ABSTRACT
While the NNCL was not realistically directed at Nazi war criminals, its drafters left open the aspiration of bringing Nazis to trial in Israel. To facilitate this, the NNCL created a new legal category without precedent in international law – crimes against the Jewish people. 1 As mentioned, in the previous chapter, no Jewish collaborator was charged with this offence. Moreover, the rationale provided by the Israeli Supreme Court (that crimes against the Jewish people required the intention to destroy the collectivity) virtually foreclosed this possibility. Eichmann was charged with crimes against the Jewish people but the NNCL defined this term in a fashion consistent with the definition of genocide in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1951). Arendt did not agree with this approach because she felt that the Holocaust concerned all of humanity. She argued: ‘[T]he physical extermination of the Jewish people was a crime against humanity, perpetrated upon the body of the Jewish people’ (Arendt 2006a: 268–269). 2
