The latest solution to prevent genocide of the Palestinian people simplifies the situation ─ no reason to be concerned ─ predictions have Israel containing the seeds of its own destruction; Israel has a “dark future;” Israel will be undone; “and isolated from the world, it could be consumed by turmoil at home as widening fissures threaten to break up the country itself.”
There is supporting evidence and merit to these sentiments. Invezz News reports.
Israel's economy has suffered a severe downturn, with a 19.4% contraction in GDP in the last quarter of 2023….As government spending skyrocketed by 88% in the final months of 2023 to support military efforts and displaced citizens, consumer spending, a vital component of economic activity, collapsed by 27%.
This summer has highlighted that tourism, a significant contributor to Israel’s economy, has all but collapsed since the onset of the war. Crippled productivity, business bankruptcies, and credit downgrades are sinking the nation's economy. A mass exodus of human capital is occurring as other countries are calling for sanctions to be imposed. The economic fallout was further exacerbated by the evacuation of more than 120,000 Israelis from areas near the northern and southern borders, disrupting communities and local economies.
According to the Hebrew newspaper Maarivover, over 46,000 businesses have gone bankrupt, while foreign investments, which had already declined by 60% in the first quarter of 2023 due to the far-right policies of Israel’s government, show no signs of recovery. The majority of the money invested in Israeli investment funds is rapidly being diverted to investments abroad because Israelis do not want their own pension funds, insurance funds, or their savings to be tied to the fate of the state of Israel. Now, those business closures may just be the beginning. According to an estimate cited by The Times of Israel, up to 60,000 businesses are expected to close before 2024 is over.
Beyond the immediate economic impact, Israel faces a potentially more damaging long-term issue, which is the phenomenon of brain drain…the prolonged conflict and the bleak economic outlook are prompting a growing number of highly educated Israelis to consider emigration.
The argument suggests that the forecasted economic decline will jolt Israel’s leaders into halting their aggressive tactics that precipitated the economic decline and bring peace and reconciliation to the Levant. Not so fast. The economic problems may force the Israel government to take a deep breath and temporarily shift attention from eliminating the Palestinians to eliminating the economic problems. After filling the lungs with oxygen, breathing well again, and having factories humming with workers, Israelis will return to the real work of settlers performing their dirty work. Presently, there is no indication that the derogatory economic environment has deterred the government or the people.
Netanyahu’s Israel is in similar difficulty to Putin’s Russia and Kim Jung-An’s North Korea (NK), both of which do not have the benefactors that Israel has — Uncle Sam and millions of other rich uncles around the world. Russia and NK continue moving along and far from collapse. Why will Israel collapse? There have been no protests concerning an economic situation; only protests that demand a truce that will free the hostages; only a debate on how many Gazans should be killed before the military stops operations. No debate yet on how many West Bank Palestinians and villages should be destroyed before the military ceases its destruction .
Anything that can be done to enhance Israel’s economic decline should be pursued. Depending on an economic collapse to resolve the issue of intended genocide will be folly. Sentiments are not actions. They are sides to keep aside while responses to the genocide continue. Relying on prognostications to prevent actions is a dangerous proposition and, wait a second, could it be that is what the deceptive Zionists want ─ reduce guard to the genocide by believing that the mass killings will dissolve in the future breakup of the Zionist Empire?
Zionists and their worldwide cadres of information manipulators excel at fooling all the public all of the time. One of the more devious deceptions is to give Palestinians a vision of hope, just be patient and a lifeline to liberation will be available. When leading government officials — Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid — contradict Prime Minister Netanyahu, as occurred with Netanyahu’s insistence on Israel maintaining the Philadelphia Corridor, are they serious or they pretending to give hope to dissenters? Yair Lapid has called for the end of the war on Gaza and has also noted that “the genocidal campaign in Gaza is still seen by many Israelis as a necessity. They can’t envision any ‘solution’ that will actually deal with ‘the Hamas problem.'” Is it normal for a Defense Minister to contradict the nation’s leader in public rather than private?
The tasty morsel of hope for the Palestinians ─ Israel will fall apart ─ has circulated widely and achieved prominence with an article by Ilan Z. Baron, Professor of International Politics and Political Theory and Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Jewish Culture, Society and Politics at Durham University, and Ilai Z. Saltzman, Associate Research Professor of Israel Studies and Director of the Joseph and Alma Gildenhorn Institute for Israel Studies at the University of Maryland (Do the Zs mean Zionists? What is “the Study of Jewish Culture, Society, and Politics and why is it important?” ). The article, The Dark Futures That Await After the War in Gaza, appears in the August 12, 2024, Foreign Affairs magazine. In addition to affiliation with the University of Maryland, Ilai Z. Saltzman is a board member with Mitvim, The Israeli Institute for Regional Foreign Policies, a progressive think tank based in apartheid Israel.
The start of the Foreign Affairs article informs us of the opposite of what we know.
At Israel’s creation, in May 1948, its founders envisioned a country defined by humanist values and one that upheld international law. Israeli society has never been able to resolve the contradiction between the universalist appeal of the declaration’s ideals and the narrower urgency of the founding of Israel as a Jewish state to protect the Jewish people.
We are told that Israel has gone a little awry and needs an adjustment. Are slaughtering Palestinians, stealing their lands, and forcibly expelling them, considered “humanist values and upholding international law?”
Was there an urgency to protect the Jewish people, when Jewish people had achieved elevated prosperity and education compared to the populations in almost all Western countries where they lived? Hadn’t the Western nations won the war and protected their Jewish populations?
Hasn’t Zionism proved the Jews need protection from themselves and the Zionist yoke? Thanks to Israel, Jews are attached to the genocide of the Palestinian people and to a worldwide conspiracy that tricks, deceives, and influences others to support Israel in its genocide. Have the Jews ever been universally despised as they are now? Despised is a mild word for the animosity against contemporary Jews. The Zionists disguise the horror exhibited at those who commit genocide with a mask of anti-Semitism and convince themselves that the mask is a real face.
Israel is on track to become increasingly authoritarian in its treatment not just of Palestinians but of its own citizens. It could fast lose many of the friends it still has and become a pariah. And isolated from the world, it could be consumed by turmoil at home as widening fissures threaten to break up the country itself.
Since David Ben-Gurion and a small clique of opportunists took advantage of an ill-advised UN, an ill-led and ill-equipped Palestinian community, and a confused world to declare unilaterally their own state, without giving attention to the 400,000 Palestinians in a bi-national state, all of these “coulds” are “ises.” After 75 years of “ises,” apartheid Israel continues to pursue the agenda that Zionists described at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference — Israel from close to Amman, Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea and from the Litani River in Lebanon to the Sinai Desert and Gulf of Aqaba.
The political Zionists capably performed their tasks and now the religious Zionists will finish the job. The latter Zionists have no concern of being isolated from the world; that is what they have always wanted in their self-imposed ghettos. God is on their side and God will protect them. What’s the problem?
Indeed, many Israelis see their country’s treatment of Palestinians as separate from its functioning as a democracy. Israelis have long tolerated, if not sanctioned, violence by Jewish settlers against Palestinians. In a contravention of international law, Israel subjects Palestinians living under its rule in the West Bank and East Jerusalem to what is in effect martial law. Successive Israeli governments have overseen the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, imperiling the future creation of a sovereign Palestinian state.
This tremendous revelation, known to only a few billion people, tells the complete story — Israelis don’t give a damn about the Palestinians and any appeal to the Zionists is futile. Why continue?
On its current path, Israel is veering in a deeply illiberal direction. Its current hard-right turn, pushed by politicians as well as by many of their constituents, could see Israel become a kind of ethnonationality theocracy, run by a Jewish judicial and legislative council and right-wing religious extremists, nothing less than a Jewish version of Iran’s theocratic state.
Misleading use of words. “Current “or “consistent”? “Veering” or “continuing”? “Could see Israel become” or “Could realize Israel has become”?
Will the U.S. treat the Israel theocratic state the same as it treats the Iran theocratic state?
Does Israel's Nation State Law transform Israel into an international theocracy?
Israel's Nation State Law established a privileged Jewish community, governed by communal administration, with an extension to Jews in other nations, who can align themselves with Israeli society. Based on misconceptions, the Nation State Law reveals Israel as a deliberate deception. The world has been insufficiently alert to this phenomenon and to the contrived manner by which it formulated. Israel never established an Israeli nationality and, instead, gave its citizens unique nationalities, one of which is a Jewish nationality. The Nation State Law allows all Jews in the world to be part of a Jewish nation without having Israeli citizenship.
Since the October 7 attacks, the Israeli right wing has grown even more radical. For them, and many others in Israel, Hamas’s massacre proved that there can be no compromise with the Palestinians or their supporters. These conservatives see Israel as existing in an eternal state of war, with peace unthinkable—a state, to borrow the phrase of Israeli historian David Ochana, akin to “Sparta with a yarmulke.”
We have an atavistic revival to a tribal form of governance, where borders and boundaries are not fixed. The mythical Joshua, leader of the Biblical Conquest, is brought to life and, with sword and Lord, clears the land for the chosen people.
As Israel becomes more authoritarian, that illiberal turn would not mask the growing fissures within Israeli society. The state would increasingly lose its monopoly over the legitimate use of force, and divisions could inflame to the point of civil war.
The Z’s have arrived at the newly established Israel, and not an Israel racked with civil war. It is an Israel culminating in a prepared civil split. A strategy during the last two decades by the political Zionists, who are mostly secular, has been to give West Bank Palestinian land to the pesky orthodox Jews who were ruining the political Zionists’ shiny Israel and damaging their cars on the Sabbath. Let them settle the West Bank and complete the Zionist agenda.
Israel will have three departments.
Labor Zionists inhabiting the territories captured during the 1948-1967 wars,
Religious Zionists inhabiting the West Bank, and
Financial schemers exploiting Gaza’s fisheries, offshore gas reserves, and Palestinian cheap labor for industrial manufacturing.
Israel is not France, Spain, or United Kingdom. It was not created from peoples who lived and fought together on common soil for generations, shared a common language, history, and culture, and had their authenticity certified by the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. A small assembly of Zionist Jews artificially created Israel and not as a new nation among other nations. They created Israel with a specific purpose ─ capture land falsely attributed to a dubious ancient kingdom and bring disparate Jews from around the world to inhabit the land. If Jericho, Canaanites, or Philistines get in the way, well, defeat them. Don’t be dissuaded by what others say or do; continue the mission commanded and protected by Jehovah.
In the Western nations, political Parties compete for power. Economic, social, and global conditions modify electorate preferences and shifts in political power occur. Political parties slightly rise and slightly fall but remain as strong opposition. Not so in Israel. Economic, social, and global conditions have subsidiary roles in Israel’s elections. The key issue is framed as security, which translates to how to control Palestinian resistance to the settlements and continue the land grabbing. Allied to the security issue are the military issues of defending against external threats from Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas, and the internal threat from ‘pistol-packing” and loose cannon militant settlers.
In the last decades of elections, there has been an eroding of previously popular Parties and emergence of new political Parties, usually featuring a former Defense Minister, Religious Zionist, or celebrity, and a monotonic shift to stuffing Parliament with politicians that have one ambition ─ expand settlements and recreate mythical Israel. Gone are the Socialist Democratic Mapai (merged into Labor), progressive Meretz, and Palestine nationalist Balad. Barely hanging in is the once dominant Labor Party, now the Democrat Party. The conservative Likud Party achieves majority rule by incorporating several newly established religious and nationalist Parties into its government. These extremists gain more strength in each election.
This commentary reads as a conspiratorial interpretation of history. Can it be this way? It is this way. Israel has never obeyed any UN Resolutions, always claimed security while stealing Palestinian lands, is oppressing the Palestinian population and committing genocide. Little opposition from its citizenry has appeared. No campus demonstrations against genocide in Israel. Truth and reality do not guide the Israelis. The principle debate has never been economic, domestic, or foreign policy issues; it has been, ”Should we formally annex the West Bank?” Why will tomorrow be different than today?
The Israelis who live west of the 1967 truce line know little and care little of what is happening in the West Bank. The settlers in the West Bank know little and care little of what happens outside of their confined life. Perceiving Israel as a democratic nation with a constitution (which it does not have), involved in the global community, adhering to international norms, and seeking cooperation with others contradicts history. Approaching Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people as a matter of convincing a government that genocide is not the best for its future health is futile. Israel is not a nation; it is a land without borders and containing a collection of people who make their own rules and have operated as a criminal enterprise. Its contingent of well-placed accomplices shield the criminal enterprise from international actions and continue to give the United States offers it cannot refuse.