There's No 'Better' Israel

Netanyahu isn't the problem. Zionism is.

Benny Gantz, a former Netanyahu opponent, later joined the Likud coalition.

During his Ivor Novello awards acceptance speech, Bono expressed the Western world’s most common misunderstanding about modern Israel:

“Israel, be released from Benjamin Netanyahu and the far-right fundamentalists that twist your sacred texts.”¹

While I agree Zionism is a bastardization of Judaism, it’s incorrect to frame Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestine as a product of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or his Likud party. I wish this were true. If the Irish rockstar was correct, then the anti-genocide movement could achieve its goal by bolstering an Israeli anti-Netanyahu coalition, ending the violence through electoralism. But those opposing Netanyahu don’t oppose the genocide. Many of them think Netanyahu is too kind to Palestinians. Liberal Zionist Yair Lapid, leader of Israel’s opposition party, recently accused Netanyahu of secretly letting humanitarian aid into Gaza.² Benny Gantz, who led the anti-Netanyahu Blue and White coalition before joining the Likud government,³ campaigned against Netanyahu in 2019 by bragging about how many Palestinians he killed during 2014’s Operation Protective Edge. His campaign video (below) used footage of decimated Palestinian homes to show how ‘tough’ Gantz was as an IDF commander. The images are a ghoulish match of those emerging from Gaza today.

Middle Eastern stability, and by extension, global security, won’t come from Israel or its Star Spangled parent state correcting its ‘error’ and ousting Benjamin Netanyahu. To them, there is no error. Zionists don’t see the horrors of Gaza — massacres, starvation, assassinations — as ‘mistakes.’ They see everything going according to plan. After all, for over a century, Zionism has advocated genocide, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing to achieve its goal of colonizing historic Palestine.

Earlier this month, Israel announced ‘Operation Gideon’s Chariots,’ a plot to ethnically cleanse Gaza of indigenous inhabitants and seize it permanently. While promoting the plan, the Israeli Finance Minister confirmed what anti-Zionists have said all along: Israel never intended to free its citizens held by Palestinian militants, only use them as an excuse for its imperialism and genocide.

“We are finally going to occupy the Gaza Strip. We will stop being afraid of the word ‘occupation.’ We are finally taking control of all humanitarian aid, so that it does not become supplies for Hamas… There will be no retreat from the territories we have conquered, not even in exchange for hostages.” — Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich⁴

This vitriol is not a modern development, but the continuation of Israel’s founding ideology. Theodore Herzl, the father of Zionism, described Israel as a ‘ colonial idea’ to the British government. His compatriot, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, explained how to bring this ‘colonial idea’ to life. Written over a century ago, Jabotinsky’s plan for racial apartheid and violent colonization is an exact description of modern Israel’s subjugation of Palestine.⁵

‘Zionist colonization … can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population—behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach. Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonized. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of ‘Palestine’ into the ‘Land of Israel’

Jabotinsky was no fortune teller. He developed Zionism to ‘transform Palestine into Israel’ and explained how to do it. Modern Israeli Zionists of all political persuasions followed his instructions, building the iron walls that enclose Gaza and the West Bank. With the Palestinians divided and weakened, Israel is now extinguishing the ‘spark’ of Palestine through previously unimaginable violence.

Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall. Israel finished enclosing Gaza in 2021.

Whenever I point out the 1:1 relationship between Zionism’s espoused settler-colonial foundation and its current crimes, Israel's apologists point to small concessions and humanitarian aid as supposed evidence that Israel doesn’t want to destroy Palestine. Again, simply listening to past and present Zionist leaders disproves that these are genuine acts.

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Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, was barbarically honest about how Israel should pretend to want peaceful coexistence as cover for its colonial intent.⁶ Describing how Zionists would appease the 1947 UN partition plan, which divided Palestine into Israel and an Arab state, Ben Gurion admits Zionism had no intention of upholding the internationally-declared borders, which was quite favorable to the Zionists.

“After the formation of a large army in the wake of the establishment of the state [of Israel], we will abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine."

“The acceptance of partition does not commit us to renounce Transjordan. One does not demand from anybody to give up his vision. We shall accept a state in the boundaries fixed today — but the boundaries of Zionist aspirations are the concerns of the Jewish people, and no external factor will be able to limit them.” — The Birth of Israel

Despite these clear admissions of deception and war crimes, modern Zionists still claim Israel’s 1948 immediate expansion beyond its internationally recognized borders was an act of self-defense.

A refugee camp for Palestinians driven from their homeland by Israel during the 1948 Nakba.

While Israel has used the strategy of saying one thing, doing another for seventy-seven years, the Zionist government no longer feels the need for secrecy. Under pressure from Washington, Israel recently allowed food, water, and medicine into the Gaza Strip, the first humanitarian aid allowed in over three months. Not wanting to give his electorate the impression he’s against starving Arab babies, Benjamin Netanyahu recorded a Telegram post explaining he was only allowing minimal relief because of pressure from the United States.⁷ Stating he’d been told “Israel’s greatest friends in the world cannot accept images of mass hunger,” Netanyahu clarified the minimal aid was to ‘solve the problem.’⁸ The problem of starving children? Oh no. Don’t be ridiculous. The problem that pictures of malnourished children would force the U.S to pull support, stopping Israel from ‘conquering all of Gaza.’ (Netanyahu’s words.)

It’s both disturbing and illustrative that Israel’s prime minister felt the need to explain to his country that saving Palestinian lives wasn’t his intention. As evil as he is, Netanyahu isn’t wrong. The myth of a ‘better’ Israel lying somewhere underneath the Likud party’s vitriol is just that: a myth, easily shattered when we investigate the desires of the Israeli population.

Haaretz, the longest-running newspaper in Israel, recently found there is landslide support for genocide among the Israeli citizenry. 82% of Israeli Jews support the forced expulsion of Gazans. 56% support the forced expulsion of Arab citizens (Palestinians) from Israel.⁹ Most disturbingly, 47% of Israeli Jews answered affirmatively to the following question:

‘Do you support the claim that the IDF, when conquering an enemy city, should act in a manner similar to the way the Israelites acted when they conquered Jericho under the leadership of Joshua, that is, kill all its inhabitants?’

Forty. Seven. Percent. Almost half of Israel’s dominant ethnicity wants to massacre every Palestinian man, woman, and child. And that’s only the ones who are willing to admit it. These troubling results aren’t an outlier. A separate study by Israel’s Channel 13 found that 53% of all Israelis don’t want life-saving aid to enter Gaza, while only 34% want it to enter.¹⁰ Commenting on the poll, Palestinian-Israeli lawmaker Ayman Odeh expressed extreme worry about what this said for families like his own.

As Israel enacts its final solution in Gaza, assassinating healthcare workers,¹¹ bombing marked refugee shelters,¹², and openly admitting to targeting civilians for political objectives (which is the textbook definition of terrorism) it’s essential for Americans to reconcile with the violent society our government has unconditionally supported for close to a century. Israel — the ruling government, major opposition, and overwhelming segments of the population — is loudly proclaiming it wants to further the worst crime against humanity committed in the 21st century. When someone tells us who they are, we should believe them. Once Americans realize that the idea of a progressive, peace-seeking Israel was a myth, the path to peace in historic Palestine becomes obvious. The lauded two-state solution is both dead and unrealistic. If a Palestinian state were created, Israel’s violent and imperialist character, the source of conflict in the region, would not disappear. I fear Zionist Israel would immediately invade and occupy its new neighbor, as it did to the West Bank in 1967, the Golan Heights in 1981, and Lebanon in 1985. Instead, of letting imperialist intent fester, it is wiser to end the 19th century colonial ideal once and for all by recognizing reality. Currently, the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is controlled by Israel, which affords different dignity to its subjects based on their race, religion, and place of birth. Israel-Palestine is already one state. Only the establishment of equal rights and democracy for all will end Zionism’s inherent racism and create peace for all who call the Middle East home.

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In Solidarity — Joe

1. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/may/23/bono-criticises-benjamin-netanyahu-and-hamas-at-ivor-novello-awards

2. https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/lapid-suggests-israel-funding-foreign-shell-companies-distributing-gaza-aid-pm-spokesperson-denies/

3. https://en.idi.org.il/israeli-elections-and-parties/parties/blue-and-white/

4. https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/smotrich-idf-wont-withdraw-from-gaza-even-for-a-hostage-deal-israelis-should-embrace-the-word-occupation/

5. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10099254/

6. https://www.progressiveisrael.org/ben-gurions-notorious-quotes-their-polemical-uses-abuses/

7. https://www.newsweek.com/netanyahu-says-israel-will-seize-control-all-gaza-strip-2073990

8. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/5/19/israel-to-allow-limited-food-into-gaza-amid-intensified-military-offensive

9. https://archive.md/yI4Dy

10. https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20250522-53-of-israeli-public-opposes-aid-entering-gaza-new-poll-shows/

11. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/25/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-doctor-children.html

12. https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-hamas-war-news-05-26-2025-6a7285f144a3619e8239138e6883b3b6