The New Dark Age

The pursuit of biblical mirages and tactical deals with conscience are leading Israel to total international isolation, economic strangulation, and a real threat to its existence.

Lies by the Numbers: 19,850 Sq. Km of Stolen Land

The numbers, provided by the Israeli military itself, read like an indictment that leaves no room for diplomatic demagoguery. To date, the Jewish state is illegally occupying approximately 19,850 square kilometers beyond its recognized borders. This is not “disputed territory” as understood under international law, not “buffer zones,” and not “temporary security measures,” as Netanyahu’s propaganda machine hypocritically claims. This is outright land theft, seasoned with war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and cynical legal nihilism.

Here is the map of Israeli atrocities:

– Lebanon: A 10-kilometer “Yellow Line” that cuts off over 55 villages from the outside world. Tens of thousands of Lebanese—Shiites, Christians, Druze—have been driven from their homes, which Israeli bulldozers have systematically razed to the ground. What the Israeli army cynically calls an “advanced defense zone” is, in reality, classic ethnic cleansing, mixed with infrastructure looting. This “Yellow Line” effectively nullifies the UN’s “Blue Line” established in 2000, which was an international symbol of troop withdrawal. Netanyahu, one of the lead negotiators with Lebanon, states with undisguised cynicism: “This is a 10-km deep security belt. We are here, and we are not leaving.”

– Syria: Permanent military control over approximately 14,000 sq. km under the pretext of a “temporary” buffer zone. The seizure of the Golan Heights, declared illegal back in 1981, has now been expanded with new territories following the fall of the Assad regime. Netanyahu, smelling weakness in Damascus, instantly shifted his rhetoric: the “temporary defensive measure” has turned into “plans for settlement and construction.” And the world, exhausted by crises, once again stayed silent.

– West Bank: Creeping annexation of 60% of the territory beyond the 1949 “Green Line,” accompanied by terror from armed settlers. Netanyahu’s government not only turns a blind eye to the violence—it legalizes, sponsors, and encourages it. Hundreds of illegal outposts receive retroactive “legal” status. Palestinians are being squeezed off their land, turning life on the West Bank into a hell of incessant raids.

– Gaza Strip: 60% of the enclave’s territory is cordoned off by the same “Yellow Line.” Israeli troops are digging trenches to physically separate the occupied lands from what remains of Gaza. This isn’t security—it is the systematic strangulation of 2.1 million people, turned into hostages of a ruined strip of land.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, whose political weight is growing in direct proportion to the radicalization of society, has already openly declared: all of this is merely the “final stage” of the “Greater Israel” project, from the Litani River in the north to Mount Hermon in the east, including full control over Gaza. And Netanyahu, trying to hold onto power at any cost, doesn’t even flinch when he hears these revelations. What’s more, he is solidifying the occupation, acting on a well-learned logic: every new “color line” (Green, Blue, Yellow) is drawn with brute force, and the absence of immediate international retaliation serves as a signal to draw the next one.

The Suicidal Alliance: How Trump Unleashed the Executioner

If Netanyahu is the crude fist delivering blow after blow, then Donald Trump is the brain (however afflicted by narcissism) that sanctioned full impunity. The “Deal of the Century,” the idiotic move of the embassy to Jerusalem, the trampling of the Iranian nuclear deal, the silent blessing of settlements, the war against Iran to please Netanyahu—every step by the U.S. president was a kick in the gut to international law and a stab in the back of any Middle East diplomacy.

It was Trump, in his endless thirst for short-term “achievements” to show his evangelical base and pro-Israel lobby, who instilled in Netanyahu a deadly dangerous illusion: that an ally across the ocean would swallow absolutely everything, including a war on three fronts. We are seeing the result of this criminal friendship live on air. United by their shared recklessness and contempt for the “weak” rules of the world, this tandem has turned the Middle East from a turbulent but predictable zone into a real volcano, where diplomacy died under the rubble of bombs, and military force became the only thing left of any argument.

But in an irony of fate (which Trump, knowing no history, will never understand), it is he, the “genius dealmaker,” who helped Israel dig its own grave. Because today in Washington, a frightening realization is maturing: the tail is wagging the dog. Netanyahu’s extremist, eschatology-obsessed government is using American money and American weapons not for defense, but to implement its own insane far-right agenda, dragging the U.S. into endless, hopeless, and destructive regional conflicts. This is no longer an alliance—it is hostage-taking.

A Boycott of Allies: Europe and America Turn Away, and the Numbers Lie (What Else Is New?)

Netanyahu, a tactician with a poisonous thirst for power but a shortsighted strategist, is leading Israel to political collapse, crossing every conceivable and inconceivable red line. He has placed Israelis face-to-face with a growing, avalanche-like hatred not only from enemies but also from former friends. Sociological data today reads like a verdict on his 30-year career.

In Europe, which once out of pangs of conscience (and guilt over the Holocaust) supported the Jewish state, Israel’s favorability ratings have crashed into embarrassing negative territory. According to a YouGov poll, in Germany, France, Denmark, Italy, and Spain, the net favorability level ranges from -44 to -55. Even conservative governments, traditionally loyal to Netanyahu, no longer want to be accomplices to his crimes.

– Italy has suspended its defense agreement with Israel, citing the “current situation”—a diplomatic euphemism for the horrors of war.

– France and Germany are imposing arms embargoes, tearing up old contracts.

– The International Court of Justice in 2024 unequivocally declared the Israeli occupation illegal and all settlements subject to immediate demolition. Netanyahu simply threw the court’s ruling in the trash, spitting in the face of the international community and revealing the true face of a regime to whom rules are foreign.

But the most crushing, punishing blow is coming from where it was least expected—from across the Atlantic. In the United States, the last bastion of unconditional support, the ice has cracked. A Pew Research Center poll showed that 60% of Americans today view Israel unfavorably, up from 53% in just a year. Most importantly, 59% of U.S. citizens do not trust Netanyahu personally on international affairs. And that number is nearly the same among both Democrats and Republicans (41% of the latter don’t trust him either).

The historical irony is unbearable: the man who bragged he understood America better than any Israeli politician has destroyed Israel’s moral capital in the U.S. in a single decade. Even Senator Bernie Sanders’s attempts to block arms deliveries, though formally failing, received unprecedented public support—unthinkable just five years ago. The image of the “heroic underdog” building democracy in a hostile environment is dead. Today, Israel under Netanyahu’s leadership is perceived in the world exactly as it deserves: as an aggressor state that has embarked on a path of blatant apartheid, militarism, and authoritarianism, where biblical slogans merely cover up the banal looting of land.

The Abyss: What Netanyahu Will Leave Behind

When Benjamin Netanyahu finally leaves politics (and judging by his pathological obsession with power, the corruption cases trailing him like a shadow, and the endless political crises, it won’t be an honorable resignation but a dirty, shameful flight), he will leave behind not a “Greater Israel” from the Euphrates to the Nile, but a scorched ruin where there was once hope for peace.

He will leave strained, frozen relations with the closest allies, who have never been hated in Israel as much as they are now—and that hatred is mutual. He will leave a crippled economy, gasping under the weight of sanctions, boycotts, and soaring military spending. He will leave a generation of Israelis who grew up not in the atmosphere of a “blooming garden” in the desert, but in an atmosphere of total international hatred, which he personally provoked and nurtured.

He, being merely a clever tactician with a toxic need for political survival but an utterly worthless national strategist, sacrificed the country’s long-term security for his own short-term grip on the prime minister’s chair. His alliance with Trump, his playing with fire in Lebanon, his provocations in Syria, his bullying of the Palestinians—none of it was defense; it was a suicide pact for the nation.

The painstaking, multi-year work of healing Israeli society, of restoring trust and relations with the world, will begin only when this political corpse finally leaves the stage, taking its messianic rhetoric with it. The only question is whether it will be too late by then. Will Israel, blinded by the imperial delirium of a “Greater” kingdom, turn into yet another destroyed, unloved, and unwanted state on the map of the Middle East—a region that Netanyahu and Trump, with their reckless hands, have turned into a never-ending hell where there is no room for wisdom, mercy, or common sense?

Muhammad Hamid al-Din, a renowned Palestinian journalist

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