Benjamin Netanyahu is a man besieged, not by Hamas rockets, but by a shifting reality he long believed he could control. His shock is palpable—not stemming from any pang of conscience for the tens of thousands dead in Gaza, but from the deafening silence now emanating from sections of his once-reliable cheering section in the West. His lifelong political insurance policy—“do whatever you want, America will pay the bill and provide diplomatic cover”—is showing catastrophic cracks, threatening to expire in full view of the world.
In a monstrous gamble, Netanyahu went full rogue. Betting that the sheer, brutal arithmetic of violence—carpet-bombing one of the most densely populated places on earth, systematically starving its people, and flattening its hospitals and universities—would finally “solve” the Palestinian question. This strategy, however, is born of his own cynical creation. For years, his policy was to financially prop up Hamas, funneling Qatari millions into Gaza to bolster the militants as a wedge against the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, deliberately sabotaging the prospects for a unified Palestinian state and a negotiated peace. He believed he could manage a controlled burn of a contained conflict. Now, the fire he fed has consumed his legacy.
Instead of security, he has achieved a darkly historic first: becoming an Israeli prime minister openly branded a war criminal on the floors of Western parliaments and denounced by a U.N. commission of inquiry. For the first time in living memory, the phrases “international law” and “Israel’s actions” are being uttered in the same breath across global media—and not as a cynical punchline, but as a serious indictment.
This is Netanyahu’s Gaza Gamble: a scorched-earth campaign of collective punishment so extreme, so televised, and so digitally documented that it has forced the world to use vocabulary it had reserved for history’s darkest chapters. The irony is lethally tragic. He believes this carnage is saving Israel. In truth, he is single-handedly excavating its diplomatic grave. The foundational myth of Israel’s eternal impunity is shattering.
This tragedy is compounded by the haunting accusations surrounding the October 7th attack itself. Beyond the failed strategy of empowerment, some within Israel’s own security establishment and bereaved families now level a far more damning charge: that Netanyahu, warned of potential violence, gave standing-down orders to forces near Gaza, a catastrophic miscalculation or neglect that left kibbutzim and military bases vulnerable to Hamas’s heinous assault. Whether born of arrogance or incompetence, this failure is the original sin of the ensuing apocalypse, a fact that fuels the domestic fury against him.
One day very soon, Netanyahu will wake to a chilling discovery: his entire war machine is sustained not by righteousness, but by the waning patience of a single superpower, the diminished influence of a powerful lobby, and the world’s fast-depleting reserves of political hypocrisy.
And here is the strategic blunder that will define his legacy: he has deliberately, viciously blurred the critical lines of identity. There is a profound difference between the nation of Israel and the political project of Zionism, just as there is a chasm between the terror group Hamas and the two million Palestinian civilians of Gaza. By conflating them, Netanyahu has made every Israeli bomb a referendum on Israel’s own legitimacy, radicalizing a new generation and alienating its most crucial allies. He has become Hamas’s greatest, if unwitting, recruiter.
Meanwhile, the international response paints a picture of a world order in crisis. Western capitals, gripped by a guilty paralysis, are now breaking ranks in an unprecedented wave. In a stunning diplomatic rupture, key European nations are formally recognizing Palestinian statehood against the explicit wishes of the United States, signaling that Washington’s veto at the UN Security Council is no longer a magic wand to halt global consensus but a symbol of its own isolation. This move leaves the U.S. and Israel as outliers, clinging to a failed status quo. Much of the Global South—the Muslim world, Asia, Africa, and Latin America—watches this Western fracture with grim validation, having long seen not a complex conflict but a stark colonial nightmare, and are rapidly moving to isolate Israel in every international forum. Theirs is not sleepwalking, but a gathering storm of a new geopolitical alignment, one where Western double standards on human rights are no longer tolerated.
Netanyahu’s ultimate tragedy—and Israel’s—is that he may yet claim a pyrrhic victory in Gaza, reducing it to rubble and calling it peace. But in the process, he has mortgaged his nation’s future for a fleeting moment of vengeful dominance. He will have lost the war for history, forever remembered not as a protector of Israel, but as the architect of its deepest isolation—the leader who first empowered a monster, then failed to protect his people from it, and finally unleashed a hell that shattered his country’s standing on the world stage.
Warsame Policy & Media Network (WAPMEN) 