Bibi's days are numbered, but what replaces him and what does it mean for Palestine?

Benjamin Netanyahu has long been the symbol of Israeli intransigence, corruption, and brutal apartheid. But his reign, kept alive through racist incitement, alliances with the far right, and a calculated cultivation of fear is cracking. His days are numbered. Just this week he showed his true colours by turning on his most ardent western supporters. The real question now is: what comes after him? And will it offer anything different for Palestinians living under occupation, siege, or second-class citizenship? The answer, tragically, is probably not. At least not unless power begins to shift from within, from below, and from beyond Zionism itself.

The Netanyahu coalition is crumbling under the weight of its own contradictions. His alliance with extremist settlers like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, the political equivalent of arsonists managing a fire brigade, has backfired. These zealots, who openly advocate for ethnic cleansing (Haaretz, 2022), have dragged Israel to the brink of fascism. Meanwhile, Netanyahu’s "judicial overhaul": a euphemism for turning Israel into a de jure autocracy, has sparked unprecedented protests among Israeli Jews. But let's be clear: these demonstrations have mostly been about preserving internal Jewish democratic norms, not about justice for Palestinians (+972 Magazine, 2023). While thousands flood the streets over constitutional changes, Israel continues to bomb Gaza, expand settlements, and maintain an open-air prison in the West Bank.

And for even daring to discuss this, Jews on the left are berated as 'Kapo's' and 'self-hating Jews' by the Zionists both in Israel and in the diaspora. I feel like I need to say this every time I write about Israel and that speaks volumes about our country's complicity in this, both politically and in the media: calling Jewish anti-Zionists 'self-hating Jews' is just a desperate tactic used to shut down debate and protect Israeli impunity. It’s not an argument, it’s an ad hominem smear. Jews who oppose Zionism are not only not betraying their identity; they are honouring a long tradition of Jewish ethics rooted in justice, solidarity with the oppressed, and opposition to nationalism as idolatry. Something that is clearly absent in Israel. As for accusations of antisemitism being wielded to conflate Israel with Judaism, this is one of the most dangerous manipulations of our time. It turns legitimate criticism of a state into a hate crime, and in doing so, it makes actual antisemitism harder to fight. When everything becomes antisemitism, nothing is. Zionism doesn’t get to monopolise Jewish identity. Judaism existed for thousands of years before 1948, and it will outlive the apartheid too.

So who replaces him? Netanyahu’s fall won't usher in a leftist renaissance. Yair Lapid? A centrist liberal who called Operation Protective Edge (the 2014 assault on Gaza that killed over 2,200 Palestinians, including 500 children) 'justified' and boasted that 'no country in the world acts with as much morality as Israel' (Times of Israel, 2014). Benny Gantz? A general who ran a campaign ad bragging about bombing Gaza 'back to the Stone Age' (Haaretz, 2019). Even Meretz, once the darling of the liberal Zionist left, couldn't survive the last election. Why? Because liberal Zionism is a contradiction in terms: you cannot reconcile ethno-nationalism with equal rights, just as apartheid South Africa couldn't be 'reformed' from the inside. The so-called 'Zionist Left' is complicit in occupation. Labor built the settlements. Barak offered Bantustans. Herzog allies with Netanyahu on Gaza. These are not alternatives, they are different shades of colonialism.

Let’s say Netanyahu is ousted tomorrow. The occupation will continue. The siege on Gaza and the bombing will continue. Administrative detention, home demolitions, child arrests, military checkpoints, sniper killings at the fence, ALL will continue. Why? Because these are not Netanyahu’s inventions. They are core functions of the Zionist project: to maintain a Jewish ethnostate in a land where millions of non-Jews live and resist. Palestinians will not be liberated by a change in the Israeli prime minister. Their liberation will come in spite of Israeli elections, not because of them. True justice means dismantling apartheid, ending the occupation, and guaranteeing the right of return for Palestinian refugees, a right enshrined in international law (UN Resolution 194) and denied for 77 years. It is heavily embedded in Israeli culture. Today is Yom Yerushalayim, or Jerusalem Day. This holiday celebrates the reunification of Jerusalem following the Six Day War in 1967. The far right in Israel see this as a stepping stone to eretz Israel, or returning the state to the borders of what they believe was the Davidic Kingdom. This is settler colonial expansionism wrapped up in Bronze age mythology in a 77 year old country trying to create a national identity.

One of the most dishonest and intellectually lazy smears levelled against anti-Zionists, especially Jewish ones, is that we want to 'destroy Israel'. But challenging Zionism is not about erasing Jews, Jewish life, or even necessarily the concept of an Israeli state. It’s about ending a system of domination that denies millions of Palestinians their rights based on their ethnicity, and which relies on permanent militarism, dispossession, and racial supremacy. To be clear: Israel exists. The question is what kind of state it is. A Jewish supremacist state, as it is now, defined in the 2018 Nation-State Law as belonging only to Jews (Israel Knesset, 2018), is incompatible with democracy, let alone justice. If Israel is to continue existing, it must be as a state of all its citizens, Jewish and Palestinian alike. This doesn't mean pushing Jews into the sea. It means pulling Palestinians out of the rubble, out from behind the wall, and into the political, civic, and human dignity they have been systematically denied.

We need to look at Theodore Hertzl and his Zionist dream. Herzl imagined a secular, European-style liberal state where Jews could live free from persecution, integrated among their neighbours with full civil rights for all. In Der Judenstaat (1896), he explicitly proposed that the future Jewish state must offer equal rights to non-Jews. But Israel today bears little resemblance to Herzl’s enlightened nationalism. Instead of being a safe haven, it has become a militarised ethnocracy that systematically denies millions of Palestinians basic rights. Rather than ensuring equality, it enshrines Jewish supremacy in law that culminated in the 2018 Nation-State Law, which downgrades Arabic and institutionalises apartheid. Herzl believed Zionism would end antisemitism by normalising Jews among the family of nations. But in practice, political Zionism has made Jewish safety contingent on state violence, racial hierarchy, and permanent conflict, fuelling not peace, but isolation and backlash. He was also a person of his time. A native of the Austro-Hungarian Empire envisioning a homeland in the Ottoman Empire. World War I say the end of both of these great powers and both Britain and France carved up to Ottoman Levant between them using a ruler and crayon. To challenge Zionism today is not to betray Herzl’s ideals, it is to ask whether those ideals were ever viable in a settler-colonial framework in the first place. Furthermore it is to demand a future that puts justice above nationalist fantasy. Irrespective of whether you are Jewish, Christian or Muslim. All have an equal and valid claim to be there and to live there in peace.

Herztl: “We shall be grateful to receive the support of all nations and we shall not forget that the interests of all must be considered.”
He even envisioned Arabic as an official language alongside Hebrew.

A non-Zionist, de-colonial future isn’t just good for Palestinians. It’s good for Israelis and for the entire region. Zionism has locked Israel into a siege mentality, one where peace is only possible through supremacy. That has made Israel not a 'light unto nations', but a pariah: militarised, paranoid, and addicted to external threats. Peace with neighbours like Lebanon, Syria, and Iran is impossible when your identity is built on racial hierarchy. But if Israel became a true democracy, whether one-state or two, it could unlock a new regional order based on cooperation, not domination. Imagine an Israel that was no longer feared, but trusted. That begins with acknowledging Palestinian humanity and rights.

The Israeli right: from Likud in the Knesset to Weiss and the messianic settler movement in the West Bank has been taught for decades that Palestinian lives don’t matter, and that Jewish safety can only be secured through walls, guns, and preemptive violence. This is ideological poison. Deprogramming this mentality will take time. It requires a reckoning inside Israel, akin to Germany’s Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the post-Holocaust process of confronting historical guilt and complicity. Yes I know that's specifically making a comparison between the actions of Israel and Nazi-Germany has been weaponised as an example of the EHRC definition, but let's be honest, if it quacks like a duck. We've seen what Israel has done in Gaza in real time and for that matter on the West Bank. There must be curricula in schools that teach the Nakba honestly. There must be a new civic ethos built not on victimhood and vengeance, but on empathy and accountability. This isn't utopian, it’s necessary. Israel cannot survive without it and no society built on dehumanisation survives without eventually turning on itself.

And a two-state solution? is it still viable? Now that is a question. Many view a two-state solution as increasingly unworkable not because they oppose the idea of Palestinian sovereignty, but because Israel has already fragmented Palestinian territory beyond repair. Over 750,000 Israeli settlers live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem (B'Tselem, 2023), connected by Jewish-only roads and guarded by an army that treats Palestinians as enemies in their own land. Still, if Palestinians themselves demand two states as a transitional path to dignity and rights, that must be respected. What must not be tolerated is using the two-state rhetoric to delay justice indefinitely, as the Israeli government and its Western backers have done for decades. The real principle is self-determination. One state, two states, confederation, whatever structure allows Palestinians and Jews to live as equals in peace and that is all what matters.

^{Who left the gates open at the cunt farm?}

Let’s say the quiet thing out loud: Zionism survives not just through tanks and airstrikes, but through a vast, well-funded network of international complicity. From AIPAC to the Israeli arms industry to lobby groups embedded in Western governments, media, and universities, the global Zionist apparatus distorts discourse, smears dissent, and criminalises solidarity. It helped write laws that ban BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) in over 35 U.S. states (ACLU, 2022), and punishes artists, students, and academics who dare to speak the truth about apartheid. Breaking the hold of these lobbies is not antisemitic, it is anti-complicity and pro-humanist. It is a demand that Western governments stop arming, funding, and politically shielding a regime engaged in daily war crimes. If your solidarity with Jews requires silencing Palestinians, then it’s not solidarity. It’s supremacism in disguise.

And I cannot stress this enough, challenging Zionism is not about Jewish self-erasure. It’s about rejecting a project that confuses safety with supremacy, and justice with walls. The path forward lies in decolonisation not just in land, but in minds. That means breaking from Zionist ideology and imagining a future based not on borders and bombs, but on shared freedom. Netanyahu may fall. But unless Zionism itself is interrogated, dismantled, and replaced with a vision rooted in justice for all, his legacy will live on.

If there is hope, it lies in anti-Zionist solidarity: among Palestinians resisting on the ground, in Israeli Jews refusing conscription and rejecting apartheid, and in global movements, especially within the Jewish diaspora, who are no longer buying the 'self-defence' narrative. Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow, and other radical Jewish groups are making clear: being Jewish does not mean endorsing apartheid. As Hannah Arendt warned in 1948, Zionism's logic of sovereignty through force would produce 'a Jewish nation that is chauvinist and militarist' (Arendt, "To Save the Jewish Homeland," 1948). She was bang on the nail.

Netanyahu will go. If there is any justice he might even end up in jail. But the system of Zionism that birthed him, sustained him, and normalised his crimes remains. If we want to imagine a just future for Palestine, not just a post-Bibi Israel, we must look beyond elections, beyond 'reforms' and toward liberation. That means challenging Zionism itself.

The world has gone mad. If you enjoyed reading this, please feel free to look at the rest of the blogs on www.TetleysTLDR.com. They're free to view, there's no paywall, they aren't monetised and I won't ask you to buy me a coffee. Also please free to share anything you find of interest, we only get the message out if people are aware of it. Just a leftie, standing in front of another leftie, asking to be read. All the best, Tetley