It’s Not Just 'Netanyahu': The Rise of Liberals’ One Bad Man Theory to Explain Away Gaza Genocide

Attempts to pin the horrors on “Netanyahu" obscure the reality of just how popular genocide is with US elites and within Israel itself.

Democratic Party consensus over Gaza is beginning to buckle under the increasingly-difficult-to-deny reality of genocidal intentions and policies, with polls showing only 8 percent of Democrats support Israel’s “war.” Now, liberal institutions and media that spent the better part of two years ignoring this reality, deflecting from it, or overtly supporting it, are seeking to cover their asses and spin their way back into the good graces of progressives and basic common decency. Out of all the taking points in support of this pivot, one has emerged as a clear favorite, a sort of compromise position for the Pod Saves set: acknowledge that Israel is committing genocide (or something close to it) but limit the damage by reducing the moral outrage to the machinations of one man, Benjamin Netanyahu.

It’s not a new line: it’s been the go-to liberal zionist limited hangout since criticism of the US and Israel’s destruction of Gaza began to emerge among Democrats in late 2023 and early 2024—a popular tic, for example, of Sen. Bernie Sanders. It’s not Israel’s genocide, we are told, but “Netanyahu’s war.” This framing enjoys meaningful overlap with the Bumbling/Fuming Biden alternative reality constructed in liberal media throughout 2024, complete with antisemitic undertones that an otherwise decent Biden was somehow being manipulated by the wily and cunning Israeli prime minister.

Most of the recent high-profile “breaks” with Israel by Democrats in Congress have limited criticism along these lines. “It is clear that Prime Minister Netanyahu’s personal and political interests are guiding Israel’s actions,” wrote New York Rep. Dan Goldman. “He is beholden to the extreme right.”

“Do I think the relationship between Israel and the Democratic Party is irreparably damaged? The answer is no,” New York Rep. Ritchie Torres said recently. “Do I think the relationship between Netanyahu and the Democratic Party is irreparably damaged? The answer is yes.”

“I supported Israel's right to defend itself against Hamas after Oct 7th horrific terrorist act,” California Rep. Ro Khanna told AIPAC on Twitter. “Netanyahu's policies lost young Americans.”

“This interview is the first time I felt like I had any understanding of what problem the GHF was supposed to ‘solve’ and it's a political one,” MSNBC’s Chris Hayes said on Twitter. “A big part of Netanyahu's coalition wants ZERO aid entering Gaza.”

“Netanyahu is a bad actor, he’s continued the war for political purpose…this is not a partner we can count on,” Pod Saves America’s Tommy Vietor lamented on a recent episode.

A recent, widely shared report in The New York Times echoed this conventional wisdom. “How Netanyahu Prolonged the War in Gaza to Stay in Power,” the Times headline read. “Secret meetings, altered records, ignored intelligence: the inside story of the prime minister’s political calculations since Oct. 7.” The chatter around the article was uniform: Netanyahu had “dragged on” the war against popular will for "political gain.” One Bad Man was not only forcing the leader of the most powerful empire in human history to do its bidding—he was forcing the Israeli people as well.

There’s a problem with this formulation: It is a complete fiction. Not only are neither Trump nor Biden being “pulled into” anything, poll after poll shows the most extreme and genocidal policies of the Netanyahu government are not only popular in Israel, but, in key ways, to the left of Israeli society. It’s not that, as Chris Hayes says, “a big part of Netanyahu's coalition wants ZERO aid entering Gaza.” It's that a big part—indeed, 68 percent according to one recent poll—of Israeli society wants zero aid entering Gaza.

Netanyahu has “dragged on the war” because the “war’s” objectives are extremely popular among top politicians in Israel, Israeli society more broadly, and among political elites in the US.

One April 2024 Pew poll showed that only 4 percent of Jewish Israelis believe that Netanyahu had “gone too far” in Gaza, and 34 percent of Israelis (including Palestinian Israelis, so the number is likely much higher) saying he had “not gone far enough.” By that time over 35,000 Palestinians had been killed. The primary line of criticism from Netanyahu’s political opposition over the past few months, in addition to corruption charges totally unrelated to Gaza, is that Netanyahu refuses to expand the military draft to Israel’s ultra-orthodox communities. In April of this year, former premier Naftali Bennett lambasted Netanyahu not for his backing of genocide, but his policy of “preventing the military enlistment of the ultra-Orthodox,” saying it was keeping Israel in a stalemate with Hamas in Gaza. “The stagnation in Gaza stems directly from government policy that deprives the IDF of the main tool required for victory: fighters,” said Bennett, who the Times Of Israel said was “widely seen as gunning to replace Netanyahu.” A survey conducted by Professor Tamir Sorek of Pennsylvania State University and published in Haaretz in May, found that 56 percent of Jewish Israelis supported the “transfer (forced expulsion) of Arab citizens of Israel to other countries.” Respondents were asked whether they agreed with the position that the IDF, "when conquering an enemy city, should act in a manner similar to the way the Israelites acted when they conquered Jericho under the leadership of Joshua, namely, to kill all its inhabitants." Nearly half, 47 percent, agreed. According to another poll from the Israel Democracy Institute, conducted at the end of July, a vast majority of Israeli Jews—79 percent—say they are "not so troubled" or "not troubled at all" by the reports of famine and suffering among the Palestinian population in Gaza.

This isn’t to make a totalizing moral claim about every individual Israeli—there are indeed dissidents and conscientious objectors, including Israeli youth who are refusing compulsory conscription into the Israeli military over ethical objections. The problem is, if they all gathered in the same place, they could probably not fill Wrigley Field. And there’s no reason to believe they have any real impact on what Israel does or will do in the near future. The point is not to be smug; indeed, as a white American living on colonized land among a population where 30 percent Republicans agree we should bomb Agrabah, the fictional country from Aladdin (PPP, 2015), I am very aware of how violent and racist my own society can be. But, in the context of Gaza, poll after poll shows that Israelis are overwhelmingly genocidal in their attitudes and axioms. Whatever the reasons, whatever the colonial indoctrination, whatever the internal propaganda, whatever the racism at work, Israeli society, especially its body politic, remains in a genocidal fervor almost two years on, and overt support for starvation, ethnic cleansing and mass killing remains the majority position among Israelis. It is moral and journalistic malpractice to act as if it isn’t.

Polls show this is far less so in the United States: A clear majority of Americans are against Israel’s operations in Gaza and want to stop arming Israel. And since the United States is a co-conspirator in Israel’s genocide, it logically follows that this disconnect is the best place to focus activist attention to finally create real leverage on ending the genocide. Again, this is not because Americans are inherently morally superior—it’s because their foundational genocide and subsequent colonial state formation was achieved decades before Israel’s even got underway. Indeed, this issue is not even particularly sectarian: according to an Economist/YouGov poll from Jan 2024, almost half of Jewish Americans under the age of 30 think Israel is committing genocide. But it is nationalistic, and ignoring this reality does nothing to address the underlying dynamics at work.

Focusing on One Bad Man prevents us from interrogating the ideological structures at work, in this case, the political ideology of modern zionism, which is predicated on the goal of Jewish demographic supremacy. And any call for ethnic supremacy necessitates the expulsion of those who are the wrong ethnicity, a reality that holds true whether one identifies as a liberal or progressive, or a conservative or an extremist. This fundamental component of zionism eclipses all else. Calls for social democracy and healthcare and good liberal public goods or even scholarships for some Palestinians mean little when your political system requires constant expulsion and displacement. The logical end point of this view is playing out today with Israel’s extermination campaign in Gaza, and liberal zionists, as well as fanatics on the right, deserve blame.

Beyond the fact that it’s without empirical basis, there’s a more urgent, practical reason why One Bad Man Theory must be rejected: its obvious political utility in maintaining the logic and basis for the genocide. This particular genre of Liberal Cope is immensely popular for a number of reasons, but the main one is that it argues, sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly, that the US does not need to cut off arms to Israel, nor does there need to be a move to boycott all of Israeli society, because—don’t worry, we are assured—an anti-war, anti-”Netanyahu” movement is perpetually around the corner to stop the horrors we are witnessing on our social media timelines on a daily basis.

This spin is popular with everyone from Thomas Friedman in the New York Times to Zack Beauchamp in Vox, both of whom have been aggressively making the case that Israel can, and is, working to effectively sort out its own genocide problem internally—ostensibly, because we are perpetually on the brink of a liberal anti-Netanyahu political movement that will win power and end the “war” in Gaza. Like an MSNBC NeverTrump Republican waiting for the “fever to break” and the base to turn on Trump, liberal zionists await an enlightened, supposedly humanitarian zionism that’s always just around the corner, but strangely never materializes.

Alas, we have no indication it will. In a recent debate I had with Beauchamp on Twitter over this issue, his primary piece of evidence—indeed, the only real peice of evidence any of this crowd can concoct—is polls showing a majority of Israelis now support a “hostage deal.” When I noted that the majority of Israeli society supports the basic aims of the ongoing genocide, he claimed “this is false, 70 percent supported Phase 2 [of a hostage deal] of the agreement earlier this year which would have traded IDF withdrawal for hostage release (no other conditions) and linked to a poll that does indeed show this.”

But the devil is very much in the details. The majority of Israelis are indeed partial to a “hostage deal,” with the emphasis on word on hostage: the overwhelming liberal position is that Netanyahu should work out a deal to get the remaining hostages back then go back to destroying Gaza. This is a position Netanyahu has, not incorrectly, argued is not tenable and would require Israel to effectively trick both Hamas and the US, something unlikely to happen. Which is why Hamas, no doubt able to read the same polls, has never been willing to agree to a deal that would simply permit Israel to get its captives back then commence leveling, bombing, starving, and destroying Gaza. Put another way, Israeli society, like all societies, is complex and contains glaring contradictions in its preferences, but one through-line is consistent in polling: the Israeli public, and their representatives in government, largely do not oppose the genocide in Gaza or any of its most extreme depravities. And neither do Presidents Biden and Trump—and the majority of Democratic and Republican lawmakers. We know this because they keep supporting, arming, and funding the genocide.

It is vital to be clear-eyed on the different political views among the US versus Israeli public, because we need a sober assessment of how we can end the genocide as quickly as possible. The only real meaningful opposition in the immediate future can come from an American public, pressuring its representatives into shifting positions and making support for Israel as an ethnostate—not “Netanyahu”—irrevocably, politically toxic. Sitting around and waiting for Israel to reform itself is obviously not going to rectify an urgent situation, and the only logical way to pressure Israel is to cut off its arms and isolate it from the Western economies it depends on. This does not mean that those doing the work of trying to chip away at this support and chart another path forward, based on equal rights, are wasting their time. Israel has vocal supporters of the Palestinian-led movement for BDS, for example, and it does have an anti-Zionist left, however marginalized. Yet, it is not analytically sound to claim that this cohort is winning the day in Israel. It is unfortunately very fringe and will likely remain so in the near future.

Thus, attempting to frame the issue as the work of One Bad Man—and make no mistake, he is a bad man—reduces the issue to a personality dispute with no underlying conditions or causes. The very logic of zionism requires the removal, killing, and dispossession of an inconvenient people. The debate, such as it is, has always been about whether this process is slow and subtle, given cover by a fictitious “peace processes,” (so-called liberal zionism), or whether it is out in the open, overtly genocidal, and accelerated in its violence and removal (the far right for whom the genocide is now being pinned). This logic of zionism, of ethno-supremacist state-building between the river and the sea, whatever its flavor, remains the fundamental problem, not one uniquely Machiavellian politician who, we are lead to believe, is carrying out a genocide more or less by himself. The demand now, more than ever, has to be isolating and cutting off Israel, as such, not just One Bad Man. It’s the demand of virtually all of Palestinian civil society, and it’s the only logical fulcrum to meaningfully change Israel’s campaign of lawless, nihilistic violence. Attempting to bifurcate a country that is currently in a genocidal fervor from its leader—who largely represents the public consensus among Jewish Israelis on Gaza—does nothing but provide cover for the former and seeks to pin US and Israel’s complicity in the genocide in Gaza entirely on the latter.