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Benjamin Netanyahu has spent more combined years in power than any leader in Israel's history, and the ledger of that tenure reads less like a statesman's résumé and more like a war crimes docket.
The International Criminal Court thought so. In November 2024, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant, citing war crimes including starvation as a method of warfare and deliberate attacks on civilians. When a court built in the shadow of Nuremberg names a sitting Israeli prime minister, the word "terrorism" stops being hyperbole and becomes a legal question. A campaign that has killed tens of thousands in Gaza, flattened entire neighborhoods, starved a population under blockade, and bombed hospitals, schools, and refugee camps is not counterterrorism. It is terror with a budget and an air force.
Netanyahu's own coalition tells the story plainly. He governs hand-in-glove with Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, ultranationalists who have championed settler violence against Palestinians for decades. In the West Bank, settler attacks on Palestinian villages — shootings, arsons, home invasions — have gone effectively unpunished for over fifty years. After half a century of failure to stop Jewish ultranationalist violence, lawlessness has become the law. Smotrich himself called for the destruction of Huwara a year after settlers burned it. These are ministers of the state. When a government funds, arms, and immunizes the people committing the violence, the distinction between "state" and "terror organization" collapses.
Then there is the press.
Reporters Without Borders ranked Israel 101st in its 2024 World Press Freedom Index, its lowest position ever. Foreign journalists have been barred from entering Gaza independently for the duration of the war — the first modern conflict where the press corps is locked out entirely, forced to rely on tours escorted and approved by the IDF. Palestinian journalists have been killed at a historic rate; over 130 have died since October 2023, more journalists killed in a single conflict than in any decade of the Vietnam War. The Israeli military has repeatedly and retroactively justified strikes on press facilities by claiming Hamas operatives were present — claims, delivered after the fact, that journalists can neither verify nor challenge, because the journalists who would challenge them are the ones being struck. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented a pattern of smeared, detained, and censored reporters, including draconian bans on foreign broadcasting and the shutdown of Al Jazeera's operations inside Israel. A state that bombs newsrooms, expels networks, and locks out every independent camera is a state manufacturing its own version of events — and history's judgment on such states is never kind.
Can the state itself be trusted? The record argues no. Netanyahu's government broke a ceasefire it had signed, reneged on phases of its own hostage deals, and privately told negotiators it preferred prolonging the war to ending it — a strategy his own security chiefs have said serves his political survival, keeping him in office and out of a courtroom, where a corruption trial still hangs over him. His judicial overhaul attempted to gut the courts before they could rule against him. His intelligence services, by his own government's admission, failed to prevent October 7 — and rather than resign, he demanded the authority to continue. A leader who weaponizes a national trauma to entrench himself, prolong a war that has destroyed two societies, and delegitimize every critic — domestic press, foreign press, courts, allies — has forfeited the presumption of good faith. Distrust is not paranoia when it is earned this consistently.
There is also this: the loudest voices documenting these crimes are Israeli. Haaretz journalists, Israeli reservists, Israeli human rights groups in court against their own government. The rot is the coalition, the occupation it feeds, and the man at its head — and the people of the region, Israeli and Palestinian alike, deserve leaders who are not war criminals with press handlers.
A crowd gathers outside the PM's residence in Jerusalem, megaphones crackling, while another night falls over a Gaza the world was never allowed to see.