Israel Is Already Over

What is left is contaminated memories, apparitions and foreign interests

Few people in Israel remember it, and virtually no outsider would even know about it, but the current phase of Benjamin Netanyahu’s political career began in 2006. In the summer of that year, the IDF and Hezbollah had their biggest confrontation to date, and the inconclusive results of that campaign, where Hezbollah proved to be a mighty rival for Israel’s military, made the Israeli public quite uneasy.

Also in that war, soldiers and reservists reported being severely ill-equipped, in the most literal sense, to carry out their tasks: they had to loot houses and gas stations for food and water, and many found their fighting gear to be outdated, malfunctioning or missing altogether (this, by the way, is a fixture of Israeli wars. Here’s, for example, an identical story from October 9, 2023).

But after the lackluster 2006 war, something else happened: a group of reservists started a protest movement, and it began gaining traction with the Israeli public. At the height of the Reservists’ Protest movement, 100,000 people attended one of their demonstrations in Tel Aviv.

But protest over Israel’s weak showing at a 2006 war doesn’t sound too political: what is there to protest about a lost or unwon war? The twist is, of course, that right-wing elements were part of the process all along, pumping myths about how - you guessed it - Israel’s wimpy left-wing government snatched a major win from Israel’s fighters' hands by succumbing to its over-humane (therefore defeatist) urges.

In 2008, then Israeli PM Ehud Olmert announced he was quitting, and the Reservists’ Protest was over. In the general election of February 2009 Netanyahu came out as the winner, and he has been at the helm almost continuously since.

What about that mass popular protest, you may be justly asking? Many years ago it was established that Netanyahu had direct ties to the Reservists’ Protest, which was in truth a right-wing operation in disguise. Here’s a blog post about this by Raviv Druker, a top Israeli journalist.

It was then that the seeds of underground right-wing activity were planted, much as a lesson from the 2005 evacuation of some 10,000 Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip, which the religious right-wing experienced as a never-to-happen-again trauma.

-

Ever since 2009, a gradually darker and darker aspect has taken over Israel, with increasingly more radical and violent right-wing groups emerging out of the shadows and becoming legitimized in the broader culture. I knew some of the figures involved in this movement personally, and I was to an extent involved in it myself, as then I was still thinking about myself as right-wing, though my stance was more about culture and Arab-Jewish (Mizrahi) identity than about settlements and land (in my naivety, in 2014 I wrote an op-ed for Haaretz titled ‘The Right-Wing Has to Disengage from the Settlements‘).

Yesterday, at Sde Teiman, we saw this wave of ethnic, religious nationalistic amock that started forming in 2006, under Netanyahu’s tutelage, reaching a new peak and making itself known to the whole world with Netanyahu as the Prime Minister of genocide.

This cultural process of unmasking of monsters and demons not only spells Israel’s doom: it is telling us it can no longer be governed, and can no longer be seen as a functioning country.

If you don’t completely get me, you will in a short while.

-

I don’t want to exaggerate Netanyahu’s role in Israel’s demise. I will only say this: his role relates more to quantity and pace, not to essence. Because, in essence, Zionism has been tainted with racism, colonialism, and anti-humanism from the very first moment. But it always had this duality where, while scheming and committing crimes against humanity, some part of it still wanted to belong in the civilized world. Paradoxically or not, that part, the classic liberal Ashkenazi Zionists, were responsible for Zionism’s greatest crimes in all the decades leading up to the current genocide.

But they denied the shadow deeds and beings, those classical Zionists. The massacres, the ethnic cleansing, and the belligerent militarism, all were concealed from view. They were trying to hide it, to pretend it never happened, and to blame it on circumstance, the times, or the cruelty and inflexibility of Arabs.

It was rubbish and provided a very thin cover but still, it provided Israel with some room for maneuvering and image-bulding. And, with the help of the US and the rest of the colonial bunch, and with a peace agreement with Egypt, Israel could be seen, or could present itself, as just a normal delegation in the Eurovision Song Contest.

Yet the shadow always lurked underneath the fake normalcy, and it was supported immensely by one Zionist tradition no Zionist, even the most liberal, could break: Arabs (not to mention Palestinians) could never be presented as equal, and no revisions were allowed to the Zionist account of history. This meant the Palestinian side of the story could never be allowed to be shared, and it also meant Palestinians could never be seen as human in Zionism, regardless of how classical, liberal, and Ashkenazi it was.

If Palestinians are not people, and if it’s ok to kill their children, babies, and innocents, why is it wrong to sexually torture them?

It requires at least a semester to go over Zionim’s romance with the darkest aspects of human psychology and behavior: the murders and assassinations, the organized crime, the secret agreements with every evil political entity imaginable, the espionage, the extortion, the ‘influence‘. Really, really dark stuff (all countries have a past, but not all pasts are equally terrifying, and not all countries are built up as beacons of morality and democracy, and certainly not all countries are white supremacist colonial projects).

All went relatively well till this genocide. No one, except a fringe demographic of reporters, academics, and Palestinians, asked serious questions about Israel.

The occupation had all but been buried and forgotten as a major international issue since Netanyahu’s 2009 resurrection. Israel’s dealings with Mianmar’s genocidal regime and Argentina’s junta, for example, are known only to a tiny number of people. It didn’t matter, and therefore it didn’t exist.

For decades, American dominance over Western culture and politics made sure Israel would never be asked a serious question, and certainly wouldn’t have to answer one.

But then October 7 came, and the rot that spread across the entirety of the Israeli structure was laid bare. From the genocidal remarks by virtually the entire military and political leadership to the soldiers’ TikTok videos to the unending (god, unending) parade of dead children and babies and broken families to the demand - still sounding as firmly in Israeli media as it did 10 months ago - to kill, raze, destroy, nuke, eliminate, no mercy for no one, to the demolition and burning of everything, ecstatically, delightedly: the world is watching a live-streamed Apocalypse Now moment it will never be able to forget.

And now there is no duality anymore. There is not the well-lighted, polite Israel, formerly, and deceptively, presented as the main thing, with just a little bit of complementary shadow.

Now there is only shadow.

Israel cannot recover from this

There are many reasons why Israel cannot recover from this, but I will only speak of two, which continue the points I already made.

The first reason Israel cannot recover from this is that its shadow is now in the light, as we saw in Sde Teiman (and before that in the sabotage of aid convoys). The people who are involved in those activities are everywhere: in the IDF and police, in the legal system, in secret services of this and that nature, in the media, in every ministry and municipality. Everywhere.

This means that every attempt to revert to the previous norm of pretending to be a sane democracy will be met with open resistance and violence. No one will stand (perfunctory) trial for torture, murder, theft, or rape of Palestinians.

A system that cannot even pretend to be sane has a very short lifespan ahead of it. It cannot function. More pressingly, once Israel experiences a serious military setback, the rage and violence that will explode out of this large group of Jewish Israelis will be a lot more dangerous and destabilizing than the gentle 2006-2008 Reservists’ Protest demonstrations. Every judge, journalist, or military or police commander who is believed to be cooperating with the forces of defeat and national humiliation will be in severe danger.

We all know that a war with Hezbollah, and potentially Iran, is coming; this war will be incredibly devastating for Israel, and after it the nationalist volcano will erupt uncontrollably, seeking to wipe off the shame and betrayal created by lefties in high places, or maybe the US itself.

The other reason Israel cannot survive this, and is practically over, is the same but from an outside perspective. The world sees Israel now as a crazy, monstrous entity, narcissistic and sadistic beyond imagination. The US will do all it can to keep protecting it, and some European countries will also give it a shot, but for much of the rest of the planet, having anything to do with Israelis has as much charm as engaging with flesh-craving zombies.

The isolation of Israel and the growing hate for it will only become more acute when the genocide finally stops, and its true scope and nature begin to come out, with international institutions and media outlets starting to give an account of what really happened.

With arrest warrants for seniors starting to be issued, a growing BDS movement, and horror growing daily at the actions that were taken, Israel will simply buckle under the pressure, especially as it undergoes serious self-destabilization, courtesy of all that emergent shadow.

Once Netanyahu is Out, Israel is Out

Bizarrely, one of the main cohesive elements for Israel’s existence is the presence of Netanyahu, who may be hated by many but is universally accepted as a source of authority. Once he is gone, for whatever reasons, the fight for the spoils in Israel will begin, with no side and no party able to produce a leadership acceptable enough to the other players. This, too, will unfold under heavy international and internal pressures. It will be impossible to build a functioning coalition between the Hague, the Sde Teiman rioters, and the old Zionist tradition of not recognizing the human and political legitimacy of Arabs and Palestinians.

The coming war with Hezbollah will only accelerate the inescapable destruction.

A Moral and Political Failure of Historic Proportions

Israel has failed in everything it set out to achieve: it did not establish ‘a safe haven’ for Jews, it did not make Jews just one more nation out of many, and it did nothing to improve the way Jews are perceived by other peoples.

Israel did cause immense damage, and a series of catastrophes, to the Palestinians and other groups in the Middle East. It chose wrong so many times nobody can remember it choosing right anymore. It aligned itself with colonialism and exploitation, it practically finished a collection of Jewish-Arab cultures and communities, and it has estranged the Jewish collective from the rest of the world for the foreseeable future.

Israel’s failures have been known to anyone who did not wish to not know them for a very long time. This genocide brought them to the personal devices of virtually all of humanity. By seeking to draw power from shadow, undoubtedly as his shadowy personality dictated he chooses, Netanyahu brought down the whole thing.

Israel may still appear to be functioning for a while, but it is mostly brain dead (its Air Force and PR departments are all that remain, and they, too, are on life support ). It has a pulse but no cognition, judgment, or will. All it would take to finish it is one healthy nudge or one semi-serious blow. It has very little life remaining in it, and zero vitality. For most intents and purposes, and especially morally and politically, Israel is already over.