel with Trump’s messaging since he first came under investigation. It’s a framing that’s only gotten more explicit — and disturbing — since his first re-election campaign rally last March. “They’re not coming after me,” he told the crowd gathered in Waco, Texas. “They’re coming after you.”
It’s a message he’s repeated often, including at a rally in Georgia soon after special counsel Jack Smith obtained a federal indictment accusing him of trying to steal the 2020 election. More recently, he did so again in an official campaign video posted last month. “They’re not coming after me, they’re coming after you. I just happen to be standing in their way, and I will never, ever be moving out of their way,” he intoned directly into camera.








