You Protest, You’re Punished. Netanyahu Genocides, He Gets Cleared for Takeoff.

The dystopia is here: where students are jailed and genocidaires are honored guests.

The plane that carried genocide soared through European skies today. Unbothered. Unchallenged. Unashamed.

Netanyahu’s “Wing of Zion” — a bird of impunity — sliced through the clouds above Croatia, Italy, and France on its way to the United States. All three are signatories of the International Criminal Court (ICC). All three are legally obligated to apprehend him. None did. Instead, they cleared the skies.

This isn't just hypocrisy. It's a signal to the world: international law is a charade.

More damning still, Netanyahu is expected in Israeli court tomorrow for corruption charges. He skipped it, or rather, the court canceled his testimony to allow him to visit the White House.

It’s not the first time. Last year, he broke a ceasefire in Gaza just to dodge court. As Israel’s Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar confirmed in a letter to the High Court of Justice, “The war's continuation, on multiple fronts, was for Netanyahu's personal benefit... a diversion from his trial, used as an excuse for the interminable delays."

This is how Zionism works. But let us not sanitize what is happening: this is not war. This is genocide.

France—the land of liberté and droits de l'homme — let the plane pass. Not once. Not twice. Three times. Even after the ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

In this descent into dystopia, arrest warrants are apparently just press releases. Decorative. Not for the powerful, but for the protestor, the student, the refugee.

Speak out against genocide? You're a threat. Defend the dispossessed? You disappear. Massacre a population in real-time? You get airspace clearance.

Hungary has withdrawn from the ICC entirely. It flung open its doors for Netanyahu—the architect of apartheid—and rolled out the red carpet with the blood of Gazan children still wet on his hands.

But Hungary’s withdrawal from the ICC won’t take effect for a year—meaning its legal duty to arrest Netanyahu remains in force.

This isn’t diplomacy. It’s the collapse of moral order. As Stephen Bowen, Executive Director of Amnesty Ireland, put it: “This wanted man cannot leave Hungary without traveling through the sovereign territory or airspace of many European countries.”

Meanwhile, lines of semi-trucks carrying aid rot at the Egyptian border. Gaza is starving. The Rafah crossing could be opened with a single phone call. But Trump, like Biden, refuses to dial.

Because, as Netanyahu reminded the world back in 1980: “We own the Senate and the Congress. America won’t force us into anything.”

No wonder he’s so emboldened. From his Budapest-Washington flight, Netanyahu posted a series of deranged attacks against Israel’s Shin Bet director and Attorney General—the last two gatekeepers left. No comment on hostages. None on Israelis injured by Hamas. Nothing about tariffs or diplomacy. Just rage and vengeance.

This is not an aberration. This is the spirit of Israeli society now.

Journalist Gideon Levy explains:

“October 7 was a terrible development... not just because of what happened that day, but because of what it did to Israeli society. It destroyed the peace camp. Most Israelis now support any war. Any brutality. There is no more shame. No more guilt.”

The army has changed, too. Settlers now occupy high ranks. Entire Palestinian villages in the West Bank are being evacuated by soldiers with no orders, no oversight, and no consequences.

“You can now do whatever you want,” Levy said. “Not just generals. Even low-ranking soldiers. That’s the spirit now.”

This isn’t about Netanyahu. Bernie Sanders might wish it were, but the problem is deeper. More systemic. The facts speak for themselves:

• Only 3% of Jewish Israelis are morally opposed to the ethnic-cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza.

• 14% consider it a “distraction.”

• Over 80% support it.

Israelis may hate Netanyahu. But they support the war.

And yet, only 15% of Americans support increasing military aid to Netanyahu. Despite this, Congress just approved an $8.8 billion military package.

“Republicans and Democrats took a constitutional oath to represent the American people—not AIPAC.”

Meanwhile, Belgium's Prime Minister spelled it out in plain terms:

“I don’t think there’s any European country where Netanyahu would be arrested.”

This is not the rule of law. This is the death of it.
And still, Netanyahu flew free.

“The International Criminal Court calls for Netanyahu’s arrest, yet the EU imposes no sanctions. Instead, the EU arms Israel while offering Palestinians empty words”, Mark Botenga, a Belgian member of the European Parliament said.

“This isn’t balance—it’s complicity in genocide.”

Belgium won’t arrest Netanyahu. Won’t honor the ICC warrant. Won’t honor the corpses. The Prime Minister calls this realpolitik, that “practical considerations prevail over ethics.” As if ethics are a luxury. As if law is optional when the killer wears a suitx

But what “vital interest” does Belgium have in shielding a man accused of genocide?

What’s so vital about Palestinian children being torn from their sleep and buried in rubble? What’s so practical about throwing international law in the trash—just to appease a foreign butcher?

This isn’t realpolitik. It’s suicidal allegiance.

A state sacrificing its own moral infrastructure to defend the very forces undoing it.

They told us these laws were sacred—the same laws they waved for Ukraine, the same norms they preached as Europe’s post-war salvation.

But now, for Gaza, they bend. They betray. They reveal what was always true: justice was never the point—only proximity to power.

It’s hard to find hope these days, to believe that the people will remember they are the powerful, when they act together. But these days I find hope in people like Francesca Albanese who just had her mandate as Special Rapporteur extended, despite a viscious smear campaign led by the Israeli lobby.

In the U.S., Only 15 out of 100 U.S. Senators voted to block the transfer of weapons to Israel, in direct violation of their moral and legal responsibility to prevent genocide. As babies are routinely beheaded and an entire population is subjected to weapons experimentation, the Senate’s decision is a tacit endorsement of these atrocities.

In doing so, they have voted not only for the continuation of genocide but also for the erosion of the very democratic principles they are sworn to uphold.

The U.S. Senate’s failure to act on this issue, to halt the flow of weapons fueling the genocide in Gaza, is a deliberate surrender to the forces of impunity. By greenlighting continued arms transfers to Israel, they are complicit in the destruction of not just Palestinian lives, but the global moral order itself.

This is what complicity is: legislation that enables the powerful to escape accountability while the powerless are left to face the full brunt of violence and state-sanctioned oppression. The decision to continue aiding Israel's war machine, as outlined in the Senate’s vote, is a stark confirmation of what this government truly values: power, profit, and control—at any cost.

This isn’t a failure of policy; it’s a failure of humanity.

A plane holding a genocidaire sailed across a world pretending to believe in justice. The silence surrounding it is louder than the engines. And history will not forget who cleared the skies.