A popular version of this story in Washington and London ends with Benjamin Netanyahu leaving office, pushed by those who insisted for years that Israel’s conduct could be corrected by a better coalition, a different attorney general, or a firm speech from an American president. That narrative avoids looking at the state that existed before Netanyahu and will outlast him. He did not devise the 1948 expulsion of Palestinians, the military rule imposed on those who remained until 1966, or the occupation begun in 1967. He inherited a country whose law, land regime, and armed power had already arranged Palestinian life around a single premise: Jewish control must be secured, and Palestinian presence must be managed, broken up, or expelled when it resists.
The war in Gaza stripped away the diplomatic manners from that premise. Israel’s 2018 Nation-State Basic Law reserves national self-determination in the state exclusively to Jewish people and directs the state to encourage Jewish settlement. Palestinian citizens had long lived under planning arrangements that hemmed in their towns while Jewish localities expanded, just as Palestinians under occupation remained subject to military orders while their settler neighbours used Israeli civil law. The 2018 statute placed that existing hierarchy into a Basic Law and asked the world to treat it as constitutional normality.
Focusing on Netanyahu allows foreign governments to condemn an individual leader while renewing military arrangements with the state. Liberal institutions mourn an Israel they prefer to remember, opposing genocide as a personal excess without examining what made Palestinian destruction administratively imaginable in the first place. Netanyahu is corrupt, opportunistic, and fluent in the language of permanent domination, yet the roads joining settlements to Israel, the permits governing Palestinian construction, the military courts trying Palestinians, and the civil protections reserved for settlers were all established before his current coalition. He did not build the machine; he tested its limits.
Occupation is a legal description that has functioned as a diplomatic sedative. The term suggests a temporary interval that will end once negotiators return to a table with maps and coloured lines. In practice, Israel has absorbed the West Bank in incremental administrative moves: a bypass road, an outpost, a firing zone, a closed military area, a planning decision, a declaration of state land. A Palestinian village loses access to its fields; a settlement gains water, paved roads, and armed protection; yet foreign ministries continue to speak of a temporary arrangement.
In July 2024, the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel’s settlements and their associated regime violate international law, concluding that land seizure, settlement construction, infrastructure integration, and the application of Israeli law in occupied territory entrench control intended to endure. The Court detailed the coercive environment created by settler violence, state inaction, and restrictions on Palestinian access to land. This is the legal description of a territorial system designed for permanence.
The road network reveals what diplomatic communiqués hide. A settler drives to Jerusalem or Tel Aviv on highways built to integrate his community into Israel, uses civil courts, and votes for the government ruling the territory. A Palestinian neighbor must seek permission to add a room to a house, navigate military checkpoints, answer to military courts, and watch surrounding land confiscated order by order. The state treats only one population as the public for whom the geography is arranged.
That enterprise depends on an administrative division of labour. The soldier at a checkpoint, the Civil Administration official denying a permit, the planner drawing municipal boundaries, the bank financing housing, and the ministry connecting outposts to the power grid produce a single outcome. The military assault on the evening news is its visible edge, but most of the work proceeds through forms, surveys, zoning lines, and grid connections.
Netanyahu’s cabinet made this ambition explicit. Ministers openly advocate emptying Gaza, building settlements there, and annexing the West Bank, while figures from the settlement movement direct central state offices. That language persists because an electorate, reserve officers, media outlets, and state bureaucrats are structured to execute it.
Treating Netanyahu as the sole problem launders the institution. Foreign governments express concern for Israeli democracy while arming, funding, and normalizing a state that denies equal rights to millions of Palestinians under its control. Liberal Zionist institutions denounce a villain while maintaining that a Jewish state can exercise decisive demographic and territorial control over Palestinians and remain democratic. After Gaza, this framing converts mass killing, starvation, and displacement into a personality defect, as if a replacement cabinet would clear the record.
The divide between liberal Zionism and the settler right is a matter of pace, vocabulary, and institutional preference. One speaks of separation, demographic balance, and a peace process; the other speaks of sovereignty, expulsion, and biblical title. Both accept that Palestinians must not hold equal political power between the river and the sea. One keeps domination presentable at conferences in New York and Berlin; the other operates with rifles, flags, and cabinet portfolios.
Conscription shapes broader civic life. The army functions as an employer, a social credential, and a common language, serving as the institution through which many Jewish Israelis first encounter Palestinians as a security category. A teenager learns to monitor a village through a surveillance feed, calculate threat levels at a checkpoint, and target a family home as a coordinate, then carries that orientation into finance, technology, policing, or politics. Israeli refusers, lawyers, journalists, and anti-occupation organizers face real costs for dissent, but they are dissenting from a state system, not a neutral baseline.
The killing and capture of Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023 were crimes. They were converted into the justification for a war that subjected Gaza’s entire population to bombardment, displacement, hunger, and ruin. Israel claimed to pursue Hamas, yet destroyed homes, hospitals, schools, water infrastructure, bakeries, farmland, and aid routes. A military objective does not erase the civilian character of a population, and collective punishment remains unlawful regardless of security rationales.
In 2025, Israel blocked food, fuel, medicine, and basic supplies from entering Gaza for over two months. By May, the entire population faced severe food insecurity and imminent famine. Hunger did not occur spontaneously; it was engineered through the control of border crossings, inspections, fuel, and distribution channels. Gaza’s civilian population was intentionally locked inside that system.
For years, Israeli political and business elites promoted a specific narrative abroad: a tech-driven democracy, innovative and embattled, pluralist enough for Western investors, and always one breakthrough away from a clean future. That branding converted military and surveillance operations into commercial products, recast weapons technology as innovation, and encouraged foreign investors to view a security state as an R&D laboratory.
The link between occupation and technology is structural. Israel’s military industry developed surveillance tools, drones, facial-recognition software, biometric databases, border systems, and crowd-control hardware through long-term monitoring and movement restrictions imposed on Palestinians. Whether built by private firms or state bodies, these tools stem from a core market reality: a state that treats a population as a permanent security threat creates demand for systems designed to track, sort, and control human beings.
Those tools expand beyond the Green Line and the West Bank. Israeli firms export surveillance, cyber-security, border-management, and policing systems globally, while former military and intelligence personnel move into venture capital, consulting, software, and public procurement. A municipality buys safer streets, a ministry buys border automation, and a police department buys predictive software, relying on products developed through occupation management.
Individuals who leave Israel during wartime are not inherently state envoys; people seek safety, employment, and stability. The critical issue lies in capital, expertise, and institutional networks. When military control becomes a primary export, its infrastructure moves with them.
An entrepreneur who incorporates in Delaware, London, Dubai, or Singapore may cease paying taxes in Israel while remaining integrated into Israeli research teams, military networks, and state contracts. A company can shift its legal headquarters for investor appeal while maintaining R&D in Tel Aviv and advertising credentials earned in units that policed Palestinians. The corporate jurisdiction changes, but the business remains anchored to the security ecosystem.
Capital routinely seeks favorable jurisdictions, moving toward lower taxes, streamlined visas, deeper capital markets, and predictable regulation. The anomaly is the demand that this capital movement be treated as politically neutral while the state providing the security expertise continues to subject Palestinians to conditional and disposable existence.
The Abraham Accords provided more than photo opportunities; they established commercial channels for technology, finance, tourism, logistics, and security cooperation without resolving Palestinian rights. Investment forums, direct flights, and joint ventures proceeded while Palestinians remained under military occupation and Gaza under blockade.
The United Arab Emirates became a central hub by offering capital, global connectivity, tax incentives, and access to African and South Asian markets. Israeli companies opened offices and formed partnerships there, treating Dubai as a commercial refuge from domestic instability. This business activity isolates Israeli commercial networks from the political fallout of the war while leveraging a regional structure that sidelines Palestine.
India represents another key market. The bilateral relationship centers on defense procurement, agriculture, water infrastructure, cyber-security, and tech transfer, anchored by a shared political model that positions security enforcement as modern statecraft. Indian capital and labor provide scale, while Israeli security expertise supplies tools deployed at borders, in urban centers, and against targeted populations. This partnership expands the global market for methods refined through the governance of Palestinians.
Cyprus, Greece, and Mediterranean hubs function as corridors for real estate, capital, and European market access. These are financial and logistical extensions where companies park assets, secure regulatory access, buy property, and insulate themselves from political risk. Where the older settlement project required hilltops, bypass roads, and armed guards, its international network operates through corporate registries, residency programs, venture capital, and airport hubs.
European cities have joined this network. Israeli founders and engineers have relocated or formed hybrid entities across London, Berlin, Lisbon, and Amsterdam, prompted by war, domestic political turmoil, and investor concerns. While individual motives vary including opposition to the government or avoiding military reserve duty the systemic impact remains: host cities import technology sectors tied directly to the products, personnel, and profits of permanent military rule.
Latin America demonstrates the longer history of this model. Israeli weapons, surveillance platforms, and training programs have operated across the region for decades, serving governments managing insurgencies, migration, organized crime, or civil unrest. Framed as technical assistance, the underlying exchange exports governance methods developed through the control of a subjugated population into standard state operations elsewhere.
The settler right cannot sustain this international ecosystem alone. It relies on investors seeking returns without politics, universities pursuing partnerships without scrutiny, municipal governments buying smart infrastructure, donors wanting a democratic narrative, and overseas institutions working to keep Israel palatable to younger demographics. Liberal Zionism provides that institutional respectability.
In North America and Europe, major institutions organize tours, fellowships, gap-year programs, investment drives, and political advocacy around the narrative of a democratic Jewish state. Palestinians are framed as a deferred problem, a security concern, a demographic issue, or a conflict of competing claims. While softer in tone than settler rhetoric, this framework postpones equal rights indefinitely while shielding the state enforcing inequality.
Accusations of collective blame often meet this critique. Rejecting that framing does not require viewing every Israeli abroad as a settler or soldier. It requires recognizing that institutions and commercial networks carry political histories, and host societies bear responsibility for auditing what they purchase, finance, and endorse.
That accountability requires basic due diligence: Does a procurement contract source technology tested under occupation? Does a university partnership overlook the military background of a featured firm? Does an investment fund screen out settlement activity and military surveillance contracts? Does a police department understand the operational doctrine embedded in its equipment? These standard checks are often waived for Israel by treating scrutiny as hostility.
That exemption undermines the claim of exceptional democracy. Democracies are defined by how they allocate rights, conduct warfare, enforce laws, and grant political representation. Israel claims democratic standing based on elections while holding millions of Palestinians under effective military control without voting rights. That contradiction is recorded in the land registry, the permit system, voter rolls, and checkpoints. The term democracy cannot obscure institutional reality.
Gaza exposes the reality behind the policy. A population was repeatedly displaced inside a blockaded enclave, aid was restricted as famine spread, and reconstruction was made conditional on decisions by the state that carried out the destruction. Concurrently, government ministers and settlement groups discussed building Jewish settlements in Gaza. That proposal was not a fringe concept; it reflected the core policy: displace the population, control the land, and define the outcome as security.
The West Bank executes the same plan at administrative speed, implementing annexation through zoning laws, archaeological sites, security zones, public order measures, and settlement expansion. Gaza demonstrates the strategy through military force; the West Bank enforces it through bureaucratic procedure.
Foreign governments cannot oppose annexation while maintaining the military, financial, and diplomatic ties that sustain it. Nor can municipalities and corporations claim neutrality while purchasing equipment, hiring personnel, and hosting capital that monetize occupation as exportable tech. Host institutions must decide whether Palestinian dispossession remains acceptable in their commercial and academic partnerships.
Netanyahu will eventually leave office as governments change and coalitions dissolve. Attributing state policy to his leadership alone obscures the ideology, electorate, institutions, and foreign backers that sustain it. The roads, legal frameworks, weapons systems, surveillance databases, and commercial corridors will remain until directly confronted.