Israel, the pariah
Of all the ridiculous contortions Western media have performed over the past two years to whitewash Israel’s ongoing genocide, the breathless handwringing over the supposed calamity of Israel becoming a “pariah state” is an almost touching display of fevered wishful thinking. In headline after headline, article after article, the self-styled “liberal” press—Haaretz, the New York Times, and the Guardian foremost among them—frets that Israel’s supposed “missteps” might place it at risk of becoming a rogue state, as if unrestrained brutality and open contempt for international law were mere errors of judgment. But only in a looking-glass world could Israel’s pariah status—blindingly evident since its inception—ever be in doubt. If the term has any meaning at all, Israel is its archetype, and always has been.
Yet Israel’s propagandists manufacture a “legitimacy crisis,” rebranding warranted criticism as an effort to “delegitimize” the state and endanger Jews globally. This claim is a fiction, meant only to turn culpability into perceived persecution and cover up well-documented crimes. Honest observers know this is no sudden descent: Israel’s contempt for law, morality, and human life itself is foundational—it was born in blood and terror. Recognizing this longstanding pariah status is essential to challenging the impunity that ensures Israel’s lack of accountability.
While critics rightly note that history did not begin on October 7, 2023, focusing narrowly on Gaza’s post-2006 siege—or even the 1967 occupation—obscures a much older reality. Long before its formal founding in 1948, Zionist militias waged organized terror to force Palestinians from their homes. From the 1920s onward, Zionist organizations such as the Haganah, Irgun, and Lehi carried out bombings, assassinations, and mass intimidation, establishing a political culture in which terror was not exceptional, but intrinsic to their operations. Fittingly enough, two leaders of these terrorist groups would later become prime ministers of the pariah state.
Such a framework of terror set the stage for the 1948 Nakba, during which over 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes and land. Israeli forces committed brutal massacres at Deir Yassin and Tantura—but these are only the most infamous examples. In 1947-48 alone, at least 30 documented massacres left hundreds dead, including children, women, and the elderly. And at countless lesser-known sites civilians were mutilated, raped, and executed en masse. In a perverse calculus, Israeli forces classified all males between 10 and 50 as legitimate targets, effectively sentencing children to death. These were not wartime excesses but deliberate campaigns of mass murder and ethnic cleansing, repeated hundreds of times in the decades that followed. (more...)
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