Netanyahu is No Exception: A Reading into the Roots of Zionist Ideology from Ben-Gurion to the Gaza War

The political arena in the United States is facing a escalating campaign, involving a spectrum of the right and liberal left, aimed at placing full blame on Benjamin Netanyahu for exacerbating the region and dragging Washington into a confrontation with Iran. This narrative is based on an attempt to absolve Israel as an entity from its imperial crimes, and to portray current policies as a 'sudden deviation' from an alleged democratic and peaceful path that prevailed before the rise of the far-right.

This propaganda is led by liberal Zionist figures such as journalist Thomas Friedman and Senator Bernie Sanders, who insist on holding Netanyahu's coalition responsible for 'corrupting' the Israeli record. This discourse deliberately ignores that expansionist ambitions and daily massacres in the West Bank and Gaza are not new, but are the core of the settlement project since its very beginnings in the last century.

Looking back at history, we find that the language of demonization and racism towards Palestinians did not begin with Netanyahu; Menachem Begin described Palestinians as 'two-legged beasts'. He was preceded by leaders from the 'secular' Labor Party such as Moshe Dayan who called them 'dogs', and David Hacohen who denied their humanity, which confirms the unity of the ideology behind the different political faces.

The military doctrine practiced by the occupation army today in Gaza finds its roots in David Ben-Gurion's instructions in 1948, who explicitly called for striking 'without mercy'. Ben-Gurion then stressed the need to target women and children to ensure the effectiveness of deterrence, emphasizing that there is no need to distinguish between the guilty and the innocent in the field of operations, which Netanyahu literally applies today.

Historical facts indicate that Labor Party governments, promoted as partners for peace, were the ones who laid the foundations for major settlements in the occupied territories. Before Likud came to power in 1977, dozens of settlements had already been established in the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai, and the Golan, proving that geographical expansion is a high state strategy and not a narrow partisan agenda.

In occupied Jerusalem, the destruction of Palestinian neighborhoods was not a right-wing innovation, but was started by Haim Herzog, the city's first military governor, when he ordered the leveling of the Maghariba Quarter in 1967. Thousands of residents were displaced in a few minutes to transform the Islamic endowment dating back to the Ayyubid era into a prayer plaza for settlers, in a documented war crime that occurred under the leadership of the 'Zionist Left'.

The idea of 'transfer' or forced displacement, which Netanyahu's ministers are brandishing today, was strongly present in Levi Eshkol's discussions after the 1967 war. Eshkol drew inspiration from models of expelling populations from previous international experiences, and seriously explored ways to empty the Gaza Strip of its refugees and distribute them in other countries, proving that ethnic cleansing is an original idea in the 'founding' Zionist thought.

Yigal Allon, a leader in the Labor Party, formulated his famous plan to annex a third of the West Bank decades ago, a plan that Netanyahu is implementing today under new names and designations. This systematic alignment extends to the theft of water resources and land in the demilitarized zones with Syria, which were gradually controlled between 1949 and 1967 under the guise of 'Labor' governments.

The irony is that leaders like Abba Eban did not object to the massacres themselves, but rather to their 'promotion' which could harm Israel's international image. The concern was always how to maintain the facade of a 'democratic state' before the West, while the killing machine inside continued to perform its tasks away from the spotlight, a facade that completely collapsed during Netanyahu's era.

The savagery of settlers in the West Bank today is the natural maturation of a seed planted in the seventies under the watchful eye of Labor governments. The 'terrorism against terrorism' groups that targeted Palestinian civilians and buses during that period are the legitimate predecessors of the current settler militias that burn villages and towns under the protection of the occupation army.

Even the biblical discourse used by Netanyahu to justify the occupation of Sinai or Gaza was used by Ben-Gurion before him in 1956 when he spoke of the 'Third Kingdom of Israel'. Ben-Gurion drew inspiration from the texts of the prophets to justify the invasion and control of Tiran Island and Sinai, which clarifies that the use of religion in the service of colonialism is an old tool efficiently used by the early 'secularists'.

The attempt to portray Netanyahu as a 'rogue' leader who deviates from the entity's values is a propaganda strategy aimed at re-marketing Israel as a reformable entity. The truth proven by the record of facts is that Netanyahu is merely a more explicit and crude link in a continuous chain of leaders who established their entity on the ruins of Palestinian existence since the Nakba.

Palestinian and Arab consciousness must confront the attempts of Western liberals to reduce the conflict to the person of Netanyahu, because that paves the way for legitimizing the entity once he departs. Defending the 'truth of the crime' requires emphasizing that Netanyahu is a genuine war criminal, but he does not differ in essence from his predecessors who established the rules of extermination and displacement.

In conclusion, Netanyahu remains the most honest embodiment of Zionism in its current phase, where the entity no longer needs to hide its ugly face behind false slogans of peace. Exposing this historical sequence is the only way to confront attempts to falsify history and absolve the settler colony of its long bloody legacy continuing from 1948 until today.

Netanyahu is not a deviation from the path, but rather its faithful embodiment; his crimes are merely a cruder link in a continuous chain that began since the Nakba.