Abed Abou Shhahdeh – Middle East Eye July 17, 2025
A recent extended feature in the New York Times presents readers with a long-form analysis of the genocide in Gaza. The central claim made by the authors is that the continuation of the war serves Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s personal interest in clinging to power.
This is particularly relevant given his ongoing corruption trial, and the severe blow to his political standing after the 7 October military failure. According to the Times article, this convergence of events has pushed Netanyahu to prolong the war as a means of survival.
But this framing, popular among liberal Zionist circles, dangerously reduces the catastrophe in Gaza to the ambitions of a single man.
It ignores the broad public support in Israel not only for the genocide in Gaza but for attacks throughout the region. Israel’s military actions – especially in the context of the sectarian violence in Syria – can only be understood as those of an imperial power seeking to impose its will on the region through force, intimidation, and the threat of territorial expansion.
It conveniently ignores a deeper question: why, after nearly two years of horrifying footage from Gaza, does the Israeli public continue to support the war – and in fact, demand its escalation?
At the same time, ordinary Israelis travelling abroad are encountering global criticism for the first time in their lives. Yet instead of prompting reflection, this scrutiny has driven many deeper into denial.
For much of the Israeli public, the problem is not what is happening in Gaza – it’s the world’s antisemitism, both western and eastern. In their eyes, the world has turned against them, and thus no soul-searching is needed.
Netanyahu, who lived a significant portion of his youth in the US, understands American politics well. When he says the Gaza war has not “achieved its objectives”, he is not referring to conditions on the ground, but rather to his standing in the polls. The recent strikes on Iran, despite failing to produce any strategic outcome, modestly improved his approval ratings.
Worse still, both Netanyahu’s allies and his so-called opposition have successfully encouraged and normalised genocidal rhetoric, to the point that it has become mainstream.
According to recent polls, 82 percent of Jewish Israelis support the transfer (expulsion) of Gaza’s population. Lacking any ability to convince countries to accept these refugees, what is emerging is a de facto concentration camp in Gaza.
In this context, discussions about a ceasefire are structurally hollow. Israel has shown – to Hamas and others – that it does not honour agreements: not in Gaza, not in Lebanon, not in Syria. Israeli diplomacy is fundamentally built on military power and the unilateral ability to break promises.
Ruthless strategies
Even as the Israeli public grows increasingly impatient with the Gaza war, demanding the release of hostages and watching with concern the mounting death toll among Israeli soldiers, it is disturbing to see no-one questioning the state’s ruthless strategies, which aim to confine millions of Palestinians into an area comprising less than a quarter of Gaza.
There is open discussion of reviving Giora Eiland’s “General’s Plan”, which explicitly recommends starvation as a tool of forced displacement.
But the catastrophe unfolding in Gaza is not the work of one man. It is enabled by broad public consensus, a judiciary that legitimises it, and a political culture that has long relied on the dehumanisation of Palestinians. In the occupied West Bank, the same logic plays out: Israeli soldiers, police and judges either ignore or actively assist settlers in carrying out pogroms against Palestinians.
The current crisis marks a desperate attempt – by some – to “save Israel from itself” by offering Israelis a ladder to climb down from the tree. The hope is that Israel may return to its pre-Netanyahu posture: endless negotiations, rhetorical peace processes, and a fantasy of a Palestinian state that was never meant to materialise. This illusion served the world well, allowing western nations to defend Israel’s actions while pretending a two-state solution was still viable.
But demography and ideology have shifted. Israel cannot go back.
The scale of destruction in Gaza has reopened the core of the Palestinian question: what happens when there are no refugee camps left, no territories to push people into, and no countries willing to absorb them? The conversation then turns – unavoidably – to the right of return for Palestinians expelled in 1948.
Blaming Netanyahu in isolation is intellectually dishonest. He is not an aberration, but a product of Zionist logic – a logic that has always viewed Palestinians as inferior.
Without addressing this foundational belief system, replacing Netanyahu will change nothing. We may get a leader who is less aggressive, more polished – but the structural violence will persist, merely in a softer form.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Abed Abou Shhadeh is a political activist based in Jaffa. Abou Shhadeh served as a city council representative of the Palestinian community in Jaffa-Tel Aviv from 2018 to 2024 and he holds an MA degree in political science from Tel Aviv university
its nota war
its a genocide
“It conveniently ignores a deeper question: why, after nearly two years of horrifying footage from Gaza, does the Israeli public continue to support the war – and in fact, demand its escalation?”
Why? Because they are jews. That’s why!
Hang on.
“But this framing, popular among liberal Zionist circles, dangerously reduces the catastrophe in Gaza to the ambitions of a single man.”
Nutanyahu has lied for decades, and while he’s not the worst genocidle maniac in the Joolandia regime, because there are far worse, it is Bibi who has stepped forwards to promote the Greater Israel project and the genocide. Bibi carries the can, and he’s doing it in part, because he and his wife are facing long prison sentences, but he’s not worried, because there’s a California king size bed and ensuite at Mar Largo waiting for him.
This article attempts to paper over the sicko personalities involved. Donald Hitler and Biden are just as guilty as Nutanyahu, so is Nazi Starmer. Genocide and Gaza are stepping stones to a Nazi controlled world, and that means do anything and everything to stop Russia, China and the BRICS. There’s no peace in this script, just the occasional pause.
Maybe that penny is dropping for Putin, given what MI6 and the SAS did to Russian nuclear bombers, because MI6 didn’t develope these networks and this was their one and only mission. It’s fair to say that MI6 has nukes inside Russia, UKraine, and maybe even Iran.
Of course Netanyahoo is not the cause of Gaza genocide. Nor is Zionism. It is the Jewish nature. People and especially children in Gaza who are being killed daily by bombing and starving by the Jews is something quite normal for the Jews-they do it as regularly as their job. The Jews just relish to kill non Jews, especially their babies.
Didn’t the crowd of Jewish football fans chant recently in Amsterdam: ” There are no schools in Gaza because there are no children”.But palestinians understand that to gain something you have to sacrifice something. In the meanwhile the palestinians toppled the nusairi dictatorship of Bashar Al-Asad in Syria. A nusairi dictatorship was a great insult to all the muslims of the world. Now brother Ahmed Ash-Sharaa rules in Syria and you see the difference? The syrian airspace is open to the Jewish planes to bomb Iran, this nest of the shia vipers, who are much worse than the Jews.. So some children in Gaza will be starved and bombed to death but it will bring us closer to our goal – the triumph of Islam.
hey come on
even nuttys psychiatrist said he was a psycho
thats why nutty had him murdered
Musicians as well as up to 300 other actors and artists are getting together to protest Starmer and Britain’s involvement in the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians. What stopped them before was the risk of being called an antisemite, which was a pernicious but powerful weapon. It would have cost them work if they’d spoken out individually and could have buried their careers. It cost Gary Lineker his lucrative BBC position and now he’s part of this collective. It started because some courageous people took the risk to start speaking out against the Jewish mass murderers. Now as a collective of influential people horrorified by Gaza like the rest of us are, this spurious accusation is at last losing its menace.
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/massive-attack-announce-alliance-musicians-081621470.html
A Belgian ticket inspector was warned for saying bonjour
Story by Sarah Hooper
A ticket inspector who greeted customers in two different languages has been given a warning after a passenger complained.
The Dutch-speaking region of Flanders in Belgium has strict language laws, requiring train conductors to only use Dutch in the area, French in the French-speaking regions and both languages in Brussels.
lyass Alba greeted customers with both ‘goeiedag’ and ‘bonjour’, prompting a jewish tourist to complain last year.
His employer has warned him that he should not have used French in the region unless he had been approached by a passenger speaking French.
His employer has defended him, saying Alba just wanted to ‘warmly greet all passengers, something to which we attach great importance.’
BBC
MasterChef judge John Torode starred alongside Gregg Wallace since it launched in 2005
The BBC and production company Banijay announced earlier this week that Torode’s contract would not be renewed following the finding that he had used an “extremely offensive racist term” during post-filming drinks.
he is alleged to have called a BBC boss ” a dirty little jewboy”
Yes, lets exclude those persons who perpetrate the agenda, they are innocent victims.
Keep the white man focused on Epstein, Israel, Jesus, sports & Palestinians instead of on his own demographic demise in his own nations.
With world opinion already on their side, it makes absolutely no sense for Hamas to be holding any hostages. The best thing they could do if they really represented the Palestinian people and their leadership was not another arm of the Mossad would be to destroy the only real pretext for the Israelis wanting to maintain the war, and release all hostages. Obviously, at this stage the Israelis would want Hamas not only to keep the hostages but to kill them in order to justify more of their ruthlessness.
@TheyRLying. What you say is true to a extent, but when you’ve got to play double-think and triple-think it must be easy to lose sight of what’s the best and whether a new approach will be a cure or a curse. This is why diplomacy is so vital, and why such conceit from the west to dispense with it is so dangerous.
Kikes are a criminal Mafia and are the problem: details about their latest wanky schemes hardly matter