Nadler: Netanyahu Worst Jewish Leader in 2,000 Years

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Rep. Jerry Nadler on Friday criticized Israeli Prime Benjamin Netanyahu as the worst leader of the Jewish people since a king from the Hasmonean dynasty more than 2,000 years ago.

Speaking on an episode of Politico’s “Playbook Deep Dive” podcast, the New York Democrat said Netanyahu 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.”

Hyrcanus II requested that his Roman allies help him defeat a rival Jewish faction, but that move backfired and led to the Romans effectively subjugating the Jews, the New York Daily News pointed out.

Nadler also charged on the podcast that “Netanyahu is doing everything he can to sabotage the peace talks, even at the cost of the hostages.”

The congressman emphasized that 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.”

In addition, Nadler slammed Netanyahu 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.”

Instead, Nader maintained that “the proper thing to do is exactly what the Biden administration is pushing, namely: Don’t go into Rafah; negotiate a cease-fire deal in which Arab troops from Saudi Arabia, the UAE [United Arab Emirates], 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.”

Despite his criticism of Netanyahu, Nadler said that to call his conduct of the Gaza war “genocide” is “absolutely invalid.”

The congressman said, “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.”