The moral and political crisis of Zionism
Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has reached a level of brutality that places Israel and Zionism before their own moral, political, and legal abyss.
For decades, the Zionist project has been denounced for its colonial, supremacist, and violent character. Nowadays, under Netanyahu and his far-right coalition, this violence has reached levels that can no longer be described as anything other than structural and deeply destructive, creating a reality of domination, ethnic cleansing, and collective punishment.
The Zionist regime believes that destroying all civilian infrastructure, killing entire families, and expelling an indigenous people from their own land represents a military victory. But what they call “success” is nothing more than the consecration of genocide as a state policy.
No minimally lucid person considers this a victory: it is a war crime, it is a crime against humanity, it is genocide broadcast live, with the entire world as witness and involuntary accomplice.
Israel has not won in Gaza. And it will not win. Palestinian resistance continues to exist precisely because it is anchored in moral, historical, and political legitimacy, while the Zionist project is sustained only through the physical and symbolic destruction of Palestine.
A state that needs to murder children to proclaim victory is already morally defeated. All its military power paradoxically reveals its historical fragility, its incapacity to offer any horizon other than permanent violence.
But what allows this system of terror to endure? Why, even in the face of indisputable images, do global powers continue to guarantee immunity to the Israeli genocidal regime?
The answer is simple: what is at stake is not justice, but power.
The international system that emerged after the Second World War was sold to the world as a guardian of peace, of balance among nations, and of human dignity. Treaties, conventions, courts, and resolutions were created in a legal architecture meant to prevent massacres and punish tyrannies.
However, when the perpetrator of these violations is Israel, a strategic ally of the West, this entire structure dissolves into empty speeches and automatic vetoes.
The issuance of arrest warrants by the International Criminal Court against Netanyahu and his Minister of War, Israel Katz, is a step forward that partially breaks Israel’s historical shielding. But it is still insufficient.
Netanyahu and his far-right coalition need to be held legally accountable for what they have done, not out of vengeance, but due to a basic principle: no leader of any nation can be above the law.
For the crimes committed in Gaza under his responsibility, the only sentence proportional to the scale of the barbarity would be the death penalty for Benjamin Netanyahu and the criminal leaders of the Zionist regime.
If the world wishes to prevent similar atrocities from occurring again, it is essential that crimes committed against the Palestinian people receive the same moral and legal weight as crimes committed anywhere else in the world.
Meanwhile, Gaza continues to be bombed, hospitals are attacked, universities are razed, and the dead number in the thousands. The devastation unleashed against Gaza since 2023 cannot be called war, but rather the deliberate attempt to erase an entire society.
The use of hunger as a weapon, the obstruction of humanitarian aid, the murder of journalists and humanitarian workers compose a picture that surpasses any conceivable ethical limit.
And still, resistance persists and grows in the face of something even more decisive: the international isolation of Israel. World public opinion has changed. Crowds take to the streets of major capitals denouncing the genocide. European countries recognise the State of Palestine. Universities, trade unions, artists, and social movements break the historical silence and join the boycott.
For the first time in decades, Israel is seen not as an eternal victim, but as an occupying and aggressor power. Its global image collapses, and the Zionist narrative — once dominant — loses credibility across all continents.
The arrogance of the most extremist sectors of Zionism, who believed that reducing Gaza to rubble would produce victory, reveals their inability to understand the nature of anticolonial struggles: peoples determined to survive always find ways to resist. Zionist violence is not a sign of strength, but of desperation.
True victory will not come from destruction, but from the full recognition of the humanity of the Palestinian people, the restitution of their rights, and the end of the occupation. Palestine will survive. Netanyahu and his accomplices, however, will have to face history.
The moral defeat of Zionism is already underway. What remains is for the world to transform it into a political and legal defeat as well.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.