What Hunter Biden Understood About Netanyahu Being the Embodiment of Evil—and What He Missed
By: Said Arikat
August 12, 2026
News Analysis
Washington, D.C- In an era where every syllable is parsed for partisan gain, Hunter Biden’s admission on Tucker Carlson’s podcast landed like a truth grenade. Asked about Israel’s prime minister, he didn’t hedge. He called Benjamin Netanyahu “the embodiment of evil.” Gatekeepers dismissed it as the ramblings of a troubled scion. But what if his mistake wasn’t the judgment, but its scope? Netanyahu is not a rogue mutation in an otherwise noble project; he is the logical, grinning distillation of a state that for 76 years has been the world’s most conspicuous, lawless, and murderous rogue. Hunter Biden identified the symptom accurately. The disease, however, is not one politician. The disease is Israel itself.
To call a nation-state evil requires moving past the comfortable frame of “conflict” and examining a foundational rot that makes killing innocent children, women, and men a routine, almost banal, instrument of policy. Israel doesn’t just commit war crimes; it has built a national identity around defying international law, treating multilateral institutions with contempt, and systematically dehumanizing an entire population. It has perfected what the historian Tony Judt might have called an “atrocity-producing situation”—a militarized, ethnically supremacist architecture where civilian slaughter is inevitable.
Netanyahu’s war on Gaza, triggered by the horrific Hamas attacks of October 7th, has stripped away the last veneer of civility. In months, the Israeli military has killed Palestinians in numbers so staggering, so disproportionately women and children, that even complicit Western governments have struggled to spin them. Satellite imagery shows obliterated neighborhoods. The “surgical strikes” doctrine is a dark joke; the reality is flattened universities, sniped children, bombed churches and hospitals, and the deliberate starvation of two million people. When the International Court of Justice ruled it “plausible” that Israel is committing genocide, the world’s highest court wasn’t engaging in hyperbole. It was responding to a mountain of evidence of intent—officials calling Palestinians “human animals,” discussing the need to “flatten Gaza,” and bragging about denying food and water.
But the moral obscenity predates this prime minister or this war. To find the embodiment of evil, trace the bloodline to the state’s establishment in 1948. The “War of Independence” Israelis celebrate is the Nakba, the Catastrophe—a campaign of ethnic cleansing that drove over 700,000 people from their homes, destroyed 500 villages, and committed dozens of massacres to ensure no return. That original sin wasn’t a one-time event; it was the template. The state was built on a juridical absurdity—a law granting automatic citizenship to someone from Brooklyn with no prior connection to the land, while denying return to families still holding deeds and keys to the homes from which they were expelled at gunpoint. This is not governance; it is a crime scene preserved as a national park.
Israel’s rogue status is a quantified record. No other state in the past 80 years has defied the UN Security Council with such theatrical impunity. Israel has violated more UN resolutions than any other member, treating the international community like a meddlesome parent it can ignore because the United States vetoes any consequences. It has illegally annexed East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, declaring occupation law inapplicable—a legal theory so extreme it would make a czar blush. It built a secret nuclear arsenal outside the Non-Proliferation Treaty while demanding the world destroy Iran for nuclear ambition. This is the behavior of a rogue, lawless entity that believes it is above the family of nations.
The “most criminal state in the past 80 years” crystallizes in the West Bank. The occupation is not defensive; it is a slow-motion atrocity designed to steal land and break spirits. Settler pogroms, armed and often accompanied by the military, torch Palestinian olive groves and murder villagers. Administrative detention allows Israel to imprison Palestinians indefinitely without charge—in any other context, that would be called kidnapping. A Palestinian child is classified as a potential terrorist from birth, subject to military courts with a 99.7% conviction rate. The army’s rules of engagement allow live fire against children throwing stones. That is codified policy, not rumor. That is the face of a state that kills innocent men, women, and children not in the chaos of battle, but in the cold, bureaucratic light of a Tuesday afternoon checkpoint.
And what of the children? If evil is measured by the bodies of the small and vulnerable, Israel’s ledger overflows. Long before October 7th, the UN documented over a thousand Palestinian children killed by Israeli forces in two decades—one child every three days. Operations Cast Lead and Protective Edge, euphemisms for bombing a densely populated open-air prison, left piles of tiny shrouds. The death of a Palestinian child never prompts national soul-searching in Israel; it is metabolized as a necessary cost, collateral damage in a war on a population that refuses to vanish. The sniper who shoots a toddler in the head, the pilot who drops a one-ton bomb on an apartment block—they are celebrated, their careers advanced. When a society rewards such actions, evil becomes a structural component of its existence.
Critics will charge that this ignores Hamas and Israeli fear. But the notion that Israel is merely “defending itself” collapses under the weight of power asymmetry. Israel is not David; it is a nuclear-armed Goliath, backed by the world’s sole superpower, systematically dismembering a captive population. Killing civilians isn’t a response to terror; it is a foundational requirement for maintaining Jewish supremacy from the river to the sea in a land where Palestinians will soon be the majority. The apartheid analogy is no longer controversial. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Israeli group B’Tselem have meticulously documented how the web of laws, walls, and military edicts constitutes the crime of apartheid. An apartheid state that kills with robotic consistency is, by any meaningful moral calculus, an evil state.
Hunter Biden stumbled onto a profound truth the Washington establishment and its compliant media refuse to utter: we are witnessing something monstrous. The monster isn’t just one polarizing prime minister with a corruption indictment and a messianic complex. The monster is the consensus that binds Israeli society—left, right, and center—when it comes to Palestinian life. It is the system that manufactures consent for atrocity, that labels opposition to dismembering a people as antisemitism. It is the United States’ unconditional funding of this carnage to the tune of billions a year while politicians weep crocodile tears over the rubble.
To say Israel is the embodiment of evil is not to deny Jewish suffering or the Holocaust. It is to state plainly that turning that historic trauma into a license to ethnically cleanse another people, cage millions in a starvation camp, and gun down the innocent for three generations is a perversion of Jewish ethics and a betrayal of the lessons humanity claimed to learn. Benjamin Netanyahu is a symptom—particularly unvarnished and arrogant. But the disease is a state that for 80 years has made killing the innocent, defying the law, and consuming an entire nation the core of its identity. That is not a defense force; that is a criminal enterprise. And it is long past time the world called it exactly what it is.
