[News] The moral and political crisis of Zionism

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 Comments <https://english.palinfo.com/opinion_articles/>
The moral and political crisis of Zionism
Sayid Marcos Tenório
<https://english.palinfo.com/authors/sayid-marcos-tenorio>

Sunday 14-December-2025

Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has reached a level of brutality that
places Israel and Zionism before their own moral, political, and legal
abyss.

For decades, the Zionist project has been denounced for its colonial,
supremacist, and violent character. Nowadays, under Netanyahu and his
far-right coalition, this violence has reached levels that can no longer be
described as anything other than structural and deeply destructive,
creating a reality of domination, ethnic cleansing, and collective
punishment.

The Zionist regime believes that destroying all civilian infrastructure,
killing entire families, and expelling an indigenous people from their own
land represents a military victory. But what they call “success” is nothing
more than the consecration of genocide as a state policy.

No minimally lucid person considers this a victory: it is a war crime, it
is a crime against humanity, it is genocide broadcast live, with the entire
world as witness and involuntary accomplice.

Israel has not won in Gaza. And it will not win. Palestinian resistance
continues to exist precisely because it is anchored in moral, historical,
and political legitimacy, while the Zionist project is sustained only
through the physical and symbolic destruction of Palestine.

A state that needs to murder children to proclaim victory is already
morally defeated. All its military power paradoxically reveals its
historical fragility, its incapacity to offer any horizon other than
permanent violence.

But what allows this system of terror to endure? Why, even in the face of
indisputable images, do global powers continue to guarantee immunity to the
Israeli genocidal regime?

The answer is simple: what is at stake is not justice, but power.

The international system that emerged after the Second World War was sold
to the world as a guardian of peace, of balance among nations, and of human
dignity. Treaties, conventions, courts, and resolutions were created in a
legal architecture meant to prevent massacres and punish tyrannies.

However, when the perpetrator of these violations is Israel, a strategic
ally of the West, this entire structure dissolves into empty speeches and
automatic vetoes.

The issuance of arrest warrants by the International Criminal Court against
Netanyahu and his Minister of War, Israel Katz, is a step forward that
partially breaks Israel’s historical shielding. But it is still
insufficient.

Netanyahu and his far-right coalition need to be held legally accountable
for what they have done, not out of vengeance, but due to a basic
principle: no leader of any nation can be above the law.

For the crimes committed in Gaza under his responsibility, the only
sentence proportional to the scale of the barbarity would be the death
penalty for Benjamin Netanyahu and the criminal leaders of the Zionist
regime.

If the world wishes to prevent similar atrocities from occurring again, it
is essential that crimes committed against the Palestinian people receive
the same moral and legal weight as crimes committed anywhere else in the
world.

Meanwhile, Gaza continues to be bombed, hospitals are attacked,
universities are razed, and the dead number in the thousands. The
devastation unleashed against Gaza since 2023 cannot be called war, but
rather the deliberate attempt to erase an entire society.

The use of hunger as a weapon, the obstruction of humanitarian aid, the
murder of journalists and humanitarian workers compose a picture that
surpasses any conceivable ethical limit.

And still, resistance persists and grows in the face of something even more
decisive: the international isolation of Israel. World public opinion has
changed. Crowds take to the streets of major capitals denouncing the
genocide. European countries recognize the State of Palestine.
Universities, trade unions, artists, and social movements break the
historical silence and join the boycott.

For the first time in decades, Israel is seen not as an eternal victim, but
as an occupying and aggressor power. Its global image collapses, and the
Zionist narrative — once dominant — loses credibility across all continents.

The arrogance of the most extremist sectors of Zionism, who believed that
reducing Gaza to rubble would produce victory, reveals their inability to
understand the nature of anticolonial struggles: peoples determined to
survive always find ways to resist. Zionist violence is not a sign of
strength, but of desperation.

True victory will not come from destruction, but from the full recognition
of the humanity of the Palestinian people, the restitution of their rights,
and the end of the occupation. Palestine will survive. Netanyahu and his
accomplices, however, will have to face history.

The moral defeat of Zionism is already underway. What remains is for the
world to transform it into a political and legal defeat as well.

*-Sayid Marcos Tenório is a historian, specialist in International
Relations, founder and vice-president of the Brazil-Palestine Institute
(Ibraspal). Author of the book Palestina: do mito da terra prometida à
terra da resistência (Palestine: from the myth of the promised land to the
land of resistance). His article appeared in MEMO.*
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