The current antipathy in western capitals to Netanyahu is most certainly not based on any kind of ethical assessment of Israel’s recent actions: a three-year genocidal rampage through Gaza; the violent expansion of Jewish settlements and ethnic cleansing in the Occupied West Bank; the bombing and ethnic cleansing of south Lebanon; and the Israeli leader’s starring role alongside the US in launching a catastrophic war on Iran whose fallout has destabilised the global economy.
Washington - backed by its European client states - has been an ardent partner to these crimes, supplying the munitions, intelligence and diplomatic leverage to help Israel carry them out.
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Despite the best efforts of western political and media classes over the past three years, the reality of Israel’s destruction of Gaza - and the murder and maiming of many tens of thousands of Palestinian children - has become ever harder to hide or rationalise.
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No, Netanyahu is not a pariah in the eyes of western leaders because of any of these savage crimes - crimes they have been fully complicit in.
His offence - the one they are now determined to focus attention on - is Netanyahu’s role since October 2023 in intensifying the building and expansion of illegal settlements in the West Bank to expel Palestinians from their lands.
But this narrative works only if western politicians and media studiously ignore the context: that for more than half a century, all Israeli governments sponsored settlement expansion, with the aim of ethnically cleansing the Palestinian population.
Netanyahu is not an outlier in doing this. He simply exploited the opportunity to accelerate West Bank expulsions on the back of world sympathy after Hamas’s single-day attack in October 2023.
This isn’t a Netanyahu problem, it is an Israel problem and it really isn’t just an Israel problem it is a problem that grows directly from European (including US) colonial powers and the racism and violence inherent to their foreign policy over decades and decades.
To see Netanyahu or Israel as an abberation of violence distinct from an otherwise unculpable context is to commit a grave twisting of the truth into a cartoonish villainization and hyperfocusing on of only the tip of an iceberg as if it was the entire iceberg.
Liberal zionists will always find someone to blame so they don’t have to acknowledge the illegal state of israel being the problem. After years of genocide they can’t deny it anymore, but that doesn’t mean they are going to do anything about it. Netanyahu is pure evil, just like Trump is, but don’t forget the genocide was enabled by the good grandpa Biden.
Absolutely, rot in hell Genocide Joe along with Trump.
That being said, the danger with focusing it entirely on “the problem is Israel” is that this is precisely the narrative rightwing antisemitic forces in the US and elsewhere need to escape having a more honest, uncomfortable and nuanced conversation about how the Genocide of Palestinians is a process many many many are complicit in beyond the narrow definitions of Israel and most of that architecture of complicity is not Israeli nor jewish (a lot of it regionally is Arab… which is how twisted up these things always are with humans being the way they are).
I am not saying the tip of the iceberg that gashed the side of humanity isn’t the thrust of the problem, but without the rest of the iceberg below how would this violence have grown to such magnitude?
People like Tucker Carlson will cry out “the jews have backstabbed us again and fooled us into supporting something we DEFINITELY had no idea was happening we swear!” and many smallminded people will see that as an easy offramp to a mirror being turned on the broken core of their worldview.
