Bigger Than One Man: Why the Problem Is the System, Not the Prime Minister
Remove Benjamin Netanyahu tomorrow — indict him, vote him out, exile him — and ask yourself honestly what actually changes. The settlement outposts don't disappear. The ministries funding them don't close. The ideological current that produced them didn't arrive with him and won't leave with him. This is the same mistake this newsletter has made about Trump, about Obama, about Haile Selassie and the Derg: treating a system as if it were one man wearing a crown. It never does. Netanyahu is a symptom sitting on top of a structure that predates him by seventy years and is staffed by people who will still be in government the day after he's gone.
Bigger Than One Man: Why the Problem Is the System, Not the Prime Minister
The System Didn't Start on the Right
The instinct to treat this as a story about Israel's current far-right government is understandable, and it's also historically backwards. The architecture of displacement long predates Kahanism, Ben-Gvir, or Smotrich, and it was built substantially by the Israeli left. David Ben-Gurion — founder of the Histadrut labor federation, first prime minister, lifelong self-described "Labor Zionist" — is on record as early as 1938 stating plainly, "I support compulsory transfer" of the Palestinian Arab population. Historian Benny Morris, an Israeli "new historian" who spent his career mining declassified state archives rather than activist pamphlets, documented a "Transfer Committee" established after 1948 specifically to oversee the destruction of depopulated Palestinian villages and prevent refugees from returning, and recorded testimony from Yigal Allon, a general in Ben-Gurion's own army, describing a direct exchange in which he asked Ben-Gurion what to do with the Palestinian population and received a wave of the hand meaning "drive them out." Morris's own conclusion, after decades of archival work, was that population transfer was "inevitable and inbuilt in Zionism" as a project, whatever one makes of the word "inevitable." This was not a right-wing settler faction operating outside the state. This was the state's founding leadership, from the party that called itself socialist.
The pre-state labor movement built this same logic into its own institutions before a country existed to enforce it. The Histadrut, the labor federation founded and run by Ben-Gurion, organized what its own leaders called the "conquest of labor" — a deliberate campaign to exclude Arab workers from Jewish-owned farms and businesses, boycott Arab produce, and build a segregated Jewish-only economy inside Palestine decades before 1948. This is documented in the movement's own contemporary writings and speeches, not reconstructed by hostile critics after the fact. The point isn't that Israel's left and right are secretly identical on every question. It's that the specific mechanism — displacement organized through the institutions of the state, regardless of which party runs it — has bipartisan Israeli authorship going back to the country's founding generation, which is exactly why swapping the party in charge has never been the fix anyone hoped it would be.
The System Didn't Stop When the Cameras Turned to Netanyahu
Look at what's happening in the West Bank right now and the same pattern holds in the opposite direction: it doesn't require Netanyahu's personal involvement, and it would not stop if he vanished tomorrow. Lehava, a settler organization its own founder's circle claims has over 100,000 members, was sanctioned by the U.S. State Department in 2024 for its leader Benzion Gopstein's direct role in organizing violence against Palestinians, and the EU blacklisted it the same week. The Hilltop Youth, a decentralized network that seizes land and builds outposts overnight, was designated a violent extremist organization by the U.S. Treasury for a documented campaign of killings, mass arson, and "price tag" attacks — including the 2015 Duma firebombing that burned an eighteen-month-old Palestinian toddler and both his parents to death, a crime for which a member was eventually convicted and sentenced to three life terms.
None of this is fringe activity happening at the margins of Israeli power. Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel's current minister of national security, was a documented member of both groups before entering politics, convicted in 2007 of supporting a terrorist organization and inciting racism and violence. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who also controls the settlement portfolio inside the Ministry of Defense, has approved tens of millions of dollars in stipends and equipment — including all-terrain vehicles later used to raid Palestinian villages — for the same outpost networks the U.S. and EU have sanctioned as violent extremists. In June 2025, the UK, Canada, Norway, Australia, and New Zealand jointly sanctioned both ministers by name for repeated incitement of violence and serious abuses of Palestinian human rights — a coordinated action by five governments against two sitting cabinet ministers, not against Netanyahu. This is the actual shape of the structure: elected officials, ministry budgets, state-issued equipment, and internationally sanctioned militias operating as one continuous supply chain. Netanyahu sits on top of that chain. He did not build it, and firing him leaves every link of it in place.
Bigger Than Black and White
Here is where this argument has to slow down and refuse the shortcut it would be easiest to take, because collapsing all of this into "Zionism is simply evil, full stop" would be exactly the kind of flattening this piece has spent every other essay warning against.
Zionism as a historical movement did not emerge from nothing. It emerged from real, documented, murderous persecution — the pogroms sweeping the Russian Empire from the 1880s onward, and then the Holocaust, an actual genocide that murdered six million Jews within living memory of people alive today. Treating the desire for a safe homeland after that history as inherently and only a colonial project, full stop, erases the real terror that produced it and the real Jewish people who continue to see it, in good faith, as the only guarantee of their community's survival. It is also true, and was true from the movement's own founding congresses, that Zionism was never one thing — it included Marxist internationalists like the Bund who rejected it outright as reactionary nationalism, binationalists who argued for genuine Jewish-Arab federation, and religious currents who considered a state built by human hands before the Messiah's arrival to be blasphemous. Reducing seventy years and multiple continents of Jewish political argument to a single monolith, "Zionism," does the same violence to complexity that this newsletter has criticized every time it's been done to socialism, to social democracy, to Islam, or to any other tradition treated as one undifferentiated villain.
And it needs to be said plainly, not as a hedge but as a load-bearing point: criticism of a state's policies, its founding institutions, and its documented history of displacement is not the same claim as hostility toward Jewish people or Judaism as a religion, and collapsing that distinction is precisely the move that lets actual antisemitism hide inside legitimate political criticism, and precisely the move that lets legitimate political criticism get dismissed as antisemitism. Both collapses are dishonest, and both serve someone's interest other than the truth's.
The Point Isn't to Call Anyone a Nazi. It's to Make the Ideology Visible.
One clarification matters enough to state directly, because without it this argument gets misread as something uglier than it is: none of this means a person who calls themselves a Zionist is secretly a fascist, or that ordinary Israelis cheering their team, celebrating a holiday, or simply wanting a safe homeland are personally responsible for Ben-Gvir's ministry budgets. Most people who hold a political label were handed it by their family, their school, or their government long before they examined its founding assumptions — that's true of Zionism, and it's true of plenty of other ideologies this newsletter has taken seriously as ideologies rather than as accusations against individuals. The goal here isn't to catch anyone in a gotcha. It's narrower and, hopefully, more useful than that: to show that "Zionism" isn't just a synonym for "supporting Israel's existence" in some neutral sense, but a specific political program with a documented history — the Histadrut's "conquest of labor," Ben-Gurion's own words on transfer, the institutional throughline from the Jewish Agency to the settlement ministries funding Hilltop Youth outposts today — and that history is worth knowing whether or not the person sitting across from you at dinner has ever encountered it. Most people calling themselves Zionists have never been shown this file. Showing it to them is the entire project. What they do with it afterward is their own honest reckoning, not a verdict this piece gets to hand down in advance.
Sidoc Haytu is an Ethiopian writer and researcher focused on political economy, class dynamics, and anti-imperialist movements in the Horn of Africa. If you are ready to build, not just read, follow Sidoc Haytu on Instagram at @sirapressnews.
