The consequences of being Netanyahu

Benjamin Netanyahu is heartbroken at the death of six hostages in Hamas captivity. He has sought forgiveness of Israelis for being unable to save those who have died. The grief of the families of these dead as also of the others whose loved ones died in Israel in October last year and later in captivity is shared by all people of conscience around the world. Any terrorist attack anywhere is an assault on human values everywhere and must be condemned for the outrage it is.
Equally important is the requirement to condemn any and every action of a government which causes the death of innocent men, women and children and turns their homes into rubble. Netanyahu is heartbroken at the killing of the six hostages. But his heart has never been swayed or broken or scratched by the murder of more than 40,000 people in Gaza by Israeli aerial bombardment as well as ground offensives in these past ten months.
In all these ten months, these hapless Palestinians have moved from place to place in Gaza, which is today a huge concentration camp at the mercy of Netanyahu's government, in search of refuge. All across Gaza are the lengthening cemeteries containing the remains of men, women and children whose lives were ended by Israeli brutality. It is not that these killings have stopped. The murder campaign goes on. Netanyahu repeats his old vow of vanquishing Hamas. And yet Hamas remains undefeated.
There is today the very real danger of Benjamin Netanyahu continuing in office as Israel's Prime Minister. Mired in corruption cases, which he along with his wife will likely be convicted of should he put an end to his war against Gaza, he refuses to go. It is his stratagem for clinging to power. Day after day in Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities and towns, people have gathered to demand that Netanyahu bring back the hostages alive or resign. The man simply refuses to go. And the longer he stays in office, the more of a menace he and his government become for the world.
The threat that Netanyahu is to global order has been evident in recent months through his country's military and intelligence services going into assassinations of Hamas' leading figures as well as significant personalities of Hezbollah. The Israeli military has been behind the murder of Iranian generals and other functionaries. In simple terms, the actions of the Israeli government are crimes against humanity and a genocide, a truth which the government of South Africa has splendidly projected before the world through the International Court of Justice.
And yet Netanyahu has survived. And he has because the West is too pusillanimous to orchestrate his ouster from power. The Americans, who have never been serious about bringing an end to the genocide in Gaza, are certainly embarrassed at what Netanyahu does in pursuit of his policies. But they are unable or unwilling to exercise their influence on him and convince him to call a halt to his criminal acts. They will not go for regime change in Tel Aviv. But Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan's calls for the International Criminal Court to issue warrants of arrest against Netanyahu and his accomplices in murder has Israel's friends greatly perturbed.
In the forthcoming US presidential election, neither of the two candidates for the White House will take Netanyahu to task for the crimes he has been presiding over in Gaza. They do not wish to forfeit the votes and financial support of the influential Jewish community in their campaigns for the presidency. American and western policy makers in recent years have been kind to Netanyahu through not informing him that his aggressive acts in Gaza and elsewhere are a violation of human decency. Their statements criticising illegal Jewish settlements on occupied Arab land have been muted, lacking in force.
That keeping foreign land under occupation for decades is a serious crime under international law is a point never taken seriously by the international community. That settling non-Arab aliens in land belonging to Arabs is a violation of norms, morality and international conventions is a fact which has not been pressed hard enough on the Israeli establishment. The truth, the glaring truth, is that Benjamin Netanyahu has survived to commit his crimes in Gaza and elsewhere in the Middle East owing to the reluctance of his friends in the world's powerful capitals to impress upon him the implications of his actions in the region.
These are not the days of Gamal Abdel Nasser. These are not times when Tel Aviv will feel threatened along its borders by its enemies, for its enemies have by and large made peace with it over the years. Which is as it should have been. With Jordan, Egypt and other Middle Eastern states Israel has enjoyed an era of peace. That is fine. But what is of grave concern is that no serious condemnation of Israeli actions in Gaza has emerged in these countries. Peace talks between Israel and Hamas have been going on in Qatar without taking Tel Aviv to task over the killings in Gaza. The talks have not yielded any results, at least not yet.
Benjamin Netanyahu remains the biggest obstacle to a return to normal conditions, normal being a term open to interpretation, in Gaza and the rest of the Middle East. His obstinacy has resulted in the death of many hostages taken by Hamas. His insensitivity to human sufferings has continued to cause death and destruction in Gaza. It is not a joke to preside over the murder of 40,000-plus Palestinians and flatten their homes and businesses. It is not politics when a man charged with corruption refuses to quit office and instead perpetrates atrocities on people without any let-up and invites on his country the opprobrium of the civilised world.
Netanyahu remains a danger to the world. Long after he is gone, the world will still be picking up the pieces that will reconstruct it somewhat through the debris of the damage his government will have caused in Gaza, in Lebanon, in the Golan Heights. History will excoriate him as a war criminal who got away, but a war criminal all the same.

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