This is not "Netanyahu's war", this is Israel's genocide
It is not right to blame the catastrophe we are witnessing in Palestine on one miserable leader! The Prime Minister of Israel is not the only one to blame for these calamities that befell my people. I would not blame him alone for the fact that Israeli bombs are destroying every corner of Gaza today, and children are dying under the rubble. Even in 2013, when I heard on the news that my people were being massacred in Gaza, I did not blame him alone.
I, my family and my people know very well that what we are witnessing in Palestine today is not "Netanyahu's war". This man is a continuous war machine - just another "bolt" of Israel.
If you listen to Senators Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, who are defenders of Palestinian rights and advanced humanitarian ideas in the United States, they point to only one person to blame for everything that has been happening on Palestinian soil for the past 75 years, today it is Netanyahu.
Sanders called Israel's ongoing offensive against Gaza "Netanyahu's war" and demanded that the United States "not give Netanyahu any more money." Meanwhile, Warren condemned "Netanyahu's failed administration" while calling for a ceasefire.
These progressive senators have identified the root cause of all the pain and suffering in Palestine: a far-right, death-throwing prime minister who wants to perpetuate the conflict because it helps him stay in power.
Of course, Netanyahu is evil. Of course, he committed countless crimes against Palestinians and humanity during his long career. Of course, he continues to escalate the carnage in Gaza, in part to preserve his political career. Naturally, he must answer for his words and actions that caused suffering to our people. But the racism, extremism and genocidal intent in Gaza and the occupied Palestinian territories today cannot be blamed solely on Netanyahu.
Blaming Netanyahu alone for Israel's flagrant human rights abuses, disregard for international law, and open war crimes is nothing more than a coping mechanism for liberals like Sanders and Warren.
They serve to spread the lie that "the state of Israel was not founded on ethnic cleansing, but on the basis of advanced ideas" by showing Netanyahu as the cause of the oppression and calamities suffered by the Palestinian people.
By blaming Netanyahu, pretending that "Israel is a country that respects international humanitarian law, but these things are happening because it is now led by a bad leader," they are dissuading themselves and the US in general from being complicit in Israel's many war crimes.
Of course, Sanders, Warren, and those promoting this notion know very well that the Israeli-Palestinian "conflict" will not magically disappear after Netanyahu is gone, and the Palestinians will not immediately achieve freedom and justice.
After all, they saw a similar scenario in the US a few years ago. People said that if Trump were removed from the White House, the problems he raised and provoked would disappear. It was said that American democracy will be saved, everything will go back to its brochure.
What happened next? It's been almost four years since the end of Trump's presidency, but we're still seeing the rise of racism, inequality, gun violence, and poverty across the country.
These problems did not miraculously heal after Trump's presidency, because Trump himself did not create them. These were America's problems, not "Trump's" problems. In addition, there is a real chance that Trump will return to the White House next year, because millions of Americans actively support him and his policies.
The same goes for Netanyahu and Israel. The idea that Netanyahu betrayed Israel's progressive, democratic foundations and caused the "humanitarian disaster" we are witnessing in Gaza today ignores the systemic oppression inherent in Israel as a settler colony.
Sanders and others may want to believe the Zionist myth that Israel was built in a "no man's land" by a landless people with essentially socialist foundations. But they cannot deny the fact that Palestine has never been a "land without people". Indeed, since the establishment of Israel, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been expelled from the land, and Israel's survival as a "Jewish nation" requires continued oppression and abuse of Palestinian rights, as its nation-state law states.
Today, millions of Palestinians are living under Israeli oppression, and thousands of people are dying. In addition, they are subjected to apartheid.
Netanyahu and his government cannot afford to create this baseless and unjust activity.
From the very beginning, the state of Israel has linked its long-term existence to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the complete destruction of the "Palestinian" identity, and the oppression of the Palestinians who remained in their land. "There is no such thing as Palestinians," former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir wrote in the Washington Post in 1969, decades before Netanyahu's rule.
Of course, the Israeli left promotes their agricultural communal way of life as a socialist dream, and many Israelis are proud of their country's "democracy." But to acknowledge this, you first have to deny that the Palestinians, who have been pushed off their land to create such socialist groups and cannot enjoy its democracy despite living under complete Israeli control, are human beings.
Before the genocide in Gaza, Israelis had been protesting for several months against Netanyahu's damage to the country's legal system and democracy. However, these same people did not express any protest against the occupation of their land by their state and military by the Palestinians, killing or humiliating them.
In November, a full month after the new wave of genocide began, only 1.8 percent of Israelis said they believed the Israeli military was using military force in Gaza, and now, five months after the genocide, roughly 40 percent of Israelis say they do not want to see Jewish settlements in Gaza restored.
The pictures of thousands of dead or maimed Palestinians don't seem to matter much to Israelis.
Videos of fathers carrying the remains of their children in plastic bags, mothers crying over the bloodied corpses of their murdered children, do not affect them at all.
They don't care about starving children trapped under rubble or young children poisoned by forced bird droppings in war-induced famine.
They are protesting in front of the border gates because they are not only indifferent to the sufferings of the military inflicting on innocent people, but they are not helping the Palestinians who are on the brink of starvation.
Most of them were Israelis who took to the streets a year ago to protest Netanyahu's attack on democracy...
So the human catastrophe we are witnessing in Palestine today is not "Netanyahu's war" as Sanders and Warren insist. This genocide did not start when Netanyahu came to power, and it will not end when he leaves power.
Settlers began stripping Palestinians of their land, homes, and lives long before Netanyahu gained a foothold in Israeli politics. Palestinians were forced to live in open prisons long before he became prime minister.
The problem is not Netanyahu or any other Israeli politician or general.
The problem is the Israeli occupation itself.
The problem lies with the settler colony, which has built its security and life on the apartheid system and the repression of the indigenous population.
This is not Netanyahu's war, this is Israel's genocide!
Ahmed Ibsais,
a Palestinian living in America,
is a lawyer
