The Illusion of Legitimacy

There’s a grotesque symmetry in what’s happening today. Jews are being blamed for Netanyahu’s actions, and Muslims for Hamas’s. Both peoples are being forced to carry the moral debts of leaders who trade in suffering. It’s collective punishment on a global scale – the guilt of association weaponised to justify prejudice.

Neither Hamas nor the Israeli government holds any moral legitimacy. Hamas lost it the moment it made slaughter its politics – reducing human life to a negotiating tool and wrapping it in the rhetoric of liberation. Netanyahu’s government lost it by confusing security with retribution and treating occupation as birthright. They are mirror images, each justifying the other, each feeding on fear.

But let’s not pretend this began in October or in Gaza. Likud’s legitimacy is itself a hollow shell. It clings to power through a blend of religious nationalism, patronage, and judicial vandalism. It calls itself a democracy while dismantling the very institutions that make democracy possible. When a government must gut its own Supreme Court to stay in power, it ceases to represent a people – it represents its own survival.

Netanyahu’s corruption trials, his coalition of theocrats and ultranationalists, his calculated divisions – all of it reeks of the same rot that hollowed out other democracies before they fell. Elections don’t sanctify tyranny. Votes mean nothing if they’re cast under the spell of fear, propaganda, and divine mandate.

And Hamas? It’s the perfect enemy – violent enough to justify Israel’s worst instincts, cynical enough to thrive on Palestinian misery. Each relies on the other. Without Hamas, Netanyahu loses his eternal war narrative. Without Netanyahu, Hamas loses its recruiting seraph. Between them, they’ve trapped millions in a feedback loop of vengeance.

Then come the bad actors in Western politics and media, muddying the moral waters even further – those who brand any criticism of Israel as antisemitic, and who conflate support for the Palestinian cause with sympathy for Hamas. It’s a deliberate strategy, designed to choke debate and polarise the world into false camps. The result is a politics where empathy is treason, and nuance is heresy.

Meanwhile, the West postures as referee while arming both sides by proxy. It lectures about restraint as bombs fall on apartment blocks and hostages rot underground. It wrings its hands about antisemitism and Islamophobia while quietly enabling both to flourish.

Strip it all back and what remains is a moral vacuum – two powers claiming divine right, both feeding on trauma, both morally bankrupt. The only legitimate authority now would be anyone with the courage to stop the killing without insisting first on being right.