The enactment of this law underscored Israel’s commitment to seeking justice for Holocaust victims and holding perpetrators accountable, regardless of their nationality or the location of their crimes.

It has a number of unusual provisions, including ex post facto application, extraterritoriality, a relaxation in the usual rules of evidence, and mandatory death sentence for the most serious crimes laid out in the law.

Similar clashes also erupted in Mandatory Palestine and informal honor courts were operated by landsmanshaften (organizations for immigrants from a certain country) and the World Zionist Congress.

"[18] Instead, "the law will apply less to Nazis than to their Jewish collaborators who are here in the State of Israel", Rosen said, invoking the Hebrew phrase "let our camp be pure", derived from Deuteronomy 23:14.

[19][20] Some Knesset members, including Hanan Rubin and Eri Jabotinsky, believed that Nazis might eventually be tried under the law either via extradition or other means.

[21] Lawmakers explicitly rejected a proposal by Zerach Warhaftig (United Religious Front) that would have distinguished offenses by Nazis and collaborators.

[14] Mapam politician Yisrael Bar-Yehuda strongly rejected a suggestion to permit excusing conduct under duress or in self-defense: I am opposed to … this kind of person being relieved [of legal responsibility] because he did what he did out of cowardice.

[14]This attitude was based ideologically on his party's close association with the Zionist youth movements that led ghetto uprisings, often in opposition to the Jewish leadership.

In the end, the Knesset adopted a strict and limited form of exculpation, also rejecting Bar-Yehuda's suggestion that anyone who served in the underground should be granted immunity.

[28] To be prosecutable under the law, the crimes must have been committed in an "enemy country" (Nazi Germany, German-occupied Europe, or territory controlled by another Axis power).

[29] The law is limited to one victim group (Jews), one time period (1933–1945), and one location (Europe), whereas the Genocide Convention is of universal applicability.

[33] Article 6 criminalizes "delivering up persecuted person to enemy administration", which according to Ben-Naftali and Tuval was primarily aimed at the actions of Jewish councils.

[23] Article 10 enumerates the circumstances that would lead to the acquittal of the defendant: if he acted to save himself from the danger of immediate death, or if his actions were intended to avoid worse consequences.

Following the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, in which prosecutor Gideon Hausner set out to remove the guilt of collaboration from Jewish functionaries, defendants were more often viewed primarily as victims of the Nazis.

[41] Israeli historian Idith Zertal writes that the trials exposed the routine regime of terror, oppression, and abuse in the ghettos and camps, where inmates’ human character and moral stamina were obliterated long before their bodies were consumed, and brought to light the existential and moral hell created by the Nazis, the monstrous upside-down world which had transformed persecuted into persecutors, victims into reluctant wrongdoers and accomplices in their own oppression.

[49] The very first trial under the law involved Andrej Banik, accused of responsibility for the deportation of Jews from Slovakia; according to Porat, the timing was "clearly chosen for the symbolic value" of trying a non-Jew first.

[49][57] Banik came to Israel with his wife, a Jewish convert to Christianity, but was soon identified as a member of the Hlinka Guard by survivors[58] and first questioned by police before the passage of the law.

[59] He was ultimately acquitted[60] because the testimony against him was unreliable; the judges ruled that one witness in particular "either lied intentionally or is suffering from hallucinations and imagines things that he may have experienced which he attributes to the defendant with no basis whatsoever".

[63] Prosecutor Hausner also tried to challenge the portrayal of Jewish functionaries that had emerged in the earlier trials, showing them at worst as victims forced to carry out Nazi decrees while minimizing the "gray zone" of morally questionable behavior.

[64] Hausner later wrote that available archival documents "would have sufficed to get Eichmann sentenced ten times over"; nevertheless, he summoned more than 100 witnesses, most of them who had never met the defendant, for didactic purposes.

[82] In his judgement of the same case, Landau wrote: [I]t would be presumptuous and self-righteous on our part, us who never walked in the shoes of those [who were there] ... to criticize those 'little people' who did not rise to a supreme level of morality, while they were subject to rampant persecution by a regime whose the primary purpose was to wipe out their humanity.

[87] Following the quashing of the death sentence of Enigster, the editor-in-chief of Yediot Aharonot, Herzl Rosenblum, published an op-ed in the 8 April 1952 edition of the paper praising the verdict.

Arguing that no German Holocaust perpetrators were executed primarily for crimes against Jews, Rosenblum contended that it would be unjust "to hang the few Jewish helpers in these circumstances—who did what they did under the most unbearable pressure".

"[90] In a book that they coauthored, law professors Michael Bazyler and Frank Tuerkheimer were unable to agree on a conclusion to the chapter on the kapo trials.

He disagreed that any Jewish survivor should be tried under criminal law for such offenses, "because of the extreme, in fact, inconceivable circumstances of Jews in the concentration camps".

"[92] In a separate article, Bazyler and Julia Scheppach argue that the law's "intention most likely was to distance Israelis from what they regarded as the shameful response of Europe’s Jews to their destruction", and should be viewed in light of general hostility and contempt for Holocaust survivors in Israel, who were seen as having gone "like sheep to the slaughter".

[55] She highlights the fact that for a decade after it was passed, "not one of the defendants tried under the law was charged with or found guilty of directly or indirectly causing the death of a single person".

[94] Furthermore, he charges that Israeli institutions such as Yad Vashem omit the issue from their public presentations and in fact "have been suppressing the memory of the kapo trials for fear of tainting the image of the victims".

[87] According to Drumbl, "[l]aw lacked the vocabulary or finesse; the courtroom was a poor conduit" for reckoning with the behavior of kapos[97] and the law's "quest for condemnation, finitude, and clarity effectively constructed the persecuted Jew as a Nazi".

[99] Multiple authors have compared the case of judging kapos to 2010s trials of current or former child soldiers who committed war crimes, such as Dominic Ongwen and Omar Khadr.