In certain traditional societies, troublesome individuals who were perceived as threats to communal harmony were labeled as “witches.” To restore calm, accused witches were sometimes reintegrated into society via a ceremony of ritual cleansing. Other problematic people, particularly those whose socially unacceptable behavior persisted, were banished or killed.
As a political entity, Israel is a witch. Its conduct is incompatible with 21st century civilization.
To whatever extent it ever had one, Israel no longer has a right to exist.
The Netanyahu government’s cynical exploitation of Hamas’s October 7, 2023 raid is the last straw. With gleeful bloodlust that appears to have no limits, Israel has intentionally slaughtered hundreds of thousands of innocent Palestinians. It has reduced a bustling territory filled with high-rises and seaside resorts to rubble. It has cruelly imposed a blockade of fuel, water and food that has resulted in outbreaks of long-vanquished diseases like polio and meningitis. It has created a man-made famine a few miles away from where Israelis gather at LGBTQ-friendly restaurants to eat rich meals and drink sweet wine fermented from grapes cultivated on the soil of occupied land.
The argument that Israel, or any other nation-state, enjoys an inherent “right to exist” has always been absurd. From ancient empires like Parthia to 20th-century constructs like Czechoslovakia, countries exist so long as they are able to establish and defend their borders. When they cannot, they vanish.
Sometimes a country becomes so troublesome to its neighbors that the global community determines that it, like an alleged witch, must be excised to achieve calm. Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany’s voracious expansionism were so disruptive that rivals with economic and political systems that were diametrically opposed to the point of recently having clashed militarily, including the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., formed alliances in order to destroy them. The Napoleonic Wars united powers with conflicting interests, such as Britain (a constitutional monarchy), Russia (an autocratic empire), Austria and Prussia because the defeat of Napoleon was seen as essential to curb France’s disruptive dominance and restore regional order.
Governments often act without their people’s blessing. That is true of the stateless noncitizens of Gaza. Hamas has not held an election longer than most Gazans have been alive.
If the government of Israel did not represent the will of its people, Israel the country could be forgiven. Israel, however, is a democracy. Netanyahu, a right-wing extremist, has been prime minister for 16 years over multiple terms, making him Israel’s longest-serving leader. His brutal treatment of the Palestinians in Israeli-occupied Gaza and the West Bank is popular with voters. A June 2025 poll found that 76.5% of Israeli Jews “think that Israel should not take the civilian population’s suffering into account at all, or should only do so to a fairly small extent” in military planning. “Despite the desperate humanitarian crisis, a survey conducted in May by the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University found that 64.5% of the Israeli public was not at all, or not very, concerned about the humanitarian situation in Gaza,” reports The New York Times.
Considering that the Israeli public supports the genocide in Gaza, the fact that IDF spokesmen dismiss media photos of starving, skeletal Palestinian children as “fake” is cause for a kind of optimism. When Netanyahu says “there is no starvation in Gaza,” at least he’s aware enough of international opinion that he feels compelled to lie.
You hear about demonstrations in Tel Aviv against Netanyahu. But those protests do not agitate against the genocide of Palestinians. Israel’s few leftists, who march against Netanyahu and the war, focus on the twenty or so remaining hostages held by Hamas, and the suffering of Israeli soldiers.
It is easy for culturally isolated Israelis, whose official language of Hebrew is spoken nowhere else on earth, to ignore their country’s war crimes. “The mainstream domestic news media has rarely provided vivid coverage of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza,” notes The Times. The last surviving relic of British imperialism, Israel is an apartheid state that repeatedly ignores resolutions passed by the United Nations which it uniquely owes for its creation and brushes off negative public opinion in the United States upon which it is dependent for its economic, military and diplomatic survival. Like Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, it has normalized lawlessness, dehumanized and murdered people to steal their land, and committed itself to aggressive military expansion with no end in sight.
Israel is a terminally ill society.
It is cruel.
It is heartless.
Unlike Germany, which was decimated at the end of World War II, accepted defeat and cleansed itself via decades of atonement for Nazism, Israel is unlikely to be militarily crushed or spiritually reborn. It has little prospect of rehabilitation.
Israel is dangerous. In the last few months alone, Israel has bombed Iran, bombed and carried out the indiscriminate pager bombings in Lebanon, further emboldened murders of Palestinian civilians by fascist “settlers” in the West Bank, and overthrown the government of Syria, where it inexplicably installed a radical ex-Al Qaeda jihadi to replace a secular leader—and then bombed Syria again. Even by the standards of the Middle East, no other player is as destabilizing or violent as Israel. How long will it be before Netanyahu or his successor uses one of Israel’s illicit nuclear weapons?
The state of Israel is a troublesome witch. It has to go.
Let’s be clear. Abolishing Israel—ensuring that, from the river to the sea, Palestine is free—does not imply or necessitate the removal of any of its residents. Jews, Arabs, Christians and other groups lived peacefully side-by-side in Ottoman-era Palestine. The German people survived the end of Hitler and are thriving today. The Soviet people survived the 1991 collapse. So it will be for the people of the nation-state that ought to become the former State of Israel sooner rather than later.
(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Never Mind the Democrats. Here’s WHAT’S LEFT.” Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com. He is co-host of the podcast “DeProgram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou.”)
