Bibi Kills

by Cesar Jaramillo | June 25, 2025

With Benjamin Netanyahu, the atrocities pile up faster than the outrage can register. Forty killed here, seventy-eight there, another hundred and twenty on a different front. A family of eight wiped out. A dozen emergency workers buried under rubble. Two dozen killed while waiting for food.

Then, with a dubious pretext, an illegal bombing campaign in Iran – now joined by the United States – escalating the risk of a bloody regional, if not global, conflict.

Day after day, body counts rise. International Humanitarian Law is trampled on. Tensions exacerbated. And still he doubles down.

He recently declared that “Free Palestine” is the modern-day equivalent of “Heil Hitler,” as if that would shame everyone into silence. As if grotesque comparisons could erase the war crimes, repair the ruins of Gaza, or make the world unsee what it has already seen.

His government’s latest aerial blitz on Iran, coming amid the continued devastation of Gaza and rising violence across multiple regional fronts, is not only unlawful – it dramatically undermines the prospects for a diplomatic solution to the Iran nuclear issue. Now he has drawn the United States into this illegal and unnecessary war.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s recklessness is rapidly pushing the Middle East toward catastrophe – and, potentially, the rest of the world with it.

Scrutiny Warranted – and Necessary

The Hamas-led attacks of October 7 – deliberate massacres of civilians, kidnappings, and indiscriminate rocket fire – were abhorrent violations of international law and basic human morality. They merit unequivocal condemnation, as does the continued holding of hostages, who must be released without delay.

And while Iran has the legal right to pursue peaceful nuclear technology under the NPT, it must provide credible assurances that it will not develop nuclear weapons, both as a matter of legal obligation and self-interest – because doing so would not enhance its security, but rather increase regional volatility.

But acknowledging these truths does not lessen the gravity of Netanyahu’s own choices, nor does it justify the abandonment of international norms in response.

And let’s be clear: this is not a denunciation of the people of Israel, nor of their legitimate right to live in peace and security. It is a denunciation of the reckless, unlawful, and morally bankrupt policies of the Netanyahu government – policies that endanger not only Palestinians, but Israelis as well.

Looming over all of this is a powerful deterrent – not against war crimes, but against criticism. The chilling effect of casually and cynically equating legitimate criticism with antisemitism cannot be overstated.

Conflating criticism of Netanyahu’s disastrous policies with hatred toward a people is a clever tactic – but one that must not be allowed to obscure the urgent need for accountability and change.

In some circles, it has become a reflex: raise your voice against the bombardment of Gaza, question the morality of occupation, challenge the double standards of Western governments – and suddenly you’re smeared as bigoted, as hateful, as anti-Jewish.

This is not only intellectually lazy, it is morally reckless. It dilutes the meaning of real antisemitism, which must be condemned wherever it arises. And it insulates state violence – and those primarily responsible, like Netanyahu – from scrutiny.

Criticism of a government’s actions – especially one that receives billions in military aid and routinely flouts international law – is not an attack on a people. It is an act of accountability. To suppress it is to say that some states, uniquely, should operate above the rules the rest of the world is meant to follow. That is not justice. That is a license to brutalize with impunity.

Nuclear Hypocrisy

Netanyahu has long styled himself as a bulwark against existential threats. But who, in this deadly game of projection, is truly existential to whom? Iran, for all its rhetoric and regional meddling, is not the nuclear-armed party here. Israel is. And it is Israel – not Iran – that is bombing nuclear facilities, not as a defensive act but as a pre-emptive, escalatory strike with no international mandate and no concern for the fallout, literal or figurative.

Israel is the only country in the Middle East with nuclear weapons. It has never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), never opened its program to international inspection, and never formally acknowledged its nuclear arsenal. Iran, by contrast, remains a signatory to the NPT. And despite legitimate Western concerns and sustained efforts to prevent it from developing a bomb, there is no credible intelligence indicating that Iran is currently doing so.

As Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard put it in March 2025, the U.S. Intelligence Community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.” That is not an Iranian claim – it is a U.S. assessment. And yet, while diplomacy was still possible – while the revival of the 2015 nuclear deal (JCPOA) remained within reach – Netanyahu did everything he could to sabotage it.

The irony is staggering: the only nation with a nuclear arsenal in the region is also the loudest voice warning of nuclear threats.

In Gaza, entire families have been wiped out. Hospitals, schools, and UN shelters bombed. Aid convoys blocked. More than 55,000 Palestinians are dead and counting, the majority women and children. Yet Netanyahu insists it is Israel under existential threat. And Western leaders, unwilling to cross political red lines, parrot the same tired slogans about Israel’s “right to defend itself,” as if this were a limitless license to destroy.

It isn’t. International law doesn’t permit disproportionate attacks. It doesn’t permit collective punishment. It doesn’t permit one state to dictate who may enrich uranium for peaceful purposes while holding a clandestine nuclear stockpile of its own.

This is the incoherence at the heart of Western foreign policy. If it is to champion a rules-based international order, then those rules must apply to everyone. That includes Israel. And that includes Netanyahu.

And what is this so-called rules-based international order that Western leaders so often invoke? Well, here are some of the rules: the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. The International Criminal Court. The Arms Trade Treaty. The Political Declaration on Explosive Weapons in Populated Areas. The Chemical Weapons Convention. The Biological Weapons Convention. The Safe Schools Declaration. And, of course, the bedrock of it all – International Humanitarian Law.

But when it comes to Netanyahu, he is unbound. Cluster munitions in civilian zones? Strategic necessity. Collective punishment of an occupied population? Regrettable, but understandable. Targeting medical infrastructure? Disputed. The institutions meant to protect civilians and restrain violence are routinely ignored or undermined – not by states alone, but by their supposed guardians.

What credibility remains when the nations that claim to uphold these norms are the very ones shielding the violators from accountability? When war crimes are met with “concern” rather than consequences? The moral scaffolding of the international order collapses when its loudest champions apply its principles only to their adversaries.

Institutionalized Impunity

Netanyahu loves to cloak his militarism in the language of civilization. He presents his warpath as a noble stand for the West, for modernity, for decency itself – against what he calls barbarism. It is a seductive narrative: a beacon of democratic values fending off hordes of irrational enemies. But no amount of rhetorical varnish can mask the brutality underneath. What civilization lays siege to hospitals and refugee camps? What democracy rigs pagers to explode in marketplaces and calls it ingenuity? What moral order turns its nuclear monopoly into a shield for impunity, while decrying existential threats?

To call this “civilization” is to empty the word of meaning. His methods – indiscriminate bombings, political assassinations, the weaponization of suffering – are not the defense of civilized norms. They are a desecration of them. And the world’s failure to confront that hypocrisy only deepens the rot.

One of the most disturbing features of Israel’s security doctrine under Netanyahu is the routine use of assassination as a tool of state policy – especially against Iranian scientists, military officials, and perceived political adversaries. These killings are not covert anomalies; they are often publicly celebrated, quietly acknowledged by officials, and reported by media outlets with a chilling matter-of-factness: “Israel assassinates another…” As if this were normal. As if extrajudicial killing were simply a footnote in foreign policy.

This normalization of murder by drone, by bomb, by bullet – carried out far from any battlefield and in peacetime contexts – ought to set off alarm bells. Yet the international response ranges from muted unease to outright complicity. There is little political cost to be paid when powerful allies look the other way.

Murder has been normalized. Accountability, abandoned. And with each new killing, each new bombing of a civilian area, the threshold for what is considered acceptable behaviour by a state actor drops lower still. That is not strength. That is impunity dressed as strategy. It is the rule of force replacing the force of rules.

Recall Israel’s 2024 “pager bomb” operation in Lebanon, where thousands of ordinary communication devices – pagers and walkies-talkies – were rigged with hidden explosives and distributed via Hezbollah’s supply channels. When they detonated in fruit markets, mosques, hotel rooms, and taxi cabs, over 40 civilians were killed and thousands injured. Even ambulances arriving to help were targeted.

The technical audacity of the operation drew praise in some Western circles for its “ingenuity,” while the blatant illegality and indiscriminate carnage were largely glossed over. There was no regard for the laws of war, no effort to distinguish combatants from civilians.

Then there is the silent annexation – the steady, calculated expansion of illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. These are not fringe outposts or ambiguous zoning disputes; they are systematic violations of international law, condemned by the United Nations, reaffirmed by the International Court of Justice, and clearly prohibited under the Fourth Geneva Convention. Yet the bulldozers roll on. New housing units rise on confiscated land.

And what does the so-called international community do? Express “concern.” Issue statements. Occasionally abstain.

This silence is not neutral. It is complicity in the slow-motion erasure of a people’s right to territory, sovereignty, and self-determination. The normalization of illegality – the quiet acceptance of what international law calls inadmissible – is a betrayal not just of Palestinians, but of the very idea that laws, not force, should govern international conduct.

Will Anyone Stop Him?

So yes, Bibi kills. He kills talks. He kills norms. He kills international agreements. He kills hope. And he kills people – lots of them.

What remains to be seen is whether anyone will stop him – whether global powers will keep enabling this highly destructive individual, or whether they will finally impose the accountability they so often demand of others. The world is not safer because of Netanyahu’s crusades. It is more fractured, more volatile, and more vulnerable to catastrophic escalation.

The tragedy is not only that he has taken this path, but that too many are still condoning it, scared. Or complicit.

Cesar Jaramillo is Executive Director at SANE Policy Institute.