Netanyahu: Architect of Apartheid and Carnage
Decades of occupation, ethnic cleansing and mass murder disguised as Israeli “self-defence” — Netanyahu’s true legacy exposed.
One-time former editor of The Australian, Paul Kelly, has always been a reasonably balanced journalist, but his piece in today’s copy of the paper isn’t journalism. It’s an extension of Israeli state propaganda — manufactured, curated, and delivered through the tightly controlled Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC) media tours that Kelly himself took part in.
AIJAC-sponsored delegations exist for one reason: to cultivate sympathetic journalists, tightly control what they see, and ensure that Israeli government narratives dominate Australian public discourse.
The result is exactly what Kelly delivered: a glorification of Benjamin Netanyahu as a military mastermind, fighting existential wars on multiple fronts, while barely acknowledging the reality that Israel has been the principal aggressor, occupier, and violator of international law for more than 75 years.
Netanyahu is not the "war leader" Kelly so admiringly describes. He is the architect of one of the most sustained systems of modern state terror: illegal military occupation, home demolitions, systemic ethnic cleansing, the suffocating siege of Gaza, mass civilian slaughter, and the day-to-day oppression of Palestinians under apartheid rule. His legacy is not complex or tragic. It is criminal.
Kelly’s framing of Hamas and Hezbollah as “terror groups” obediently parrots Israeli government talking points while stripping away any context of Israel’s decades of aggression, dispossession, and colonial violence. These groups exist because of Israel’s occupation and military brutality, not in spite of it. They are resistance movements born out of the simple fact that Palestinians have been denied basic human rights, sovereignty, and dignity for generations.
Throughout his article, Kelly labours to portray October 7 as some unprecedented evil that transformed Israel’s moral universe. Yet he makes no serious attempt to confront the policies and actions that fuelled the conflict for decades prior: Israel’s daily violence, settlement expansion, mass incarceration of Palestinians without charge, blockades, targeted assassinations, and decades of failed peace efforts systematically sabotaged by Netanyahu himself.
The hypocrisy is breathtaking. Kelly speaks of Israel’s "moral dilemmas" while ignoring the reality that more than 55,000 Palestinians — overwhelmingly civilians — have been slaughtered in Gaza under Netanyahu’s orders, with homes, hospitals, schools, refugee camps and critical civilian infrastructure systematically obliterated. This is not "tragic collateral damage" — it is the inevitable result of a policy that treats Palestinian lives as expendable.
Kelly’s use of Netanyahu’s own language — that Israel “works according to a simple rule: whoever harms us, we harm them” — perfectly encapsulates the policy of collective punishment that defines Israeli military strategy. Under international law, collective punishment is a war crime. Yet Kelly presents it as reasonable statecraft.
Even within Israel, Netanyahu stands accused by his own former Prime Ministers — including Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak — of prolonging the war to serve his personal political survival, enabling the far-right, and committing what even Olmert now describes as “a war of annihilation … brutal and criminal killing of civilians.”
The AIJAC tour Kelly attended never placed him inside the ruins of Gaza, or among the millions of displaced Palestinians living under military rule. Instead, it offered him carefully selected briefings designed to reinforce the myth of Israel as eternal victim, fighting an unprovoked war for survival. The result is this deeply compromised "analysis," which functions not as journalism but as Israeli state PR packaged for Australian consumption.
Netanyahu’s true legacy is clear: apartheid, war crimes, regional destabilisation, the collapse of any peace process, and a growing international recognition of Israel as a rogue state. His leadership has not secured Israel’s future; it has made permanent war inevitable.
Journalists like Paul Kelly continue to serve as stenographers for this regime is not just a failure of journalism — it is complicity.
Netanyahu has also admitted that he has been arming Palestinian gangs tied to Daesh in order to counter the influence of Hamas. Daesh, which is better known as Islamic State (IS), ISIS, or ISIL, can hardly be deemed "nice guys." They are in fact a jihadist group.
The decision to work with such people leads one to question whether Bibi is in fact a "military mastermind." Then again, the facts about what is going on in Gaza, the West Bank, and elsewhere lead us to question how the Zionists can argue that they are "fighting existential wars."
It is creepy how so many people, otherwise often reasonable, can spew out such obvious propaganda. You do wonder if on one of those visits to Ziorael they had chips implanted in their heads.