Why repeating “Netanyahu’s War/Government” is propaganda for rehabilitating Israel, and why its historically and morally inaccurate.

After almost two years of horrendous atrocities in Gaza, Senator Bernie Sanders finally recognised the genocide as a genocide. In an op-ed posted on his United States Senate website, he wrote: “The intent is clear. The conclusion is inescapable: Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.”

Like with other recent declarations – from the United Nations and the International Association of Genocide Scholars – this one came too late. But worse than that, it came in a highly problematic framework. Sanders chose to start his op-ed by essentially suggesting that “Hamas started it”. This not only amounts to victim-blaming but also erases eight decades of pillage, plunder, and ethnic cleansing.

This framing is more than just morally bankrupt; it is legally irrelevant and sets a dangerous precedent that any occupied or colonised people who resist must lay down their weapons or face the same fate as Gaza. It whispers to every oppressed population that their survival depends not on international law or humanity, but on their perfect submission to those who seek to erase them.

The 1948 Genocide Convention defines genocide as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. The five prohibited acts stretch across the spectrum of Palestinian experience in Gaza, the occupied West Bank, and historic Palestine: killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately creating conditions calculated to bring about physical destruction, imposing measures to prevent births, and forcibly transferring a population.

The legal framework carves no exceptions, offers no asterisks. There is no clause that reads “unless you think the other side started it”. There is no paragraph about proportional genocide. There is no subsection explaining when genocide may be justifiable or understandable.

Sanders acknowledges Israel’s “right to defend itself”, which it actually does not have in this case. Under international law, a state cannot simultaneously exercise control over a territory and then attack it on the claim that it is “foreign” and poses a national security threat.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) itself confirmed that in its 2004 ruling on the apartheid wall Israel was building in the occupied West Bank. The ICJ held that Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, which allows for a state to exercise self-defence, does not apply to Israel in the case of an alleged threat from the Palestinians because it occupies them.

Israel has maintained sole and absolute control over Gaza’s boundaries, airspace, and territorial waters since 1967. For decades, it has controlled what goes in and what comes out, who lives and who dies. It does not have “the right to defend itself” against a people whom it fully occupies.

What Sanders and others also refuse to acknowledge is that international law grants Palestinians the right to resist occupation. UN General Assembly Resolution 37/43 affirmed “the legitimacy of the struggle for independence, territorial integrity, national unity, and liberation from foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle”.

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In the same way, Bernie Sanders continues to launder the fiction that this is “Netanyahu’s War” and the genocide is the work of Netanyahu and this particularly special right wing government, as if dispossession, ethnic cleansing, and seven decades of killing is not particularly evil in its own right.

As I previously wrote in 2024,

“I do not blame Benjamin Netanyahu. I do not blame the Israeli prime minister for what is happening to my people. I do not blame him today, as Israeli bombs destroy every corner of Gaza, and children die under the rubble. I did not blame him back in 2013, when I had to watch the slaughter of my people in Gaza on the evening news, either.

My mother did not blame him when snipers perched on rooftops shot at her as she tried to make her way to work in the West Bank. My grandfather, God rest his soul, did not blame him as he died without ever returning to the land settlers stole from him in the 1980s, either.

For me, for my family, for my people, what we are witnessing in Palestine today is not “Netanyahu’s war”. It is not his occupation. He is nothing but another cog in the relentless war machine that is Israel.

Yet if you were to ask senators Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, the supposed champions of Palestinian rights and progressive humanitarianism in the United States, everything that has happened to us in the past 75 years, and everything that is happening to us today, can be blamed on one man, and one man alone: Netanyahu.

Sanders insistently calls the ongoing Israeli assault on Gaza “Netanyahu’s war”, and demands that the US “not give Netanyahu another nickel”. Meanwhile, Warren denounces “Netanyahu’s failed leadership” as she calls for a ceasefire.”

Sure, Netanyahu is evil. Sure, he committed countless crimes against Palestinians and against humanity, throughout his long career. Sure, he is continuing to fuel the carnage in Gaza today in part for his own political survival. And he should be held accountable for everything he has said and done that caused harm and pain to my people. But the racism, extremism and genocidal intent that is on display in Gaza and across the occupied Palestinian territory today cannot and should not be blamed on Netanyahu alone.

Blaming Israel’s blatant human rights abuses, disregard for international law, and open celebration of war crimes on Netanyahu alone is nothing but a coping mechanism for liberals like Sanders.

By blaming Netanyahu for the suffering and oppression of the Palestinian people, past and present, they keep alive the lie that Israel was built on progressive ideals, rather than ethnic cleansing.

By blaming Netanyahu, they whitewash their seemingly unconditional support for a state blatantly committing war crimes and crimes against humanity.

From the very beginning, the state of Israel tied its long-term survival to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, complete erasure of the Palestinian identity, and the oppression of Palestinians who remained on their lands. Former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir wrote in a Washington Post op-ed that “There is no such thing as Palestinians” in 1969, decades before the beginning of Netanyahu’s reign.

Sure, the Israeli left promote their agriculture-based communal living situation in “kibbutzim” as a socialist dream, and many Israelis take pride in their country’s “democracy”. But all this is true only if you ignore the humanity of Palestinians who have been ethnically cleansed from their lands to make way for the socialist kibbutzim, and who cannot participate in Israel’s democracy despite living under full Israeli control in illegally occupied territory.

Before the beginning of the genocide in Gaza, Israelis protested en masse against what they deemed to be an attack on the country’s legal system and democracy by Netanyahu for months. Yet they have never protested in such numbers and with such force the occupation, murder, and brutalisation of Palestinians by their own state and military.

In November, a full month into the genocide, only 1.8 percent of Israelis said they believed the Israeli military was using too much firepower in Gaza, and now, five months into the genocide, some 40 percent of Israelis say they want to see a revival of Jewish settlements in Gaza.

It seems the images of thousands of dead and maimed Palestinians do not mean much to Israelis. They are not moved by the videos of fathers carrying the remains of their children in plastic bags, or mothers crying over the bloodied bodies of their murdered babies. They do not care about hungry children stuck under the rubble, or toddlers being poisoned by the bird feed they are forced to eat amid a man-made famine. They are not merely indifferent to the suffering their military inflicts on innocents – thousands of them actually protest at the border gates to ensure no aid reaches Palestinians on the brink of starvation.

And since 1948, every Israeli government has depended on the removal, erasure, and death of Palestinians. David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister, was clear: “We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population.” Moshe Dayan, architect of Israel’s military doctrine, once told the Palestinians under his rule, “You shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave.”

From Plan Dalet to the massacre at Deir Yassin, from the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians during the Nakba to the destruction of over 400 villages, Israel was never designed to coexist. Was the initial seizure of 78% of historic Palestine meant to foster regional unity? The “peace process” was never a process toward peace, but a process of erasure with better PR.

And it is not just the government. When Israel bombed aid convoys and starved Palestinians, settlers protested against the dispersal of food. When an Israeli soldier was arrested for the rape of a Palestinian, it was settlers who rallied for his release. And when Israel is committing genocide, thousands are still choosing to settle on Palestinian land. This is mass complicity. This is a settler society fighting for its supremacy.

Those who tell you otherwise are supporting genocide.

There is no Israel without the displacement of Palestinians.

We are now living through what some call the second Nakba, but it would be more accurate to say: the Nakba never ended. It metastasized. The tents of Rafah are no different than the tents of Ramla. The forced displacement of 1.9 million Gazans today follows the same blueprint of erasure from 1948—erase the land, erase the homes, erase the people, and call it “peace”.

And yet, the world asks us to forget. To believe the lie that this is “new”. That this brutality is an outlier. That it is one man’s fault. But a genocide cannot be blamed on bad leadership. Not when it is systematized. Not when it is ritualized. Not when it is supported, funded, and cheered on by the society that elects these leaders, that sends their sons to drop the bombs.

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