If Israelis voted today, Netanyahu's Likud would still emerge as the largest party

If Netanyahu knows the Israelis, they know him too. And in him, they see the best outlet for their genocidal expression.

A huge segment of politicians, influencers, and commentators in the West, over the past two years of the ongoing Holocaust in Gaza, has shamelessly maintained that Palestinian suffering would end if Netanyahu were removed from power. However, even a cursory look at polls in Israel over the past two years is sufficient to disabuse anyone of that notion. As I have reported in these pages, survey after survey among Israelis has revealed overwhelming support for the total annihilation of Gaza and either death or displacement for the Palestinians. When a ceasefire was announced in Lebanon last November — which the Israelis have flouted thousands of times since, killing hundreds of Lebanese civilians in the process — the Israeli public were aghast that their government did not “finish the job.” Taking their cue from the Bible, warfare for the Israelis is incomplete if the enemy is not totally eradicated — humans, sheep, oxen, and donkeys; everything must be wiped from the face of God’s green earth.

Now, another survey has laid bare the genocidal bloodlust of the average Israeli. If the citizens of the genocidal state voted today, Netanyahu’s Likud party would emerge as the largest party with 27 seats in the Knesset, a poll by Channel 12 has revealed. Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) of Ben-Gvir — who has regularly posted videos abusing Palestinian detainees in Israel’s rape-and-torture dungeons for the pleasure of his burgeoning Jewish supremacist support base — would secure eight seats.

Although a Haaretz report on the poll frames it as a gain for the opposition parties, The Jerusalem Post earlier this month reported that Netanyahu “continues to lead every major poll.” It goes on to detail how demographic changes in Israeli society and bickering among the opposition parties virtually guarantee many more years for Netanyahu in the top office.

It is worth remembering that none of the Jewish opposition parties are opposed to the Gaza Holocaust. Their bickering is exclusively about domestic Jewish-centric politics. On the matter of devouring Palestinian bodies and land, there is complete unity.

A political animal, Netanyahu is the longest-serving Israeli prime minister, having first taken the post three decades ago in 1996. If Netanyahu knows the Israelis, they know him too. And in him, they see the best outlet for their genocidal expression. He has certainly delivered beyond their wildest dreams, having laid waste to Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria, and significantly damaged Yemen and Iran over the past two years. Moreover, he even bombed an American ally — Qatar — putting the rest of the Persian Gulf states on notice. Smotrich just told the Saudis to “keep riding camels.”

In early November 2023, by which time Israel had already killed over 10,000 civilians, 98.2 percent of Israeli Jews were perfectly fine with the indiscriminate attack on the pre-genocide population of 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, over half of whom were children. Fast forward to September 2025, 79 percent of Israeli Jews said that they were not “troubled by the reports of famine and suffering among the Palestinian population in Gaza” — despite a constant stream of harrowing images showing emaciated children and adults, skeletal from starvation and dying en masse. For the average Israeli, the genocide has never lost its veneer over the two years that it has been live-streamed. To satiate the general public’s lust for Palestinian blood and inhumane suffering, the occupation forces even ran a Telegram channel — 72 Virgins—Uncensored — which was regularly updated with images of dead and dismembered Palestinian children. They lapped it all up and brayed for more.

Several commentators have pointed out that the unfolding genocide in Gaza is the most democratic in history. “The genocide in Gaza is very different. It is very personal. It is actually done by hundreds of thousands of Israeli soldiers — this is the most democratic genocide we have seen in all our lifetime,” Haim Bresheeth-Zabner, Israeli filmmaker and professor, recently said in an interview. “This is the most technological genocide, this is the most televised genocide, and the most frightening one because of the role of sadism and brutality in actually sharing the horrors with your family, with your friends, and with people that you do not know but you feel, as a genocidaire, that you need to share it. This has not happened before.”

But this is not a post-October 7 phenomenon — not by a long shot. Any neutral observer who has visited occupied Palestine has come away with the same conclusion about the total moral inversion of the Israelis.

In 2019, American political commentator Kim Iversen went to occupied Palestine and came away shocked:

Bernie Sanders has recently come out to condemn the Israeli government, the racist Israeli government and their treatment of the Palestinian people. And I can tell you first-hand that it is much, much worse than any of us can express to you. It is much, much worse. It is beyond belief that Westernised people can do this to another group of people.

No other population has so overwhelmingly backed a campaign of mass annihilation in their name quite like the Israelis have done — and continue to do. Soon after the Palestinian resistance released the 20 living Israeli prisoners of war it had captured on October 7 at the start of the “ceasefire,” even the Hostages and Missing Families Forum (a body that represents the captives’ families) began calling “on Israel and the mediators to halt the implementation of the cease-fire agreement” and resume bombing Palestinian children to shreds, because Hamas has been finding it difficult to locate the bodies of the dead Israeli prisoners in the millions of tonnes of rubble to which the occupation has reduced Gaza.

Now that the living Israelis are back in their homes, those supposedly protesting the genocide in Tel Aviv have also gone home. They are no longer bothered about the fate of the Palestinians, because the Palestinians were never their concern. The bombs endangered the Israelis too. Now that there are no Jewish captives in Gaza, the bombs won’t hurt them. So there is no need to protest the genocide. Israeli morality is remarkably simple: it starts and ends with Jewish safety and prosperity.

All Jewish political factions in Israel are genocidal without exception. There is no traditional left wing in Israel with any appeal or power. Netanyahu represents the right wing of Israeli politics, with the likes of Ben-Gvir and Smotrich further to his right. While they share the same genocidal intent towards the Palestinians, the supposedly secular Ashkenazi Jews (who hold the levers of power) consider the likes of Ben-Gvir and Smotrich too loud for their taste, so they settle on Netanyahu — the American-educated, suave operator, who knows nearly the entire US Congress like the back of his hand.

Besides, no one is better than Netanyahu at child sacrifice. “They [the Israeli voters] will say: No one else could have handled this war the way Netanyahu did — not Lapid, not Gantz, not anyone,” The Jerusalem Post quoted Dr. Assaf Shapira, a political scientist, as saying recently. “It’s not necessarily cognitive dissonance; it’s a belief that he’s still the only one who can manage it.”

“Most people who are in Likud will stay in Likud. At most, they will move to Ben-Gvir’s party, but not beyond the bloc,” Shapira went on to add. So the only move away from Netanyahu’s Likud, if it happens, will be further to the right and into the camp of the overtly genocidal, uncouth form of genocide, where the perpetrators will openly share videos of burning Palestinian babies on official state accounts without needing to delegate such ignoble tasks to loutish cabinet ministers, as Netanyahu does with, say, Israel Katz.

The truth, as reported by the Israeli press itself, is undeniable: the vast majority of Israeli society has actively embraced a campaign of annihilation against the Palestinian people. With Netanyahu at the helm and the political spectrum skewed further to the right, there is no opposition to the machinery of genocide. Gaza’s suffering is not an accident of war — it is a deliberate, sustained, and publicly celebrated policy. Until the international community confronts this reality with the urgency and moral clarity it demands, history’s most democratically executed genocide will continue. Relying on Israelis to vote out the genocidaires is akin to believing in the tooth fairy or Santa Claus as an adult. Anyone telling you otherwise is insulting your intelligence. Do not let them.

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To mark two years since the Al-Aqsa Flood, I wrote a series of three stories: October 6: Why the Flood was inevitable, October 7, and October 8: The World After the Flood (I nearly broke my back writing 7,000 words of that last one after an 18-hour slog, and still missed out on some details that I’ll be updating soon). Please read!

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