Netanyahu and the Israeli far right are the problem.

There is no fundamental left-right divide when it comes to Zionism's settler-colonial project. Liberal and far-right Zionist parties may differ in rhetoric, pace, or tactics, but they share a commitment to maintaining a Jewish settler-colonial state built on the dispossession of the Palestinian people.

Israel's settler-colonial project is sustained through a permanent state apparatus. Governments set policy, the Knesset enacts discriminatory laws, the military commits war crimes, the judiciary legitimizes unlawful policies, state agencies administer dispossession, and settlers drive colonization on the ground. The prime minister may change, but the institutional machinery of settler colonialism remains.

Israel's settler-colonial state was founded and governed for its first three decades by parties regarded as Israel's political left. During this period, Israel carried out the Nakba of 1948, ethnically cleansing over 800,000 Palestinians, destroying more than 530 villages, and committing over 70 massacres. It then imposed military rule on Palestinians who remained inside Israel (1948-1966) and laid the legal foundations of apartheid through discriminatory laws that barred the return of Palestinian refugees and confiscated their land and property. In 1967, Labor governments occupied the remaining Palestinian territory, the Syrian Golan Heights, and the Egyptian Sinai. Successive governments inherited and expanded these colonial structures.

Even under Israel's most celebrated liberal "peace camp," which championed the Oslo Accords, the colonial project deepened. Although the Palestinian leadership accepted major concessions by signing an agreement that deferred fundamental rights, including ending the occupation and realizing the right of return, the Rabin-Peres governments responded by expanding settlements, growing the settler population, and institutionalizing the closure and permit regime. The language was peace. The policy was colonization.

If Netanyahu alone were the problem, he would not have been elected multiple times, nor would his government's policies enjoy such broad public support. A 2025 poll found that 82% of Jewish Israelis supported the forced expulsion of Gaza's population, while another found that 73% believed Israel's assault on Gaza, when more than 32,000 Palestinians had been killed at the time, was either "about right" or "had not gone far enough." The problem is not one government or one leader. It is a broader culture shaped by decades of Zionist ideology that dehumanizes Palestinians as a condition of its own existence.

Blaming Netanyahu or a handful of "extremist settlers" exceptionalizes what is fundamentally a structural settler-colonial system. It is politically convenient because it obscures international complicity, allowing governments to condemn one leader or sanction a few individuals while continuing to arm, fund, trade with, and diplomatically protect the Israeli state. Real change requires dismantling the structures of settler colonialism through accountability and the suspension of military, economic, and diplomatic relations, not simply condemning one politician or a few settlers.

The focus on Netanyahu often serves to preserve the image of Israel as a fundamentally democratic, legitimate, and moral state. This narrative is commonly advanced by liberal Zionists, who reduce a structural system of settler colonialism to the actions of one government or a handful of extremists. In doing so, they present the solution as electoral change rather than dismantling the settler-colonial system.