Stop Blaming Netanyahu, Stupid... - CounterPunch.org Benjamin Netanyahu and his partners in the Israeli government, Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich among others, did not descend from Mars. They are the product of the same earthly Zionist ideology. By blaming Netanyahu et al., the Zionist-managed Western media and liberals in the U.S. and Europe want you to believe that there is a moral daylight between the politics of the Israeli governing coalition and the state they lead. The European Union is a study in cognitive dissonance. It threatens Netanyahu with arrest. It bans Ben Gvir and Smotrich from entering European soil. Yet it continues to uphold preferential trade relations with Israel itself. It sanctions individual Israeli leaders but shields and sustains the state apparatus and political system that empowers them. The EU cannot have it both ways, distancing itself morally from individual leaders while continuing to finance, normalize, and legitimize the very state structure that empowers them.
Adolf Hitler could not have carried out his crimes without a German political system that enabled and emboldened him. It was not only Hitler or the Nazi Party who were held accountable for Nazi crimes; it was Germany. South African apartheid could not have endured as long as it did without the broad complicity of privileged white society. Likewise, the rise of Netanyahu’s coalition is a legacy of Israel’s privileged Zionist establishment and Israeli Jewish society at large. Poll after poll shows that while many Israeli Jews do not support Netanyahu personally, two-thirds still approve his starvation policies in Gaza. Israelis want to change the actor, but not the play. For instance, only 20 percent of Jewish Israelis support the right for Palestinians to have their own state, while 42 percent support the expansion of the illegal Jewish-only colonies in occupied West Bank. It’s not a fringe group when one hundred percent more Israeli Jews reject the rights of Palestinian self-determination than those who support a two-state solution. Such numbers reflect the true consensus and reveal the real direction of Israeli “Jewish democracy.” This distinction matters. If a government pursues a policy opposed by most of its citizens, it’s labeled authoritarian. But when it submits to the wishes of the majority, it’s called a democracy. National democratic dispensation, however, comes with clear responsibility to the people, not just loyalty to the leader. Netanyahu is not dragging Israel into crimes against humanity contrary to its “democratic” will. He is, in the grim logic of Israel’s electoral politics, delivering what most of his “Jewish” constituents want. Case in point, Tel Aviv-based pollster Dahlia Scheindlin found that the events of October 7 had only sharpened existing “Jewish Israeli” views rather than transforming them. “I think what I thought before October 7,” Israelis told her, “but more so.” The war did not create a new Israeli public. It revealed the one that had already existed. The vast majority of “Jewish Israelis” endorse the Gaza genocide, the engineered starvation, and the targeting of hospitals, schools, infrastructure. The same is now visible in Lebanon as exposed through the testimony of the soldiers who carried out those orders. A recent Haaretz investigation spoke to five Israeli soldiers from different units and backgrounds who served in southern Lebanon. Their accounts portray the institutional moral collapse of a military culture that did not descend into lawlessness in defiance of orders, but with the tacit approval of command. One Israeli soldier described organized looting operations in which every evening a logistics convoy would transfer stolen goods — carpets, motorcycles, armchairs, stoves, entire store inventories — to an outpost where they would wait for soldiers and commanders rotating home. “The feeling is that the IDF has become like an army of Vikings,” the soldier said. “They let soldiers loot so they’ll be happy and keep fighting.” This is not aberrant behavior by rogue individuals. It is the conduct of an institutional army culture where the property, dignity, or lives of Lebanese or Palestinian civilians are not worthy of respect or protection. Another soldier described villages that were emptied through systematic demolition — whole compounds flattened by civilian contractors paid by the number of houses they destroyed, with daily “achievement assessments” tracking how many structures each company had demolished. “It used to be necessary to ‘incriminate’ a structure to destroy it, to find weapons in it,” he said. “But today, they just destroy, even schools, clinics.” The support for the Gaza, Lebanon and Iran wars among “Jewish Israelis” has remained a majority position despite international attestations of war crimes. Wars and crimes that enjoy democratic legitimacy within Israeli Jewish society. That’s the uncomfortable truth that both Israeli liberals and international observers refuse to reckon with. Actions carried out by an army drawn from, and returning to, the same society that polls show broadly supports its government’s crimes. Blaming Netanyahu has become a tool to deflect from and obscure the systematic war crimes committed by the state. Unarguably, Netanyahu is dangerous, corrupt, and genuinely committed to endless wars that serve his political survival. At the same time, the polling is consistent and damning: most Israelis who want him gone do not want his crimes to end. They want a more competent — or less publicized — version of the same project. This is evident in the conspicuous absence of any opposing viewpoint within Israel. The organized political opposition, in Israel’s “Jewish democracy,” offers no alternative vision to the current strategy. They differ only on tactics, not on core objectives. This is not a political system straining against its leader’s extremism, it is one that produced it. They come from the same lot of political culture shaped by victimhood narratives, conditioned by fear and hatred toward non-Jews. It is the “democratic” political system that has always, across parties and across decades, chosen the same destructive path. It may be convenient for the Zionist-managed Western media to peddle euphemistic narratives, and for liberals to dismiss the Israeli reality as the work of a handful of “deranged” right-wing politicians. It is time to stop blaming Netanyahu and his racist coalition while ignoring the far deeper and more troubling truth: the problem is the Zionist project itself. Jamal Kanj -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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