Wag the dock

On 10 November, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stood before the newly sworn-in 26th Knesset and delivered a deeply unhinged address. In a ferocious diatribe demanding a "national unity government", he categorically denounced his political opponents and branded Arab lawmakers as "terror supporters" and "haters of Israel" who actively seek the destruction of the Jewish state. Yashar party leader Gadi Eisenkot rightfully condemned the hate-filled spectacle, stating unequivocally that it proved Netanyahu unfit for the highest office. The underlying machinations are entirely transparent. The speaker election was deliberately dragged out to give Netanyahu a crucial window to dismantle the change coalition forming under Eisenkot. For Netanyahu, staying in power is synonymous with evading a litany of corruption charges. Achieving this requires subjecting his own people to endless suffering and externalising his political survival into a constant, unresolvable war abroad.

What is at stake in this cynical manoeuvre is not merely regional stability in the Levant. It is the human future and the foundational structure of civilisation itself.

To understand the precise mechanics of how we arrived here, one must revisit the geopolitical desperation of the early 2020s. When the global war on terror appeared to be finally winding down, the military-industrial complex and embattled strongmen urgently needed a new forever war to justify their mandates. Pop culture often betrays state neurosis. In the prominent Netflix series Messiah, a Central Intelligence Agency analyst lectures a barista who is reading Samuel Huntington, asserting with absolute conviction that the "Clash of Civilisations" was right all along.

Huntington's thesis was never merely an academic observation; it is a meticulously manufactured geopolitical weapon. It provides the necessary intellectual architecture to invent an existential enemy, prime the public through relentless propaganda and engineered victimhood, and create a shock-and-awe crisis that plays directly to the basest bloodlust of the ordinary citizen.

This catastrophic playbook is certainly not confined to the Middle East. The trajectory of India under the leadership of Narendra Modi and Amit Shah mirrors this pathology with terrifying precision. The ideological localisation of Huntington's framework is blatantly evident in the very title of David Frawley's influential book, Hinduism and the Clash of Civilizations. Frawley provided a much-needed veneer of intellectual legitimacy to the systematic othering of Muslims. This ideological cover traces a direct, unbroken line of majoritarian violence from the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, through the horrors of the 2002 Gujarat pogrom, and culminating in Modi's ascension to the prime minister's office in 2014. Before that victory, both Modi and Shah faced the very real prospect of prison for their alleged roles in state-sponsored violence and extrajudicial killings.

In a functioning procedural democracy, political mandates are strictly finite. So what does a compromised leader do when the electoral mandate inevitably runs out and the threat of prison looms large? The formula is grimly predictable. You fill your coffers through unchecked crony capitalism and blatant corruption. You ruthlessly use your executive office to crush any independent institution demanding accountability or transparency. Most importantly, you constantly invoke the eternal enemy bogeyman to misdirect public paranoia and externalise the inner decay of the state. This strategy results in a completely unhinged society, driven by fear and supreme insecurity.

However, there is a crucial strategic difference between the two nations and how they weaponise this paranoia. Netanyahu does not mind western antisemitism so long as it ultimately drives fearful Jewish populations to Israel, thereby providing a steady stream of demographic fodder for his territorial expansionism. India, conversely, desperately needs its massive diaspora to go abroad, integrate, and spread its geopolitical and economic influence. Yet, by opportunistically allying with western far-right and white supremacist movements to secure immediate political cover, the Indian right wing has engineered a fatal miscalculation. They have ensured that this cultivated prejudice inevitably boomerangs back onto Indian and broader South Asian communities living globally, leaving them profoundly vulnerable.

When domestic institutions finally fail to hold these leaders accountable, the rot does not simply vanish; it metastasises internationally. Because external institutions pose a severe threat to their freedom and illicit wealth, these strongmen must actively unhinge the global order itself to survive. We are watching this systematic dismantling happen in real time. Diplomatic sources recently revealed that the Netherlands is quietly negotiating the dismantling of the International Criminal Court in The Hague. To appease the United States in the face of sanctions and diplomatic pressure, proposed compromises include granting blanket immunity to heads of state and denying the Court's jurisdiction over nationals of non-state parties. This is a brazen, targeted attempt to amputate the ICC solely to shield men like Netanyahu from active arrest warrants. When Silicon Valley tech companies facilitate the censorship of these realities and western governments willingly dismantle the international justice system, humanity is placed in its weakest bargaining position in modern history. The social contract is simply torn to shreds.

Yet there is a formidable firewall holding the line against this total institutional collapse. The 2026 United States midterm elections proved definitively that there is a hard limit to the persuasive power of foreign-inspired lobbying and massive corporate money. Despite the American Israel Public Affairs Committee deploying huge sums to aggressively shape the congressional races and unseat progressive critics, the lobby suffered a string of unprecedented, high-profile defeats. The American electorate demonstrated clearly that unlimited funding cannot permanently obscure an unsustainable moral rot, nor can it force a population to underwrite a permanent war.

If human civilisation is to survive this coordinated assault on the international social contract, it will require a decisive and unapologetic ideological shift. The global political landscape must take a sharp, unyielding turn to the left to fundamentally defeat these supremacist elements and the corrupt billionaires who fund them. If that is what it takes to save our shared future and restore accountability to the global order, so be it.