The Genocidal Heart of Israeli Society
How 75 years of settler-colonial logic reached its inevitable conclusion, and Netanyahu is not to blame
The convenient fiction that Benjamin Netanyahu is solely responsible for the Genocide in Gaza is crumbling, and what lies beneath is far more terrifying than any single man's malice. It is the revelation of an entire society that has, for decades, nurtured and normalized the dehumanization of Palestinians to such an extent that genocide has become not just permissible, but popular.
When 82% of Israelis support the forced expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza, we are not witnessing the machinations of one extremist leader. When 47% endorse the biblical slaughter of Jericho—where "all inhabitants" were killed—as a model for military action, we are staring into the abyss of collective moral collapse. When 56% want Palestinian citizens of Israel expelled from their own homeland, we are confronting the genocidal DNA of a settler-colonial project that has finally shed its liberal veneer.
The numbers, revealed in a Penn State University poll, are not anomalies. They are the logical culmination of 75 years of systematic dehumanization that began not with Netanyahu's rise to power, but with the founding of the state itself. This is not "Netanyahu's war"—it is Israel's genocide, and it has been decades in the making.
Consider the perverse irony: while Western progressives like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren scramble to pin the blame on one man, Israeli society itself has moved far beyond such convenient scapegoating. The poll reveals that even among secular Jews—those supposedly representing Israel's liberal conscience—70% support the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Among the religious, the figure reaches a staggering 97%. This is not political deviation; this is ideological consensus.
What we are witnessing is the final unmasking of the Zionist project. For too long, the world has been sold the myth of Israel as a progressive democracy hijacked by extremists. But when Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich openly declares his intention to "blot out the seed of Amalek" and speaks of Palestinians being "concentrated" in the south before being expelled "in great numbers to third countries," he is not departing from Israeli values—he is articulating them with unprecedented honesty.
The religious rhetoric is particularly revealing. When 65% of Israeli Jews believe in a modern-day "Amalek"—the biblical enemy whom God commanded the Israelites to exterminate "down to the last baby"—and 93% of them apply this commandment to Palestinians today, we are not dealing with political discourse. We are confronting theological genocide, where ethnic cleansing becomes a divine mandate.
This is the society that produced not just Netanyahu, but every Israeli leader who has overseen the gradual strangulation of Palestinian life. This is the society that cheered as Golda Meir declared in 1969 that "there is no such thing as Palestinians." This is the society that has spent decades perfecting the art of making Palestinian existence impossible while maintaining the facade of democratic respectability.
The systematic nature of this dehumanization cannot be overstated. Israeli children are raised in an education system that has undergone what scholars describe as a "process of radicalization" since the early 2000s. They grow up consuming media that routinely calls for Palestinian expulsion and killing. They serve in a military that treats Palestinian lives as expendable. Is it any wonder that only 9% of Jewish men under 40—those executing the violence—reject the ideas of expulsion and extermination?
What makes this particularly chilling is how this genocidal consensus cuts across all sectors of Israeli society. The secular left that once protested Netanyahu's judicial reforms has remained largely silent as their military starves two million people. The kibbutzim that Western progressives romanticize as socialist utopias were built on the ruins of Palestinian villages. The democracy that Israel claims to defend has never extended to the millions of Palestinians living under its control.
The current moment represents not an aberration, but an acceleration. Trump's plan to "clean out" Gaza and transform it into a "Riviera" populated by "international people" perfectly aligns with the Israeli fantasy of a Palestine without Palestinians. When Netanyahu announces that Israeli forces will no longer "enter and exit" but will instead maintain permanent control over seized territory, he is simply making explicit what has always been implicit in the Zionist project.
The international community's response—or lack thereof—only emboldens this genocidal trajectory. When the United States continues to provide weapons while Israeli officials openly discuss plans for ethnic cleansing, when European leaders express concern while maintaining lucrative arms deals, when progressive politicians blame everything on Netanyahu while absolving the society that produced and supports him, they become complicit in the machinery of extermination.
The polls reveal something even more disturbing than the numbers themselves: the complete absence of Palestinian humanity in Israeli consciousness. When Israelis are asked about killing "all inhabitants" of enemy cities, they are not being asked about military strategy—they are being asked about the extermination of human beings. When they are asked about "forced expulsion," they are being asked about the destruction of families, communities, and entire ways of life. The fact that majorities consistently support these measures suggests that Palestinians simply do not register as fully human in the Israeli imagination.
This dehumanization is not accidental—it is foundational.
A settler-colonial project that requires the erasure of an indigenous population cannot afford to recognize that population's humanity. The cognitive dissonance would be unbearable.
Instead, Palestinians must be transformed into existential threats, biblical enemies, demographic problems to be solved. We must become anything except what we are: a people with the same right to life, dignity, and self-determination as anyone else.
Yet perhaps the most damning indictment of this systematic dehumanization is not what it reveals about Israeli society, but what it exposes about the broader Western world that enables it. Even as the death toll in Gaza reaches over 62,000 Palestinians—with estimates suggesting the true number may exceed 80,000 when accounting for undercounting—even as 57 children have died from malnutrition since March alone, even as 71,000 children under five are expected to suffer acute malnutrition over the next year, the Western response remains one of calculated indifference dressed up as concern. When three-quarters of Gaza's population faces emergency or catastrophic food deprivation, when 15.6% of children under two in northern Gaza are acutely malnourished, when babies are dying of starvation while their mothers collapse from hunger, the West's primary concern remains Israel's "right to defend itself." This is not political calculation—this is the arithmetic of racism, the cold logic of who counts as human and who does not.
The tragedy is not just what this reveals about Israeli society, but what it portends for our future. When a society reaches this level of genocidal consensus, when ethnic cleansing becomes popular policy rather than extremist fantasy, when religious language is deployed to justify mass murder, we are not dealing with a problem that can be solved by changing leaders or reforming institutions. We are dealing with a society that has fundamentally lost its moral compass.
The international community can no longer hide behind the fiction that this is about one bad leader or temporary extremism.
The polls make clear that this is about the logic of a settler-colonial project that has finally reached its inevitable conclusion: the complete elimination of Palestinian presence from the land. The only question now is whether the world will continue to enable this final solution or finally recognize it for what it is—and act to stop it.
Because if we have learned anything from history, it is that societies capable of such genocidal consensus do not spontaneously recover their humanity. They must be stopped.
Thank you for this piece! It should be broadcast straight into the heads of everyone who thinks this genocide is simply an issue of leadership, as if denouncing Netanyahu is enough. People are now attempting to absolve themselves of their previous complicity and silence, but scarcely any of them have the courage to address the deeper issue at hand, as you have in this article! Looking forward to your next one.
For me the following paragraph tells me that western leaders are not fit to govern.
"Yet perhaps the most damning indictment of this systematic dehumanization is not what it reveals about Israeli society, but what it exposes about the broader Western world that enables it. Even as the death toll in Gaza reaches over 62,000 Palestinians—with estimates suggesting the true number may exceed 80,000 when accounting for undercounting—even as 57 children have died from malnutrition since March alone, even as 71,000 children under five are expected to suffer acute malnutrition over the next year, the Western response remains one of calculated indifference dressed up as concern. When three-quarters of Gaza's population faces emergency or catastrophic food deprivation, when 15.6% of children under two in northern Gaza are acutely malnourished, when babies are dying of starvation while their mothers collapse from hunger, the West's primary concern remains Israel's "right to defend itself." This is not political calculation—this is the arithmetic of racism, the cold logic of who counts as human and who does not."