The Manufacture of Impunity. How a Political Apparatus Secures Its Crimes and Captures American Power

Gaza, Lebanon, and the Architecture of a State’s Violence

[This article by Laala Bechetoula was originally published by Global Research. You can read it here.]

A thousand days.

Say it slowly, because Gaza no longer can.

A thousand dawns over a strip of land smaller than a city, each one breaking not upon rooftops but upon their absence.

A thousand nights beneath the same drone that does not sleep, does not blink, does not forgive. There, time is no longer counted in seasons, or harvests, or the growth of children — it is counted in funerals, and in the funerals that could not be held, for want of hands to dig.

A thousand days, and the arithmetic is unbearable: more than 73,000 dead, over 173,000 wounded, 9,500 more still folded into the concrete, waiting for hands that will not come.

More than half of them women, the old, the very small. Twenty-one thousand of them children — a generation entered into a ledger before it could learn to read one. And twelve thousand pregnancies lost — miscarried or ended under starvation and the ruin of the hospitals: a people struck at the root, before breath.

They killed the ones who film it — 262 journalists. They killed the ones who dig for the living — 145 rescuers, 1,700 healers. They did not merely wage a war. They made a method of it — and the world, for a thousand days, agreed to call the method by another name.

This is not about a people, a religion, or a supposed nature. It is about a state, a specific government, and the machinery that has kept its crimes running in broad daylight for a thousand days. Name it precisely — and the thousand days become an indictment that no delay at The Hague, no veto in New York, no bomb out of Washington can any longer disguise.

In 2026 the question is no longer whether crimes are being committed. An unprecedented convergence of independent bodies has settled that. The question is by what mechanism a state commits them in full view, theorizes them, replicates them from one theater to the next, and secures the guarantee of the world’s foremost power. That is the machinery to dismantle.

The Crime Named

The turning point is not rhetorical. It is juridical. On 16 September 2025, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry — chaired by Navi Pillay, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and former judge of the International Criminal Court — concluded that the State of Israel is committing genocide in Gaza (report A/HRC/60/CRP.3). The Commission found four of the five acts defined in Article II of the 1948 Convention: killing; serious bodily or mental harm; the deliberate infliction of conditions of life calculated to destroy the group; and measures intended to prevent births — the axis I have called reprocide.

What makes the report decisive is that it clears the hardest threshold in criminal law: intent — dolus specialis, the specific intent to destroy a group as such. Applying the “only reasonable inference” standard the ICJ set in Bosnia v. Serbia, the Commission holds that the statements of Israel’s highest authorities are direct evidence of that intent. It names Prime Minister Netanyahu, President Herzog, and former Defense Minister Gallant. On 9 October 2023, announcing the total siege, Gallant said: “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.” Some insist he meant only combatants. The immediate context — no water, no food, no electricity, no fuel, for 2.3 million people — led the Commission, and many jurists, to read it as the marking of an entire population.

The finding does not stand alone. It sits in a chain. The ICJ, seized by South Africa, ruled in January 2024 that the harm was “plausible” and ordered provisional measures. Amnesty International concluded genocide in December 2024. The International Association of Genocide Scholars did the same in August 2025. In November 2024 the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant — for crimes against humanity and war crimes, including starvation as a method of warfare. In its advisory opinion of 19 July 2024, the ICJ had already declared the occupation unlawful.

Honesty requires stating what these bodies did not say. The ICJ has not ruled on the merits; the case will run at least until 2029. The label “genocide” remains legally contested: serious jurists see war crimes and crimes against humanity without, in their view, the specific intent being met. And Israel offers a defense coherent on its own terms: a war of self-defense after the 7 October 2023 massacre — roughly 1,200 dead, some 250 hostages — against an organization that deliberately embeds itself in the civilian fabric.

These facts are real, and it is because the analysis contains them that it becomes damning. None of them authorizes the siege of an entire population, the methodical destruction of the health system, the forced displacement of nearly the whole territory, or the diversion of aid — a “facade,” the Commission calls it — masking a policy of starvation. As of 4 July 2026, Gaza’s Health Ministry records more than 73,000 dead and more than 173,000 wounded since October 2023, figures Israel disputes. Here Achille Mbembe’s concept applies without strain: not the power to make live, but necropolitics — the sovereign power to designate who is disposable and to administer death as an instrument of government.

The Engine

A crime of state has a genealogy. Israel’s current government is where two long-separate currents have fused.

The first is the Revisionist Zionism of Vladimir Jabotinsky — the secular, nationalist matrix of which Netanyahu is the direct heir; his father Benzion was Jabotinsky’s secretary. Its doctrine, the “iron wall,” holds that only a force the native population can never break will make settlement possible. It is a politics of raw leverage and territorial maximalism.

The second is Kahanism, the eliminationist eschatology of Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose Kach party was designated a terrorist organization and banned. Its institutional heir, Itamar Ben-Gvir — Minister of National Security, convicted of incitement to racism and support for a terrorist organization, who for years displayed in his home a portrait of Baruch Goldstein, the Hebron massacre perpetrator — has carried that ideology from banned terrorism to sovereign power. Beside him, Bezalel Smotrich embodies the messianic, settler wing.

The decisive fact is that Netanyahu, a secular Revisionist, was the vehicle of this normalization. It was he who, to survive politically, engineered the 2021–2022 merger that brought these currents into government. His responsibility is not doctrinal but instrumental — which is precisely what makes it indefensible. The cynical strategist and the messianic fanatic found each other.

This convergence produces the language that becomes, before the courts, evidence of intent. When ministers call for erasure, deportation, annexation, they are not offering an opinion; they are documenting a project. But distinguish, as a scrupulous analyst must: this project is condemned by a large part of the Jewish and rabbinic world itself, whose highest authorities denounced its supremacist texts as racist. It is an identifiable political current, not a people, that captured the machinery of state. That precision is your strength.

The Method

What unfolds in Lebanon reveals a doctrine, not excess — an openly avowed military theory of disproportion.

The Dahiya doctrine, formulated after 2006 and named for the Beirut suburb leveled that year, prescribes massive, disproportionate force and the deliberate targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure to impose lasting “deterrence.” In law, that is the definition of collective punishment: a war crime elevated into a method.

The application was methodical. In September 2024, the booby-trapped pager operation — thousands of explosives hidden in communication devices, detonated at once — killed some 40 people, civilians among them, and wounded roughly 4,000. It was indiscriminate by design: no one controls who is holding the device at the instant of detonation. Then came the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, under more than 80 bombs, including US-made 2,000-pound bunker-busters, in a residential district. The 2024 war killed, per Lebanon’s Health Ministry, about 2,720 people in Lebanon — most of them civilians — and displaced more than 1.2 million.

The November 2024 ceasefire proved a fiction. UNIFIL documented more than ten thousand Israeli violations. Strikes continued “almost daily,” killing hundreds during the truce. Israel refused to withdraw fully, keeping five positions on Lebanese soil. Then, in 2026, under cover of the war on Iran, the escalation resumed and the mask fell. In March, Minister Smotrich threatened to bombard Beirut’s southern suburbs until they resemble Khan Younis — the Gaza city all but erased. The doctrine no longer hides. It advertises itself as an exportable model.

Probity demands the other side. Hezbollah opened fire on northern Israel on 8 October 2023, violated the truce by rebuilding its arsenal, and resumed fire in 2026. These facts are established. They do not turn a documented collective punishment into a lawful act of war — which is exactly the confusion the Dahiya doctrine is built to install.

The Design

Gaza and Lebanon are not separate episodes. They are faces of one design: the pursuit of a strategic monopoly — permanent military supremacy and the methodical neutralization of any actor capable of contesting it.

This grid explains the 2026 sequence: the war on Iran, the assassination of the Supreme Leader, the fragmentation of what Tehran called the “Axis of Resistance.” Hamas decapitated, Hezbollah stripped of its command, the Syrian corridor collapsed. Add the territorial creep: positions held in south Lebanon, the persistent occupation of the Golan, the annexationist drive in the West Bank. The thread is coherent: to lock the region into an irreversible asymmetry.

Guard here against a shortcut. This design is not the product of a hidden hand. It is the logical terminus of Jabotinsky’s iron wall, scaled from the local to the regional — a doctrine stated for a century, driven to its conclusion by a government that has fused territorial maximalism with messianic eschatology. The novelty is not the intent. It is the impunity that lets the intent be realized. And that impunity has an address: Washington.

The Guarantor

This is the most delicate point — where legitimate analysis and conspiracy theory resemble each other while being opposites. The difference is one word: institutions. Not hidden power, but open, documented, measurable machinery — interest-group politics at its most ordinary.

The academic reference is neither fringe nor suspect: The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (2007), by John Mearsheimer (Chicago) and Stephen Walt (Harvard). Their thesis: the extraordinary level of American support “cannot be fully explained on either strategic or moral grounds.” Three observations follow, each guarding against slippage.

First, the coalition is neither Jewish nor secret — it is plural and public. Mearsheimer and Walt are explicit: this lobby operates like other ethnic interest groups, the Farm Lobby or the NRA. AIPAC ranks among Washington’s most powerful; but the coalition includes, massively, Christian Zionist evangelicals who hold Israel’s expansion to be biblical prophecy fulfilled — what I call geotheological framing — along with gentile neoconservatives.

To locate the problem in a composite political-religious apparatus, and not in an identity, is not a concession. It is what makes the charge true.

Second, the instruments are countable and current. Since 1970 the United States has been the most frequent user of the Security Council veto, chiefly to shield Israel: of 89 American vetoes, 51 were cast for that purpose (UN data, April 2026), at least six of them since October 2023 to block a Gaza ceasefire. Military aid exceeds three billion dollars a year.

That support is materially constitutive of the crime. The bombs that pulverized a Beirut district were American; the UN Commission of Inquiry named the transfer of weapons and jet fuel as a vector of complicity, and called on states to halt it. Mearsheimer and Walt supply the framework; the vetoes of 2024–2025 and the deliveries of 2026 furnish the proof.

Third, confront the strongest objection — coldly. Much Western support is sincere, and nothing like manipulation: the memory of the Shoah; recognition in a state that presents itself as the region’s only democracy; the real strategic value of an ally; genuine sentiment in American opinion. To reduce all of this to “capture” would be an error.

But the sincerity of a sentiment does not explain the shape of a policy — not the veto against a near-unanimous Council, nor the delivery of the very munitions the UN names as complicity. That is where organization works: lobbying does not create the sentiment but channels it, converting diffuse sympathy into parliamentary discipline and automatic alignment.

Manipulation, if the word fits, does not invent the adherence; it translates a real adherence into a policy the national interest, alone, would not dictate.

And the thesis is contested. Stephen Zunes objects that the oil and arms industries shape Middle East policy independently of any lobby. The truth is probably cumulative: strategic interest, the arms trade, ideological affinity, and organized pressure reinforce one another. None of it dissolves the central fact — the alignment exceeds what the American national interest, alone, would justify.

The System

Gather the threads. In Gaza, what four independent bodies call genocide. In Lebanon, an avowed doctrine of collective punishment, offered as a model. In the region, a design of strategic monopoly inherited from the iron wall and radicalized by an unprecedented ideological fusion. And above it all, an influence apparatus that benefits from procedural delay at The Hague, casts the vetoes in New York, and supplies the bombs and the narrative in Washington.

This is the system: impunity is not the absence of law. It is an active production. International law exists — the ICJ orders, the ICC indicts, the UN documents — but it is neutralized upstream of its enforcement by the one power that could compel it and refuses to.

Frantz Fanon saw that the colonized is, first, the one whose death does not register in the colonizer’s ledger. The 2023–2026 sequence extends that ledger to an entire region, and shows that the legal order built in 1945 can be suspended — not by its negation, but by its organized paralysis. The stakes exceed Palestine, Lebanon, or Iran: they are the survival of the idea that law stands above force. If a state can commit, in full view, what the highest institutions call crimes while capturing the guarantee of the world’s foremost power, then it is not only a people that is targeted. It is the principle of a common humanity under a single law.

To name this apparatus precisely — a state, a government, a doctrine, a coalition of interests — is to refuse both the complicity of silence and the trap of the amalgam. It is the only tenable position. It is also the only one that still works.

Addendum — 4 July 2026: Spoken Aloud

Since this text was drafted, Israel’s leaders have offered what is, for the analyst, the most valuable admission of all: they have named the doctrine.

On 1 July 2026, Defense Minister Israel Katz — Gallant’s successor — spoke at a ceremony for soldiers killed in 2006. The IDF, he declared, “will remain in the security zones in Lebanon, Syria and Gaza indefinitely”; it “will not withdraw.” Prime Minister Netanyahu, for his part, restated that there would be no withdrawal from south Lebanon until Hezbollah is disarmed. Israel now controls roughly 1,000 square kilometers across Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria.

What earlier read as the design now reads in the words of the men who hold it: an occupation with no timetable for withdrawal, presented as “defending the borders.” Here restraint is required — and it is yours: the legality of an occupation is for the courts, not the analyst. Recall only that for the Palestinian territory the ICJ has already ruled, its opinion of 19 July 2024 declaring the occupation unlawful; for the zones seized in Lebanon and Syria, the qualification is still to come. The political statement, however, is settled — and it comes from the ministers themselves.

Two facts sharpen its weight. First, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has reported, in recent days, a further expansion of militarized zones in Gaza, shrinking the space left to civilians and obstructing the delivery of aid — displacement, and access to water, medical care, and food, remaining critical. Second — and this connects directly to Washington’s role. Katz states that the principle of non-withdrawal from the “three security zones” was accepted by the United States and written into the military annex of the Israel–Lebanon framework agreement, signed in Washington on 26 June 2026 and confirmed with the head of CENTCOM. Prolonged occupation is thus not merely tolerated by Washington. It is contractually anchored to it.

The counts, finally, as of 4 July 2026. In Gaza: more than 73,000 killed and more than 173,000 wounded since October 2023, per Gaza’s Health Ministry — Israel now occupying between half and nearly 70 percent of the enclave. In Lebanon: for the phase opened on 2 March 2026 alone, 4,301 killed and 12,199 wounded, per Lebanon’s Health Ministry (as of 3 July), on top of the roughly 2,720 dead of the 2024 war; about 400,000 displaced have returned to their villages, tens of thousands still without shelter. These figures are provisional; they shift with each update, and with each body pulled from the rubble.

For a thousand days the crime was qualified, contested, deferred — the intent inferred, the occupation denied, the toll disputed. On the thousand-and-first, the minister said it without ornament: they will not leave.

The apparatus has stopped hiding, and the analyst’s task is nearly done. What remains is the question no court and no capital has answered as plainly: whether the law that names these acts will ever be permitted to reach them.

A thousand days is not a commemoration. It is a countdown no one has agreed to stop — and what it measures is older and larger than Gaza: whether law can still outlive force, or has become only the language the strong consent to speak when it costs them nothing.

The rubble will be cleared; the precedent will not.

***

Sources

ICJ, Application of the Genocide Convention in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel), Case No. 192 — provisional measures (26 Jan., 28 March, 24 May 2024); merits pending (icj-cij.org/case/192).

ICJ, Advisory Opinion on the legal consequences of the occupation, 19 July 2024.

UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the OPT, Legal analysis of the conduct of Israel in Gaza pursuant to the Genocide Convention, A/HRC/60/CRP.3, 16 Sept. 2025 (chair: Navi Pillay); OHCHR press release, same day.

Amnesty International, “You Feel Like You Are Subhuman” (Dec. 2024); statement by Agnès Callamard (17 Sept. 2025).

International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), resolution of 31 Aug. 2025.

International Criminal Court, arrest warrants for B. Netanyahu and Y. Gallant, 21 Nov. 2024.

Y. Gallant statement (“complete siege” / “human animals”), 9 Oct. 2023 — Times of Israel, Middle East Eye, Al Jazeera.

B. Smotrich threat (Beirut’s southern suburbs “like Khan Younis”), March 2026 — Anadolu / Walla / Middle East Monitor.

Lebanon Ministry of Health; UNIFIL (ceasefire violations, Nov. 2024 onward); chronologies of the 2024 and 2026 Lebanon wars.

On the Dahiya doctrine: Gadi Eisenkot (2008); literature on collective punishment.

US vetoes: UN Security Council official veto list (89 US vetoes, 51 for Israel, April 2026); Security Council Report; UN News (ceasefire vetoes, 2023–2025).

John J. Mearsheimer & Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (2007); founding article, London Review of Books, 23 March 2006. Counterpoint: Stephen Zunes et al.

July 2026 developments: – Defense Minister Israel Katz on the indefinite hold of the “security zones” (Lebanon, Syria, Gaza), 1 July 2026 — Jerusalem Post, Times of Israel, Asharq al-Awsat, L’Orient Today, Middle East Monitor, Reuters; Netanyahu on non-withdrawal from south Lebanon (Reuters). – US-sponsored Israel–Lebanon framework agreement, signed in Washington on 26 June 2026; military annex and CENTCOM confirmation (Times of Israel). – OCHA / ochaopt.org, humanitarian updates (expansion of militarized zones in Gaza, access restrictions), July 2026. – Gaza Health Ministry: 73,000+ killed, 173,000+ wounded (as of early July 2026). Lebanon Health Ministry: 4,301 killed, 12,199 wounded since 2 March 2026 (as of 3 July 2026) — WAFA. Displaced returns in Lebanon: Reuters; Nabatieh reconstruction: Al Jazeera. – Cumulative Israeli territorial control (~1,000 km²: Gaza, Lebanon, Syria) — France 24. – 1,000-day milestone (2 July 2026): figures from Gaza’s Health Ministry and Government Media Office — 73,000+ killed, 173,000+ wounded, ~9,500 missing under rubble, 21,000+ children killed (PCBS), 12,000+ pregnancies lost, 262 journalists and 145 rescue workers killed; 1,059 killed since the 10 October 2025 ceasefire. Coverage: PBS NewsHour, AP, Palestine Chronicle, The New Arab, Save the Children.

Note: the legal qualifications (“genocide,” “war crimes”) are attributed here to the bodies that issued them. The ICJ has not ruled on the merits; the characterization remains contested by the State of Israel and by part of the legal scholarship. This is political analysis, not a finding of individual guilt.

Laala Bechetoula is an independent Algerian historian, journalist, and geopolitical analyst. He has been writing on Trump, American hegemony, and the collapse of the international order since 2025. His work appears in Countercurrents, Global Research, Réseau International, Le Quotidien d’Oran, Sri Lanka Guardian, and other international platforms. This article integrates and crowns a corpus of analytical work produced between November 2025 and April 13, 2026.

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).