Netanyahu is a genocidal despot. The ICC arrest warrant is long overdue

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is the hate that settler-colonialism produced. His is a twisted and warped ethno-supremaicst worldview, infused with the malign belief that the world is defined by a hierarchy of human worth, one in which Westernized Israeli Jews belong close to the top and in which Palestinians — Arabs in genral — have been condemned by destiny and by history to remain crawling around somewhere near the bottom.

Under the precepts of Zionism — the secular ideology responsible for the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 — a muscular Jewish identity, forged in the crucible of armed struggle against an indigenous population regarded as interlopers, is the non-negotiable condition of national renewal, pride, and respect among the nations.

In this, the founding fathers of the State of Israel internalized the tropes of European colonialism and imperialism, chief of which is that might is right, that peoples and nations only ever rise at the expense of other peoples and nations, and that strength not justice is key when it comes to the direction of human affairs.

Netanyahu is a child of this perverse value system. It is one that has made a frightening comeback across the world as late capitalism has and continues to sow dragons teeth in the form…