Netanyahu is on a mission to seize the Middle East. Will anyone stop him?

The Israeli prime minister's vision of the Promised Land means that the Gaza genocide heralds the beginning of a vicious territorial campaign

Israeli troops deploy near the Gaza border on 1 August 2025 (Jack Guez/AFP)

Israeli troops deploy near the Gaza border on 1 August 2025 (Jack Guez/AFP)

Off

When South Africa brought the charge of genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the court gave Israel nine months to present its rebuttal. That expired at the end of July.

The panel of 17 judges accepted Israel’s argument that it needed more time to prepare its case because of “evidentiary issues” in South Africa’s case. Accordingly, Israel’s impunity before the ICJ was extended by another six months. It is now thought that the ICJ will not rule on the issue before 2027 at the earliest.

In those nine months, more than 250 Palestinians, nearly half of them children, have died of starvation created expressly as a weapon of war by Israel’s cabinet. The carnage has continued unabated. Thousands more civilians have been killed by bombings, and tens of thousands are set to die if Israeli forces retake Gaza City.

A leak of the minutes of a cabinet meeting on 1 March, published recently by Channel 13, revealed how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer, who now heads Israel’s negotiating team, argued successfully - against the advice of top Israeli military and security officials - that Israel should starve Gaza into submission.

Netanyahu decided to break the ceasefire that was at the time functioning, and to cut off all aid to Gaza to “force Hamas to surrender”, the leak noted.

Last week, however, Netanyahu claimed none of this has happened. The policy of starvation that he voted on at that cabinet meeting in March was a fiction, part of a mass vilification of Jews. Days later, the Israeli army joined in the campaign of denial, claiming there were no signs of widespread malnutrition in Gaza.

In other words, Unicef, the World Food Programme, and all the other experts who say that a famine is playing out in Gaza, are lying. The images of children reduced to skin and bones are fake. It’s all part of a “blood libel” against Jews.

Perverting the course of justice

If the ICJ remains paralysed, the same applies to its sister court, the International Criminal Court (ICC). As Middle East Eye has reported in some detail, the arrest warrants against Netanyahu and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, have been effectively neutralised.

This was by means of an organised and orchestrated campaign of vilification that forced the British chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, to take leave, pending the outcome of an external investigation into accusations of sexual assault - allegations Khan vigorously denies.

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On Friday, MEE reported that arrest warrants against two other ministers in the Israeli cabinet, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, were lying on the desks of two deputy prosecutors gathering dust.

They are fully prepared, according to our sources, and if served, would represent the first time that the crime of apartheid was prosecuted at the ICC.

A source within the ICC said: “If the Ben Gvir and Smotrich applications just disappear, the opportunity to prosecute one of the most blatant examples of apartheid in the world today will likely be lost forever.”

I am not holding my breath. The US sanctioned Khan in February, and in June, it sanctioned four ICC judges, two of whom approved Khan’s application for arrest warrants.

It's no longer 'plausible genocide', as the ICJ first determined. It's no longer genocide in inverted commas. It's genocide, period

This campaign to pervert the course of international justice appears to be working.

Whatever happens to Khan, Israel and the US have already succeeded in their primary aim of paralysing the court. It still exists in name. But it has stopped existing as far as Israel’s daily crimes of ethnic cleansing, starvation and apartheid are concerned.

News of the arrest warrants and South Africa’s case at the ICJ triggered a wave of optimism in human rights circles that turned out to be premature. The argument at the time was that the world should suspend judgement on whether a genocide was taking place in Gaza, to allow the wheels of international justice to turn at last.

With both courts disabled, this argument no longer applies. A number of countries have signed up to South Africa’s action, but this too has become gesture politics.

Even South Africa continues to sell coal to Israel. Turkey, whose rhetoric on Gaza is fierce, continues to allow Azerbaijani oil to flow through Ceyhan on its way to fuelling Israel’s air force.

It claims it has no sovereignty over the pipeline, and the transfer of Azeri oil to Israel-bound tankers takes place on the spot market in international waters. But would Ankara allow oil to flow through its ports if it was destined for a Greek air force that was bombing Northern Cyprus at the time? I don’t think so.

'Textbook case of genocide'

The Middle East simply cannot sit back and watch this genocide happen.

Genocide is a legal term, defined in international law. For several months, MEE has solicited the views of dozens of experts in international law and genocide studies. Some are experts on the Holocaust.

There are differences of opinion as to when this genocide started, but all are unanimous in their conclusion: what is unfolding in Gaza meets the threshold of a genocide. This includes killing members of a group, causing serious bodily harm, and imposing measures calculated to bring about the destruction of the group or society.

Israel’s war on Gaza: Why do legal experts say it’s genocide?

Let me quote a few of these expert opinions.

Raz Segal, associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University in New Jersey, was one of the first to use the term about the onslaught in Gaza. In Jewish Currents on 13 October 2023, he described Israel’s assault as a “textbook case of genocide”.

He told MEE: “As an Israeli American scholar of Jewish history and the Holocaust, I take seriously the moral imperative of ‘never again’. In Holocaust and genocide studies, we teach students to identify early warning signs of genocide: processes that escalate, red flags that demand intervention.”

Segal added: “Critics asked why I used the term ‘genocide’ so early. My answer: because we were already seeing key indicators. Ethically and legally, the obligation to prevent genocide arises in the presence of significant risk, not just once destruction is fully evident.”

Segal argued that Israel’s order on 13 October 2023, for more than a million Palestinians to go to southern Gaza within 24 hours, was an indicator of a clear risk of genocide. “I argued then, and continue to argue, that this marked a transition into the realm of genocide, or at the very least a significant risk of genocide, which, under the Genocide Convention, is sufficient to activate the duty to prevent.”

Beyond dispute

Expressions of intent are key to proving a case of genocide.

Here, Barry Trachtenburg, a professor of Jewish history and Holocaust studies at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, said: “From the very beginning, we saw genocidal statements made by Israeli leaders, which were soon followed by actions that aligned with those declarations of intent.”

He added: “In most cases of genocidal violence, we don’t have explicit statements from political and military leaders saying they will target civilians, refuse to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants, or hold an entire population responsible. But we’ve seen exactly that in this case.”

For Omer Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, war aims were key to his determination of genocide.

“My view has become that the war goals that Israel declared - which were to destroy Hamas and to free the hostages, by the spring of 2024 - turned out not to be the actual war goals,” he told MEE. “The [Israeli army] was not actually trying to destroy Hamas and free the hostages. What it was trying to do was to make Gaza uninhabitable for its population.”

MEE thus has no hesitation in calling what Israel is continuing to do in Gaza and the occupied West Bank a genocide.

It’s no longer “plausible genocide”, as the ICJ first determined. It’s no longer genocide in inverted commas. It’s genocide, period.

Convenient bogeymen

The ranks of western politicians who for 22 months argued for “Israel’s right of self-defence” - and this includes, among others, French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Freidrich Merz and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, all of whom now feign horror at the starvation that is taking place - are concentrating all the blame on Netanyahu, Ben Gvir and Smotrich.

True, there is more than enough evidence to indict each for war crimes. But these are convenient bogeymen. Zeroing in on these leaders alone creates another convenient fiction.

The myth is that if Netanyahu and religious Zionists fell from power, Israel would default to a leadership with no hegemonic intentions.

Israel's neighbours are asleep to the threat they face. This is not a threat that can be negotiated away - nor is it a threat that Washington will do anything to stop

These western leaders suggest that an Israel led by the more pragmatic Naftali Bennett would negotiate with Hamas a return of the hostages, and an end to the war in Gaza. In time, a Palestinian state would appear.

Once negotiations restarted with the Palestinian leadership, Saudi Arabia would sign the Abraham Accords, and everything would magically default to 6 October 2023, the day before the Hamas attack.

This, too, is dreamland.

Those who style themselves “friends of Israel” - and who now have to ask themselves whether they want to be remembered as the “friends” of apartheid and genocide - have argued doggedly that Israel has a right to defend its borders.

But 22 months into this campaign in Gaza, it turns out that Israel’s existing borders are a mere pit stop on the collective journey to the ultimate goal - the biblical Land of Israel.

As its forces have vanquished each neighbour in turn - first Gaza, then Lebanon, then Iran, and now Syria too - and as Israeli forces occupy Gaza, outposts in Lebanon and a substantial area of southern Syria, maps have begun to re-emerge laying claim to areas far beyond the lines where their conquering forces have stopped.

Expanding borders

This is no accident of timing. During an interview last week with i24 News, in which he was presented with an amulet depicting a map of the Promised Land, Netanyahu was asked whether he felt connected to this vision of Greater Israel. “Very much,” Netanyahu replied.

Netanyahu said he was “on a mission of generations - there are generations of Jews that dreamed of coming here and generations of Jews who will come after us”.

An ever expanding Israel will pave the way for its demise

He continued: “So if you’re asking if I have a sense of mission, historically and spiritually, the answer is yes.”

The map itself was coyly hidden from viewers, but it is well known. The Promised Land would encompass all of the Palestinian territories, along with parts of Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

Last year, Smotrich was filmed advocating an expansion of Israel’s borders to include Damascus.

The idea is not new. In January 2024, Israeli politician Avi Lipkin said that “eventually, our borders will extend from Lebanon to the Great Desert, which is Saudi Arabia, and then from the Mediterranean to the Euphrates.

“And who is on the other side of the Euphrates? The Kurds! And the Kurds are friends,” he continued. “So we have Mediterranean behind us, the Kurds in front of us, Lebanon, which really needs the umbrella of protection of Israel, and then we’re gonna take, I believe we’re gonna take Mecca, Medina and Mount Sinai, and to purify those places.”

Time to wake up

Theodor Herzl, the father of political Zionism, wrote in his diaries that the Jewish state should stretch “from the Brook of Egypt to the Euphrates”. The phrase is taken from Book of Genesis, where God grants Abraham and his descendants a vast expanse of land.

Some Israelis refer to a narrower vision mentioned in the Book of Deuteronomy. Others invoke the Book of Samuel, which describes lands secured by kings Saul and David, including Palestine, Lebanon, and sections of Jordan and Syria. For all, however, the pursuit of Greater Israel is the fulfilment of a divine mandate.

None of this is new. What is new is that Israel has the military means to make its vision of the Promised Land a reality.

Only a regional security pact, enforced by modern armies coming to each other's aid, will stop Israel's expansion and protect the young nation states of the Middle East

The genocide being waged against Palestinians is not the unintended consequence of a westernised people who have grown fat off the land they have occupied. Nor is it solely the work of religious Zionists, who are just one part of the political spectrum.

Rather, the genocide speaks to the fulfilment of a much deeper dream: the return of Jews to the Promised Land.

The one thing standing in their way are the Palestinian people, who - whether armed or not - refuse to leave lands that are rightfully theirs.

If Netanyahu’s charge is stopped now, the halt will be temporary. No Israeli leader is going to order a retreat from Syria or Lebanon. The Golan Heights are lost forever. No Israeli leader will pull up to a million settlers out of the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Israel’s neighbours are asleep to the threat they face. This is not a threat that can be negotiated away - nor is it a threat that Washington will do anything to stop.

Only a regional security pact, enforced by modern armies coming to each other’s aid, will stop Israel’s expansion and protect the young nation states of the Middle East. They should wake up, and soon.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

Israel's genocide in Gaza

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