Palestinians from the village of Tantura, a month following a massacre by Israel’s Haganah, are expelled to Jordan, June 26, 1948. Photo by Benno Rothenberg.

Of all the ridiculous contortions Western media have performed over the past two years to whitewash Israel’s ongoing genocide, the breathless handwringing over the supposed calamity of Israel becoming a “pariah state” is an almost touching display of fevered wishful thinking. In headline after headline, article after article, the self-styled “liberal” press—Haaretz, the New York Times, and the Guardian foremost among them—frets that Israel’s supposed “missteps” might place it at risk of becoming a rogue state, as if unrestrained brutality and open contempt for international law were mere errors of judgment. But only in a looking-glass world could Israel’s pariah status—blindingly evident since its inception—ever be in doubt. If the term has any meaning at all, Israel is its archetype, and always has been.

Yet Israel’s propagandists manufacture a “legitimacy crisis,” rebranding warranted criticism as an effort to “delegitimize” the state and endanger Jews globally. This claim is a fiction, meant only to turn culpability into perceived persecution and cover up well-documented crimes. Honest observers know this is no sudden descent: Israel’s contempt for law, morality, and human life itself is foundational—it was born in blood and terror. Recognizing this longstanding pariah status is essential to challenging the impunity that ensures Israel’s lack of accountability.

While critics rightly note that history did not begin on October 7, 2023, focusing narrowly on Gaza’s post-2006 siege—or even the 1967 occupation—obscures a much older reality. Long before its formal founding in 1948, Zionist militias waged organized terror to force Palestinians from their homes. From the 1920s onward, Zionist organizations such as the Haganah, Irgun, and Lehi carried out bombings, assassinations, and mass intimidation, establishing a political culture in which terror was not exceptional, but intrinsic to their operations. Fittingly enough, two leaders of these terrorist groups would later become prime ministers of the pariah state.

Such a framework of terror set the stage for the 1948 Nakba, during which over 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes and land. Israeli forces committed brutal massacres at Deir Yassin and Tantura—but these are only the most infamous examples. In 1947-48 alone, at least 30 documented massacres left hundreds dead, including children, women, and the elderly. And at countless lesser-known sites civilians were mutilated, raped, and executed en masse. In a perverse calculus, Israeli forces classified all males between 10 and 50 as legitimate targets, effectively sentencing children to death. These were not wartime excesses but deliberate campaigns of mass murder and ethnic cleansing, repeated hundreds of times in the decades that followed.

Nor was the violence confined to shootings. Early Zionist forces pioneered forms of collective terror. Jewish militias rolled explosive-filled barrels into Arab neighbourhoods, set streets ablaze, and machine-gunned residents trying to extinguish the flames. Biological warfare was deployed via typhoid in water supplies, and cars rigged with explosives were sent to Palestinian garages, delivering indiscriminate carnage. This tradition of inventive cruelty persists, most recently in the exploding pagers in Beirut that killed dozens and injured thousands—a crime against humanity—appallingly celebrated by Israel’s prime minister during a January 2025 White House visit when he presented a “golden pager” to the US president.

Since the 1967 occupation, any residual doubt about Israel’s pariah status has vanished. A permanent regime of domination has taken shape: relentless illegal settlement expansion enforced by settler militias operating without fear of repercussion; the 700 kilometre apartheid wall annexing land, isolating communities, and entrenching de facto borders; environmental warfare through sewage dumping, land theft, and the uprooting of over a million olive trees; the routine use of “skunk water” to contaminate homes and neighbourhoods; mass imprisonment without charge; routine torture, sexual violence—including the use of dogs—forced stripping and filming, child detention, and deaths in custody; collective punishment through siege, starvation, and displacement; systematic destruction of homes, hospitals, schools, and cultural life; repeated regional attacks carried out with complete exemption from consequences; and targeted assassinations at home and abroad—Israel is the West’s leading practitioner of political assassination.

As in every colonial project, dehumanization lays the groundwork for atrocity. An Israeli prime minister openly described Palestinians as “beasts walking on two legs,” while another politician referred to Palestinian children as “little snakes,” and still another proclaimed that “every baby in Gaza is an enemy.” Soldiers transform barbarism into spectacle—dancing in looted clothing, mocking the dead, and flaunting stolen children’s belongings. Such institutionalized dehumanization conditions both perpetrators and bystanders, attempting to normalize atrocity and render extreme violence thinkable.

This societal and ideological cruelty is mirrored in Israel’s state-level lawlessness and impunity. The country refuses to submit to international norms: it is an undeclared nuclear power that evades Non-Proliferation Treaty and International Atomic Energy Agency inspections; the most condemned state in United Nations Security Council history, with dozens more resolutions blocked by the US; declared by the International Court of Justice in 2024 to be plausibly committing genocide and maintaining an illegal occupation; sanctioned by the UN General Assembly; and subject to International Criminal Court arrest warrants for its prime minister and defence minister. From its earliest militias to today’s state apparatus, this unbroken pattern of systemic terror marks Israel unmistakably as a pariah.

Israeli soldiers with detained Palestinian women and children in Tantura on May 23, 1948, the date of the Tantura massacre. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

Israeli soldiers with detained Palestinian women and children in Tantura on May 23, 1948, the date of the Tantura massacre. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

Israel insists it faces scrutiny like “no other country,” yet its unprecedented impunity is staggering. Rooted in privileges entrenched since 1948 and reinforced by Western weapons, intelligence, diplomatic cover, and propaganda, this shield is the central barrier to accountability. Nowhere is this more evident than in Israel’s serial breaches of the October 10 ceasefire—violated at least 738 times, resulting in 356 Palestinian deaths (including 67 children) and 908 injuries—an outrage that would provoke global hysteria were Hamas to kill even a fraction of that number of Israeli combatants—let alone civilians—during........

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