Avi ShlaimWhen Benjamin Netanyahu strode onto the stage at the United Nations General Assembly last month, he faced a sea of empty seats. Over a hundred diplomats from fifty countries had walked out as he walked up on stage, leaving the hall nearly deserted.
But Netanyahu wasn’t speaking to them. His real audience was back home, his political base in Israel, and in Washington, President Donald Trump and his supporters. A captive audience also had little choice: Israeli military vehicles broadcast the speech into Gaza on the orders of his office. The scene captured the deepening international isolation Israel faces under Netanyahu’s leadership.
The Israeli premier faces an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court in The Hague for war crimes. He flew to New York via the Strait of Gibraltar to avoid arrest in Europe. At home, he is indicted on charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust. If found guilty, he will probably end up in jail. But as long as he remains in power, he will continue to enjoy immunity from punishment. And as long as the country is at war, he can avert an election that he knows he will almost certainly lose.
Netanyahu is Israel’s longest-serving prime minister. His profound impact on Israeli politics has been entirely negative. He reshaped the Israeli body politic in his own authoritarian and ethnocentric image, and he did so to advance his own personal and political interests.
This is Netanyahu's sixth term in office, but the coalition he has assembled is more right-wing, religiously conservative, crudely populist, messianic, and overtly racist than any of his previous five governments and indeed any other government in Israel’s 77-year history.
The Likud-led coalition formed by Netanyahu in December 2022 includes two far-right, proto-fascist parties with notoriously Islamophobic leaders.
The minister of national security is Itamar Ben-Gvir, the leader of the Jewish Power party, who was considered unfit to serve in the Israeli army on account of his extreme political views, and who was later convicted for supporting terrorism and inciting racism.
The minister of finance, Bezalel Smotrich, the leader of the Religious Zionism party, is another settler who openly advocates the ethnic cleansing of the occupied Palestinian territories.
Both parties aid and abet illegal settler violence against Palestinians, advocate the formal annexation of the occupied West Bank, and constantly push for the invasion and resettlement of Palestine’s Gaza.
The policy guidelines of the government open with the stark statement that: “The Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel”.
This includes not only pre-1967 Israel but also the occupied West Bank and Gaza. The guidelines thus amount to a flat denial of any Palestinian right to national self-determination. Supporters of Israel in the West continue to advocate what ought to be considered a two-state delusion: an independent Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza, with a capital city in East Jerusalem.
Palestinian erasure
Netanyahu's ambition is not confined to denying the Palestinians independence and statehood; it extends to forcibly removing the Palestinians in the occupied territories from their land.
By signing the Oslo Accord in 1993, the Palestine Liberation Organization gave up its claim to 78 percent of historic Palestine in the hope of gaining independence in the remaining 22 percent. But Netanyahu never accepted the peace accords of his Labour predecessors, and in his first term in office, 1996-1999, he subverted and dismantled them.
Throughout his political career, he waited for an opportunity to complete the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and he believed that a major war could provide a cover for doing this. In 1977, he told the British military historian Max Hastings: “In the next war, if we do it right, we’ll have a chance to get all the Arabs out … We can clear the West Bank, sort out Jerusalem”.
The Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, two years ago, provided Netanyahu with the opportunity to act. He delayed the military response to this attack, possibly with the intention of magnifying the trauma, to justify the unprecedented scale and ferocity of the retaliation.
In any case, the Israeli propaganda machine invented completely baseless stories, like the one about the forty decapitated babies. All this was intended to legitimise the subsequent actions of the Israeli army.
In his first address to the nation after October 7, Netanyahu said that they were fighting their second war of independence. This is preposterous: Hamas is not a threat to Israel’s independence or existence.
On the contrary, it is Israel that poses an existential threat to the Palestinians. The reference to 1948 carried a veiled threat. The 1948 war, which Israelis call the “War of Independence” and Palestinians call the Nakba (catastrophe), entailed the expulsion of over 750,000 Palestinians from Palestine.
A second “War of Independence” thus implies further ethnic cleansing, possibly on an even bigger scale. A leaked report of Israel’s Intelligence Ministry, dated October 13, 2023, which outlined plans for depopulating Gaza, showed that this was the government’s exact intention.
Egyptian opposition prevented Israel from forcibly transferring the bulk of Gaza’s 2,300,000 inhabitants into northern Sinai. But it did not prevent Israel from destroying the densely populated enclave.
This is not a war between Israel and Hamas; it is a genocidal campaign waged by an extremist Israeli government against the entire population of Gaza.
Conservative estimates reveal that in the last two years, since the Hamas attack, the Israeli army has killed 66,414 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, and injured at least 163,859.
The UN estimates that approximately 92 percent of all residential buildings in Gaza – around 436,000 homes – have been damaged or destroyed. Over 90 percent of the population have been forced to evacuate from their homes, some upward of ten times, and those who obeyed the instructions to evacuate were often bombed on the roads and in what is falsely designated by the Israeli forces as “safe areas”. There are no safe areas in Gaza.
Ecocide, medicide, scholasticide, and genocide
The Israeli army is also guilty of ecocide − the destruction of the environment. Before the current assault, 40 percent of Gaza’s land was farmed. Last month, the UN reported that just 1.5 percent of its agricultural land remains accessible and undamaged. Meanwhile, the attacks on 31 out of Gaza’s 36 hospitals and other health facilities – on the unproven claim that they serve as Hamas bases – amount to medicide.
Attacks on almost 90 percent of school buildings, as well as all twelve universities in Gaza constitute scholasticide, the systematic destruction of the educational system. Education has been deliberately denied for two years to over 658,000 children. Overall, Netanyahu has certainly achieved his aim of making Palestine’s Gaza uninhabitable.
Under Netanyahu's leadership, Israel is also committing the crime of all crimes − genocide. Israel and its friends strenuously deny the charge of genocide, but the evidence is compelling, especially the use of starvation as a weapon of war.
Many Israeli scholars of Holocaust studies, such as Omer Bartov, have concluded, after careful consideration, that Israel’s actions in Gaza are a classic case of genocide.
The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide as acts committed with the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” such as: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Israel is indisputably guilty of the first four of the aforementioned acts. Israel is not guilty of the fifth act, but that does not mean that children are spared.
At least one Palestinian child has been killed every hour on average by Israeli forces in Gaza in the last two years, with the total number of children killed now surpassing 20,000, according to Save the Children. At least 40,000 children have been made orphans by losing one or both parents. A poignant acronym has emerged from the slaughterhouse in Gaza: WCNSF − Wounded Child No Surviving Family.
The cumulative evidence of Israel's war crimes has turned it into an international pariah. Israel’s friends in the West are increasingly critical of its conduct, and some of them have recently recognised Palestine as a state.
Recognition is not simply symbolic. It is the result of a growing understanding that never-ending Israeli aggression against its neighbours hurts core Western interests, and that without a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, there will be no stability, no security, and no peace in the Middle East.
Israel claims to be acting in self-defence, but it constantly and flagrantly violates international humanitarian law. The savage war against the defenceless civilians of Gaza has undermined what little was left of its reputation and is leading to growing international condemnation. In this respect, the war in Gaza is a strategic disaster for Israel.
Self-preservation
Why does Netanyahu persist in this unlawful, vicious, and unbelievably destructive forever war? One explanation, advanced by the American-Jewish scholar, Norman Finkelstein, is that Netanyahu is desperate to occupy Gaza because he wants custody of the crime scene. If he loses custody of the crime scene, says Finkelstein, Gaza will become the graveyard of Zionism.
Another explanation advanced by Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister, is that “The prime minister is not acting in the national interest; he is acting purely for self-preservation. Every other argument is a smokescreen”.
In the shadow of the war in Gaza, Netanyahu has intensified the ethnic cleansing of the occupied West Bank. Illegal settler violence has increased significantly with the encouragement of the government and with the protection of the army. In the first year after October 7, there were 1,423 recorded incidents of settler violence on the occupied West Bank. By January 2025, at least 870 Palestinians, including 177 children, had been killed by settlers and the Israeli forces.
These are not random clashes but part and parcel of a systematic government policy, spearheaded by the Netanyahu-Ben-Gvir-Smotrich trio, aimed at the creeping annexation of the occupied West Bank and emptying of as many Palestinian inhabitants as possible.
Netanyahu's ambitions are not confined to the ethnic cleansing of the occupied Palestinian territories…His broader ambition is to crush all of Israel's regional opponents and to make it the dominant military power in the entire Middle East.
Netanyahu's ambitions are not confined to the ethnic cleansing of the occupied Palestinian territories and to the construction of Greater Israel. His broader ambition is to crush all of Israel's regional opponents and to make it the dominant military power in the entire Middle East.
After the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, Israel occupied the buffer zone, invaded deep into Syrian state territory, and launched a series of devastating attacks on the remains of the Syrian army. Hezbollah, the linchpin of Iran’s “Axis of Resistance”, started firing missiles and rockets on northern Israel after October 7.
In September 2024, Israel assassinated Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s secretary-general; followed up by bombing its bases in Beirut and different parts of the country; and staged an astonishing pager attack that killed 42 Hezbollah officials and injured 3,400 others. A ceasefire was eventually reached, but Israel does not respect the agreement; it continues to bomb at will and to occupy five points in southern Lebanon.
The Houthis, in solidarity with the people of Gaza, attacked Israeli-related shipping in the Gulf of Yemen and the Red Sea and fired ballistic missiles at Israel, one of which landed near Ben-Gurion airport.
The next day, on May 5, 2025, Israel launched a series of air strikes, killing Prime Minister Ahmed al-Rahawi and other senior Houthi officials. Among the targets were Sanaa International Airport, which was bombed and destroyed, and the port of Hudeida. The Houthis were not deterred by this show of force, and the result is a continuous cycle of strikes and counter-strikes.
And then there’s Iran
The most significant spillover from the war in Gaza is the Israeli attack on Iran. For the last thirty years, Netanyahu has been demonising Tehran and calling for a military strike against its nuclear facilities.
His rhetorical offensive conveniently overlooks a few basic facts. Firstly, Iran has never attacked any of its neighbours, unlike Israel. Secondly, Iran has signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty, unlike Israel. Thirdly, Iran submitted to the inspection of its facilities by the International Atomic Energy Commission, again unlike Israel. Fourthly, Iran has no nuclear weapons and has repeatedly disavowed the intention to produce them, whereas Israel has between 100 and 400 nuclear warheads along with delivery systems via missiles, submarines, and aircraft.
It follows that Iran does not pose an existential threat to Israel, as Netanyahu keeps insisting, whereas Israel does pose an existential threat to Iran by virtue of its nuclear monopoly.
In June 2025, Israel launched an unprovoked and unlawful war on Iran, striking the Natanz nuclear facility, military bases, and other targets. It assassinated Iran’s three top military leaders, other senior military officials, and several nuclear scientists.
The Israeli attack was followed by an American strike against three Iranian nuclear sites. The coordinated attack set back the Iranian nuclear programme, but it did not destroy it. If anything, it intensified the pressure from the Iranian hardliners to go all-out to produce the bomb.
One illegal − but loudly proclaimed − aim of “The Twelve Day War” was to bring about regime change in Tehran. By bombing civilian targets, the Israeli-American attack caused the Iranian people to rally behind the flag and ended up bolstering the position of the government.
Another illustration of Netanyahu's propensity to use force and coercion instead of diplomacy was the air strike on Doha, the capital of Qatar, on September 9, 2025.
Before October 7, with Netanyahu's cooperation, Qatar provided funding for Hamas to enable it to govern Gaza. After October 7, Qatar and Egypt were the principal Arab mediators in the efforts to arrange ceasefires between Israel and Hamas.
Some of Hamas’s political leaders live in Doha, and they conducted the indirect negotiations with the Israeli envoys on ceasefires and the exchange of Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners. The purpose of the Israeli air strike was to kill the Hamas negotiators. The operation failed to achieve its objective of killing the senior Hamas leaders, and it was roundly denounced as a flagrant violation of international law and of Qatari sovereignty.
The diplomatic fallout was particularly great because Qatar is a close ally of the United States. This was the first Israeli attack on a member of the Gulf Cooperation Council, and the message it sent is that no Gulf state, however friendly and useful to Israel, is safe from Israeli military strikes.
The second anniversary of the war in Gaza is an appropriate time to assess Benjamin Netanyahu's record.
The State of Israel emerged from the ashes of the Holocaust 77 years ago, and it enjoyed an unprecedented level of international sympathy and support. Its main raison d'etre was to provide a safe haven for Jews fleeing persecution in the rest of the world.
A great deal has changed in the intervening period. But the assault on Gaza has exposed, as no other action before it, how the victims have morphed into the most brutal and violent oppressors.
In the Second World War, the Jews were the defenceless victims of Nazi Germany. Today, it is the people of Gaza who are the defenceless victims of the Jewish state.
The sad truth is that, under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel has become a vicious war machine that constantly targets Palestinian civilians, wages war on its neighbours, and is completely out of control.
Netanyahu’s war-mongering hurts not only Israel’s opponents but the Jews of the diaspora. By stoking a massive increase in anti-Semitism, Israel’s actions in Gaza place Jewish communities around the globe in jeopardy.
Nor is Netanyahu serving his own people by his belligerent foreign policy; he is leading them to a moral abyss and, ultimately, to self-destruction. As Jesus of Nazareth had warned, “He who lives by the sword, dies by the sword”.
