Genocide won't stop with the removal of one man

Netanyahu is central and symbolic, but there's an entire edifice driving a culture of state-sanctioned murder

On Monday, the Special Rapporteur to the Palestinian Occupied Territories, Francesca Albanese, submitted her report to the UN regarding the situation in Gaza. Most such reports are untitled, but hers has a name: “The Anatomy of a Genocide.” It is concise, condensed reading, a shorter, punchier version of South Africa’s indictment of Israel submitted to the International Court of Justice a few months before.

I mean to expand on Ms. Albanese’s findings later, but what struck me when reading the report was Albanese’s underscoring a point so well-known to genocide experts as to be bedrock: genocide is a communal crime. It is a group activity.

So when I now hear, loudly, in the wake of Senator Chuck Schumer’s speech on the Senate floor a couple of weeks ago, the mounting and momentous pile-on, attributing all blame to Benjamin Netanyahu, I am both disgusted and incensed. Netanyahu didn’t do this by himself. Short of ordering a nuclear attack, there’s no way that Netanyahu could have instituted a genocide single-handedly.

Genocidal sentiment is widespread across Israeli culture, a fact captured by two polls. The first shows overwhelming support for denying Palestinians lifesaving food, even as those people, many of whom are children, starve:

The other demonstrates that the vast majority of Israelis do not feel that the response by the armed forces has been aggressive enough — that somehow a more stringent and unrelenting response is still needed and should be in the works. 75% of Jewish Israelis support an incursion into Rafah, where hundreds of thousands of displaced people are currently residing in tents that offer no protection against armed assault.

These polls show — along with another noting that while people may not support Netanyahu for various reasons, most agree with his management of the Israeli offensive — that the idea of war and the conduct of Israeli soldiers enjoy broad public support.

Genocidal intent is throughout the culture. It’s structural. Therein lies the problem with making Netanyahu the scapegoat for all of what has been wreaked in Gaza. He had an entire cabinet, almost an entire legislature, and the vast majority of public sentiment. It’s endemic, this utopic desire to destroy. At the moment, it’s self-sustaining. And it’s not going to be fixed by just plucking out one recalcitrant leader and installing someone else. 

When the environment is fixed, the environment changes you, not the other way around. The way that the state of Israel is constituted right now, it will go down the primrose path to genocide again, as that’s how its societal forces are arrayed.