As Gaza burned in the distance, Israeli settlers gathered together near Kibbutz Be'eri to celebrate and promote the establishment of settlements in the devastated strip. Adam Parsons, a journalist reporting for Sky News spoke with one of the people at the event, a young Israeli woman called Reshit. In an atmosphere of ‘frustration, entitlement and excitement’, she got to the heart of what the events of October 7th and the subsequent catastrophic war had morphed into; a naked land grab. “We should kill them, every last one of them,” Reshit said to Sky News bluntly. “If the government won't do that then we should just kick them out. This is our land. We deserve it.”

Chillingly, the statement encapsulates exactly what Israel’s war in Gaza has morphed into under the guise of bringing the hostages home and defeating Hamas: ethnic cleansing and genocide wrapped in a sense of self-righteousness, fanaticism, toxic victimhood, and impunity.  All these traits now shape Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and vast swathes of Israeli society as its hyper-violent, genocidal campaign in the decimated strip has accelerated, shattering every norm of international law and the most basic tenants that underpin the laws of war. 

Multiple US and European media outlets have either shamed themselves or actively participated in trying to cover up the historic crime aided by Israel’s notorious propaganda machine, hasbara which roughly translates to “explaining”. Together these organizations - aided by lobbying groups across the US and Europe such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the Democratic Majority for Israel, and Friends of Israel  - and their cohort of activists and journalists have actively attempted to distort and obscure events in Gaza and, to some extent, events surrounding the October 7th attacks. Some top global media organisations and journalists have either drifted into or actively engaged in genocide denial or willfully downplayed crimes against humanity.

Much of the catastrophe that has befallen Israel and Palestine lies with Netanyahu. The populist prime minister has stoked division at every turn in his political career, ever manipulating to gain advantage and exploiting Israel’s fracturing society to stay at the top while burying the two-state solution. At the same time, he has ushered extremists into the halls of power, inviting supremacists, theocrats, and ethno-nationalists to sit at the table to push through illiberal laws and transform military occupation into apartheid. In the wake of the October 7th attacks, he has become a deluded megalomaniac addicted to power, unleashing evil on the world to hold onto his position as prime minister. He has incited genocide and paved the way for ethnic cleansing in Gaza all while stoking the fires of regional war, actively sabotaging hostage deals and ceasefires tabled, and muzzling dissent at home. But while Netanyahu’s place in history as Israel’s worst prime minister and an irredeemable, genocidal monster is sealed, the roots of the country’s embrace with disaster runs far deeper than one man.

Netanyahu was forged by Israel and the settler project that has since the country’s creation prioritised displacing and stealing territory from the indigenous population, the Palestinians, all under the religious narrative of the “chosen people” and the myth of “a land without a people for a people without a land.” ‘The Israeli establishment [has'] produced and disseminated a very particular version of the Holocaust that could be used to legitimise the militant and expansionist [ideology] of Zionism, wrote the Indian essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra in the London Book of Reviews. ‘That yesterday’s victims are very likely to become today’s victimisers is the lesson of organised violence in the former Yugoslavia, Sudan, Congo, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and too many other places…The [Holocaust] as the measure of all crimes [and'] antisemitism as the most lethal form of bigotry [is] in danger of disappearing as the Israeli military massacres and starves Palestinians.’ 

Nowhere has the Nazis’ genocide in Europe against the Jews been more explicitly weaponised to commit atrocities than in the current war in Gaza. Hamas killed the highest number of Jews since the Holocaust on October 7, an indisputable fact. However, describing Hamas as ‘Nazis’ while systematically dehumanising the entire population is a gross oversimplification of the events of October 7 which took place against the backdrop of a military occupation turned apartheid. Hamas and Hezbollah are both brutal organisations which have committed atrocities but they are neither Nazis nor Al-Qaeda. The systematic distortion of what constitutes a ‘Nazi’, ‘terrorist’, or ‘Hamas’ has given the Israeli soldiers license to kill without limit. This licence to take revenge has only been fuelled by stories of systemic mass rape, decapitated babies and children being thrown into ovens on October 7 by Hamas fighters, stories that were widely shared but not eventually systematically debunked by fact finders and journalists on closer inspection. Atrocities were committed by Hamas but many were fictionalised by the hard right and military to accomplish wider goals and indoctrinate a population in the process.

The Israeli army, and by extension vast elements of its society is now in a blood frenzy, traumatised and others are in a state of denial and experiencing cognitive dissonance. Impunity has also brought sociopaths and psychopaths to the surface with many relishing and celebrating the violence they commit or see being committed in their name. The war in Gaza has turned into the equivalent of a person beating another person who wronged them senseless only to realise they beat them to death long ago. Israel will be a society not only traumatised by October 7 and the brutal conflicts that took place in its aftermath, it will be one haunted, scarred and chased by the ghosts of genocide, victims of massacres, man-made famine and torture. The country will be broken on the inside by PTSD, hatred, apathy and denial and broken from without by its immoral, politically bankrupt war on the Palestinians and its neighbours. The argument of self-defence died months ago when the Israeli army began systematically destroying Gaza’s health system and manufacturing a man-made famine.

As the Zealots brought destruction and horrors to their own people during the rebellion against the Roman Empire, the disciples of Religious Zionism and a resurgent Kahanism are leading Israel to ruin. Unprecedented numbers of Israelis are leaving the war-torn, unstable country, blighted by civil unrest and ugly supremacism run riot. Large numbers are leaving permanently and according to The Jerusalem Post, 39% of those leaving are from wealthier districts, illustrating the brain drain that is gradually taking hold of the Israeli economy. The liberal, secular elite has also been increasingly supplanted by the rise of the far-right, religious settler movement championed by a power-hungry Netanyahu. With the state falling into the hands of extremists and controversial laws and reforms being pushed through to suit their illiberal, authoritarian agendas, many are deciding to leave. “There is a considerable likelihood that Israel will not be able to exist as a sovereign Jewish state in the coming decades,” said a paper published by Netanyahu’s former chair of the National Economic Council, Eugene Kandel and administrative expert Ron Tzur. “Israel’s locomotive of growth…is driven by a small group of several tens of thousands of people in a country of 10 million. The weight of their departure from the country is immense.” 

The collapse of security has only exacerbated Israel’s crisis. October 7th ruptured the social contract between the state and society, puncturing the myth that Israel is one of the world’s safest places to be Jewish while the army has failed to restore the deterrents that were broken apart by Hamas’s assault. Missiles and drone attacks continue to rain down on the north and south and hundreds of thousands remain displaced. The result has been an exodus of over half a million Israelis since the war in Gaza began. 

War in Gaza and Lebanon are also draining the economy. Historically the Israeli army has preferred to fight short, decisive wars and has lost or been fought to a stalemate in wars that have lasted longer. It is now mired in two protracted wars in Gaza and Lebanon as Hamas and Hezbollah deploy guerilla tactics to bog down the Israeli war machine while atrocities in Israel’s campaign in Gaza have only stiffened resistance and deepened resentment against the occupiers. The result is that Israel is now fighting the longest and most expensive war in its history. The consequences are being felt in the form of downgraded credit ratings, a shrinking economy and soaring inflation as the cost of war is set to exceed $250 billion, the equivalent of 12% of Israel’s gross domestic product. 

Israeli atrocities have also destroyed the mask it careful wears to people looking on from the outside. Across the world, multiple countries are beginning to roll out sanctions, arms embargoes and sever ties with the Israeli government, outraged by its atrocities and human rights violations in Gaza and the West Bank while boycotts are increasingly taking a toll on companies and businesses that are associated with the country. The effect of external pressures has been mixed with the support of Washington providing Israel with the cover it needs to be largely able to withstand the pressure of boycott campaigns, arms embargoes, and sanctions by other Western powers which have barely put a dent in Israel’s armoury or deterred the messianic settlement movement from land grabs. 

However, no amount of American military and financial aid will halt the forces eating away at Israel’s internal stability. In providing a blank cheque to Netanyahu’s cabal of ethnonationalists absent consequences for their conduct, the Trump and Biden administrations have now sowed the seeds of future strife inside Israel. Washington has not only become complicit in genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank since October 7th, but it has also unwittingly thrown in its lot with radical ethnonationalism that is a threat to not just Palestinians but Israeli Jews, Palestinian citizens in Israel, other minorities including Christians, Druze, Circassians, Armenians, and the country’s LGBTIQ+ communities. 

“[Israel] is being engulfed by the State of Judea,” wrote Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe in an essay titled The Collapse of Zionism. “The State of Judea wants Israel to become a theocracy [and] its influence in the upper echelons of the Israeli army and security services is growing exponentially. For them, secular Jews are as heretical as the Palestinians if they refuse to join in this endeavour.” There will be few differences between the theocratic state ruled by the Kahanists and that of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.

In their blind commitment to Israel, many Western politicians and institutions long committed to the project and political ideology of Zionism have not realised that the Israel they unconditionally support, and in particular the army, is mutating into something far more dangerous. “Combat rank and file is being filled more with the ideologues, the nationalist-religious guys…There has been a big fight in the army about who the real authority is. Is it the rabbi or the commander?” said Yehuda Shaul, co-founder of Ofek in an interview with The New Yorker. “The nationalist-religious people…want to change the nature and the spirit and the soul of the army….But the fact is that their programme doesn’t work, meaning we’ve almost wiped the Gaza Strip off the face of the earth, and Hamas did not disappear.” 

That does not mean the supplanting of the old elite by the far-right absolves them from today’s catastrophe. Successive Israeli governments and leaders lacked the courage to confront the occupation of the Palestinians, the radical settler movement or the inherent contradictions of Zionism which desired to create a democratic and pluralist state from which Palestinians were excluded and a society that was built on a wave of ethnic cleansing in the 1940s and 1960s.

Instead of confronting these ghosts, the Israeli elite buried them and built settlements before their fantasies and state of denial were shattered by the reality of military occupation and the Palestinians who through protest, resistance, revolt, atrocities, and attacks over the last century have reminded the Israelis and the world that their grievances remained unacknowledged and unresolved. 

When Israeli leaders tried to resolve the conflict and end the occupation of the Palestinians, the impulse of expansionism that lay at the heart of Zionist ideology always won over the growing urgency to find an elusive peace. Those who attempted to compromise sometimes paid the ultimate price as illustrated by the person who came closest to securing such a peace, Yitzhak Rabin. The former Israeli prime minister was gunned down in 1995 by Yigal Amir, an Israeli extremist committed to the ‘State of Judea’ camp that now dominates the government today. Ben-Gvir was one such man issuing threats against Rabin before this assassination, actively threatening the prime minister on live television while Netanyahu, Rabin’s political rival and leader of the opposition, did little to stop incitement at his rallies opposed to the peace accords.

As the assassination of Rabin demonstrated, the ideological and political war for Israel’s institutions started well before October 7th and these are battles that the zealots are winning, despite their clear inability to govern competently. When the war ends, the blame game will begin adding salt to the wounds of a fractured society whose only recent unity has been found in the trauma of Hamas’s assault and the slaughter of the Palestinian population. Such unity built on a mixture of tragedy, trauma, and hate cannot endure for long and Israel will swiftly fall back into the infighting that sparked civil unrest and had many fearing civil war.

Zionism as an ideology and project faces moral and political bankruptcy. Its embrace of Kahanist supremacism under Netanyahu will only hasten its demise as the camps of Smotrich and Ben-Gvir crush the remaining advocates of compromise in the Zionist camps, whether they are hard or soft advocates of the complex political-religious ideology. Similarly, as with the apartheid regime in South Africa, the fanatics who strove to build a Greater Serbia, and the Hutu Power movement in Rwanda, Israel’s military occupation is also doomed to fail and collapse.

How fast and how destructive the collapse of the system will be is an unknown but based upon the fanaticism and rampant impunity already deeply embedded in the ‘State of Judea’ camp and the messianic settler movement, the fall may be bloody and protracted. Stained by genocide and hostage to extremists, Israel faces a reckoning and the world must brace itself for the conflagration that is to come.