Once again, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has played the victim card, claiming that Hamas wants to “destroy the Jewish state” and “annihilate the Jewish people”. His comments came in response to criticism of the “plausible genocide” that Israel is carrying out in occupied Palestine, criticism that arose not in the Arab world — where Arab Zionists are dominant— but in the UK, France and Canada. “I could never understand how this simple truth evades the leaders” of these three countries, added Netanyahu.
His “simple truth” is, of course neither simple nor the truth. It is an attempt to divert attention from the fact that ever since it surfaced at the end of the 19th century in Theodor Herzl’s book The Jewish State, political Zionism has always depended on the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, leaving the land free for Jewish settlers to take over and create a nominally Jewish state, which is in fact a “bastion of European civilisation in a sea of barbarism”. It has been sustained by Western neo-imperialists.
Moreover, Netanyahu turns reality on its head with his claims about the Islamic Resistance Movement seeking to “destroy the Jewish state” and “annihilate the Jewish people”, because it has been Israel’s objective from even before the date of its “independence” (from whom?) on 15 May, 1948 to destroy any possibility of there being a viable Palestinian state (or “Arab state”, as the 1947 UN Partition Plan described it). And, as we have seen over the past 77 years and counting, Israel has been trying to annihilate the Palestinian people constantly, either by killing them or driving them out of the land.
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It has done this through state terrorism, for which it basically wrote the handbook. Terrorist acts committed by Zionist terror groups led by the likes of Menachem Begin (Irgun) and Yitzhak Shamir (the Stern Gang), both of whom became prime minister of the settler-colonial, Zionist state, targeted first the British Mandate authorities and UN officials, before turning full on against the people of Palestine. A list of some of the atrocities committed by Zionist terrorists since the 1940s is contained in my article here.
For Netanyahu to make his claim even as his army, air force and navy are engaged in slaughtering Palestinian civilians in Gaza (while his occupation forces and illegal Jewish settlers carry out terrorist acts against the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, the so-called “silent genocide”) is outrageous, but we shouldn’t be surprised. He is a seasoned liar, accusing Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and Mark Carney of “emboldening Hamas to fight for ever”, and describing the resistance fighters as “mass murderers, rapists, baby killers and kidnappers”. And yet it is Israeli soldiers who have killed at least 17,500 Palestinian children — including countless babies — over the past 18 months or so (Israel has actually killed a Palestinian child on average every 2.5 days for the past 25 years); Israeli soldiers who are raping and assaulting Palestinian prisoners sexually, male and female alike; and the occupation state which is holding thousands of Palestinians with neither charge nor trial.
Furthermore, he leads a country which has never stated where its borders are, and has pushed the nominal borders ever outward into Arab and Palestinian territory; it’s a country which is aiming for the Zionists’ dream: Greater Israel controlling territory across a huge swathe of the Middle East, including Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. Netanyahu and his predecessors have been emboldened in this by successive US presidents and other Western leaders, including those whom he now berates.
By playing the victim card, Netanyahu hopes to convince people that it is the Palestinians who are trying to steal Israeli land and “annihilate” Israelis when, in fact, the opposite is true. Numerous statements by members of his far-right coalition government confirm their genocidal intent, as if further evidence was needed. It isn’t, or shouldn’t be. Ethnic cleansing has always been the Zionist modus operandi. The 1948 Nakba — Catastrophe — wasn’t a one-off event; it is ongoing. What happened on 7 October was a symptom of Israel’s occupation and colonisation of Palestine, not the catalyst for Israel’s brutal, genocidal offensive in which at least 54,000 Palestinians have been killed and an estimated 11,000 are missing, presumed dead, under the rubble of their homes and other civilian infrastructure destroyed by Israel.
Genocide has been happening in plain sight for decades in all but name; the whole apparatus of occupation has been established and developed with one purpose in mind: to steal as much Palestinian land as possible, and kill or expel as many Palestinians as possible. The ongoing events in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, as well as Gaza, demonstrate that.
Claims that Israel is merely acting in “self-defence” would be laughable if not so serious. Apart from anything else, an occupation state has no right to make such a claim about its actions against the people suffering under its military occupation.
An International Criminal Court arrest warrant for Netanyahu is still in force for “war crimes” in the Gaza Strip. But you don’t need to be killing and starving people to death in order to be committing a war crime. Every Israeli settlement on Palestinians territory is a war crime; every Jewish settler living in a settlement is a war crime; every Palestinian detained in the occupied territories but held in an Israeli prison is a war crime. Israel has been committing war crimes for decades; the current genocide has been livestreamed on social media. Netanyahu and his Zionist apologists can’t hide that brutal reality. That, not his spurious claims about Hamas, is the “simple truth” that he wishes we would all evade. But we won’t.
With Israel also facing charges of genocide at the International Court of Justice, the end of both Netanyahu and his racist, apartheid state can only be a matter of time. He has surely played the victim card once too often. Nobody with any credibility believes a word that he says.
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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.