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.