Won’t somebody think of poor Israel?
Israel has spent the past two years on a relentless, extremely violent, calculated rampage of slaughter and destruction throughout the Middle East. And yet, we are still told, it is the real victim.
The supposedly ever-present existential threat faced by Israel has been a core part of the ideological justification for every Israeli atrocity since the creation of the state in 1948. Supporters of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, from President Isaac Herzog down, claim that every Palestinian, including children, is a legitimate target to be expelled or killed, because every Gazan is either a current or future “terrorist”.
Recently, Israeli Prime Minister and wanted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that Iran was imminently going to acquire nuclear weapons and use them on Israel in a “nuclear holocaust”—the same claim he has been making for more than 30 years. Of course, the only nuclear-armed states that actually bombed anyone were Israel and the US, which killed nearly 1,000 Iranians in 12 days of strikes.
The mainstream media and politicians’ constant attempts to spin the story that Israel is the victim, the underdog, the state “defending itself”, are so out of touch with reality that they are becoming increasingly desperate and farcical. The UK Labour government is perhaps leading the Western world into this Orwellian abyss by its charging of the band Kneecap with terrorism offences due to their support for the Palestinian people, its attempts to censor artists at the Glastonbury music festival and now its proscription of non-violent protest group Palestine Action as a “terrorist” organisation, all while the UK continues to arm and support Israel’s genocidal terror in Gaza. But if you were to listen to the UK political establishment, you’d think it was the IDF that was the victim.
Welcome to the upside-down world of 2025, where the daily mass murder and starvation of children is fine and normal, but speaking against that is extremism, violence and hate speech.
Israel is the dominant military power in the Middle East, a position considerably strengthened in recent years. It is the only nuclear-armed power in the region, and is thought to have as many as 400 nuclear warheads. It is backed to the hilt, armed and given favourable intelligence-sharing and economic deals by all the Western imperialist powers, while also enjoying friendly relations and trade deals with other major powers like China, Russia and India. The US State Department boasts: “Since its founding in 1948, the United States has provided Israel with over $130 billion in bilateral assistance ...This assistance has helped transform the Israel Defense Forces into one of the world’s most capable, effective militaries and turned the Israeli military industry and technology sector into one of the largest exporters of military capabilities worldwide”.
Israel has, since October 2023, laid waste to Gaza, dropping the equivalent of six nuclear weapons’ worth of explosives on the tiny enclave, while also bombing Yemen, Iran, Syria and Lebanon, the latter two which it also invaded and continues to occupy. Much of this carnage has been bankrolled by the US, with more than US$30 billion delivered in aid and other financial and military assistance packages in the past two years. Since its creation, Israel has begun wars with every one of its neighbours, some on multiple occasions.
Israel has turned Gaza into a killing field, where soldiers are ordered to shoot starving civilians seeking aid. Many Israeli soldiers don’t need orders; they understand their mission is genocide, and they shoot and torture Palestinians for fun, while taking selfies, singing and dancing, in line with their extreme ethno-nationalist ideology, in which they are god’s chosen people and the Palestinians are not even human beings.
Within the rest of the historic land of Palestine, Israel has constructed a suffocating apparatus of military occupation and control, built on the principles of apartheid, exclusion, constant surveillance, checkpoints, mass incarceration, torture, terror, impoverishment and humiliation of the Palestinian population. All this is conducted with cutting-edge technology and in conjunction with the collaborationist Palestinian Authority. Israel’s ambition for the millions of Palestinians living in the West Bank, or within what is now called Israel, is ultimately similar to Gaza: expulsion, death and the complete destruction of any Palestinian identity.
The state of Israel is manifestly not under any current existential threat. It is Israel that is the existential threat: to Palestinians and millions of others in the region. Despite the absurdity of the claim, it persists because the powerful repeat it over and over again, without regard for evidence. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz recently explained why: “Israel is doing the dirty work for all of us”. He doesn’t mean the billions of people, including the majority of Germans, who oppose Israel’s rampage, but the billionaires, bureaucrats and military chiefs who run the system. For them, seeing their Middle East proxy wage death and destruction is satisfying proof of a good investment.
