This article is taken from the February 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
Is Israel finished? Ever since Israel began its onslaught on Gaza after the pogrom of October 2023, along with stepped-up settler violence in the West Bank, a notion has taken hold in the ranks of its critics that the country is in deep existential trouble. Because of its atrocities, some say, it is doomed, bound to fail and will surely implode, politically, demographically or somehow via some form of “isolation”. Whether or not its behaviour amounts to genocide, we hear that its razing and starving of Gaza is causing it to suffer what Ehud Barak once termed a “diplomatic tsunami”, pointing to possible oblivion.
Superficially, the cutting of ties from Ireland and Spain to Columbia and Bolivia to Turkey, as well as litigation in international courts also points in this direction of travel. To hear liberal outlets such as the Guardian tell it, and some internal critics, and international friends, and Israel’s bitterest adversaries, Israel is already “isolated”, its days numbered, at risk of pariahdom and therefore extinction. The warning of collective abandonment even issues from Israel’s prime backer. Even though his master assured Israel it would never stand “alone”, the then US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken cautioned that Israel’s operations in Rafah risked “further isolating” it.
To be sure, some of these prophecies forewarn not of Israel’s literal destruction, but the destruction of the kind of civilised, democratic state its founders intended. The language, though, repeatedly tips over into more basic warnings about physical safety. And little ambivalence haunts the demands of many street protesters, who cry “Israel has got to go”. Levels of sympathy or antipathy towards Israel vary here, but the underlying message is the same: states that violate basic human norms invite history’s wrath.
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These prophecies at times reflect more the wishes of those doing the prophesying, than serious engagement with the problem. If you yearn for Israel to “go”, you are more likely to expect it. The catch-cry of mass Gaza protests, that Palestine will be “free”, “from the river to the sea”, both hopes for and looks forward to the state of Israel coming to an end.
How many protesters can specify which river, or which sea, is an open question. It is also unclear, assuming their demands for a ceasefire signal a real commitment to peace, how exactly they propose to supplant or replace the state of Israel tout court without further mass bloodshed. But crowd enthusiasm for Israel’s demise does not guarantee attention to detail, nor an appreciation of the target’s resilience.
The claim that Israel is heading towards its end, of course, is an old refrain. That doesn’t mean it can never be true. There is nothing inherently frivolous about speculating over Israel’s survival. After all, that things are fragile and impermanent, that supporters can turn their backs out of caprice or grievance and that crisis and annihilation can quickly descend on Jews, are axioms that helped inspire the creation of the Jewish state in the first place.
It is frivolous though, to assume that somehow an invisible force of justice will bring to an end states that commit atrocities. Make no mistake, Bibi Netanyahu’s government is atrocious, on many levels. And whilst that’s agonising for Israel and Palestinians alike, the hard truth remains that the world is not one large morality play. Those who confidently foresee Israel’s doom betray a certain naïve assumption about how the world works. That is, they implicitly regard the universe as a virtuous system that punishes wickedness.
Yet the connection between misbehaviour and state death is not as straightforward as many apparently think. For one thing, many actors incite and commit atrocities in the region. Who or what decides which ones must go under?
If history is destined to throw Israel into its dustbin, it needs human agents to carry out this task. The implied notion of Hamas as history’s agent, an ideologically genocidal movement from the hard right of Palestinian politics, was always sinister and odd. And there are too many powers — neighbouring, regional or more distant — for whom trying to isolate or destroy Israel evidently isn’t worth the candle.
A closer look at what states “do”, apart from their communiqués, press releases and formal acts, suggests that apart from Yemen, whose regime is putting its money where its mouth is by a blockade, Israel’s Arab-majority neighbours are playing a double game in keeping with their long record of watchful Realpolitik. They might publicly condemn Israel and even cut off diplomatic ties. But they persist in trade and sometimes, as with the UAE, cooperate discreetly.
Not only is this emphatically not isolation. Israel is less isolated, with an economy more resilient (considerable foreign exchange reserves; a debt-to-GDP ratio for European countries to envy; energy self-sufficient) than in other periods when it had to cope with Arab rejectionism and/or US coercion.
Egypt may join the international litigation against Israel, but it has also increased its trade with Israel
Over 2024, even as Gaza reached higher levels of suffering, the parties of the Abraham Accords (Israel, Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan and the UAE) remained in dialogue. Saudi Arabia’s relationship with Israel is more fraught, given the interruption of the normalisation talks by the war in Gaza. Still, informal talks reportedly continue, and, in 2024, Saudi Arabia participated in secret meetings and shared intelligence with Israel. And the Crown Prince seeks progress on the issue of Palestinian statehood in order to secure domestic support for a future deal. Whether or not the deal eventually happens, this is far from pariahdom.
Day to day, vital imports to Israel have increased, from wood products and non-energy raw materials to medicine. Israel’s access to ports in Bahrain and the Emirates, to reroute imports from the blockaded Red Sea, remains intact. Egypt may join the international litigation against Israel, but it has also increased its trade with Israel — its Mediterranean ports are important transit hubs for imports and exports to the “pariah” state. And Cairo shows no signs of opening the Gaza border on its side, fearing Hamas and its ilk more than it agonises for civilians.
Turkey is a harder case. Formally, it has cut off direct trade to Israel and severed diplomatic ties. But it winks at violations of trade restrictions and reroutes goods through Greece and via Palestinian customs, presenting it as exporting to Palestine when in fact Israel has cut off funds to the Palestinian authority. Governments grieving over Palestine’s plight weep crocodile tears.
A state cannot be said to be “isolated” under these conditions. Or whilst a superpower continues to ship arms and direct its efforts at bolstering Tel Aviv (this January the US State Department announced a further $8bn arms sale), maintaining its powerful protective wing. And business goes on, thrives even. There have been more punitive shunnings.
So if Israel is to be isolated by a morally indignant world, it will take more than mass indignation. It will take a wider revolution to overthrow the double-dealing regimes who traffic with it, replacing incumbents either with principled humanists or hardened regimes willing to confront it without compromise. Well, experiments in revolution and coalition war have already been tried, and appetite is now limited.
Large parts of Arab opinion may oppose Israel’s very existence, but they also remember the bloody tumult of the “Arab Spring” as it turned dark. They grapple with other interlocking crises in the wake of the 2007-09 global financial crisis, the pandemic and, in Lebanon’s case, economic crisis. They may empathise with Palestine. But they are not Palestinians. And they have other problems to navigate, such as countering Iran.
Those Westerners who easily assume that Arab outrage will lead to collective backlash are slow to recognise the historical fair-weatheredness of Pan-Arabism, more an ideal than reality. Arab politics, like all politics, historically reverts under pressure to narrower, self-seeking behaviour and mutual suspicion. Yet in each generation, bien-pensant scribblers resurrect their romantic hopes about the promise of the “Arab street”.
Brutality can repel opinion, true enough, but usually only in conjunction with other forces
Despite expectations otherwise, atrocities historically do not necessarily spell the demise of regimes. Sometimes brutality is accompanied by failure. But many times it is not, and the causal linkages between gentleness, roughness and success are not obvious. There is something ironic about using a Chinese-manufactured smartphone to tweet out predictions that Israel’s bloodshed puts it on the wrong side of history. Beijing commits mass atrocities in Xinjiang province, yet there is little sign of local and global mass outrage inducing state collapse. Has China “got to go” too?
The Sri Lankan state committed atrocities to suppress the Tamil Tigers, as did Russia to stamp on Chechnyan revolt, as did the wartime Allies to redraw the borders of modern Poland, via the forced displacement of ethnic Germans in Eastern Europe from 1944. None faced international punishment or desertion. Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno famously told General Francisco Franco’s death squads “you may be winning, but you have not convinced [me]”.
We know what happened next. Franco crushed the Spanish republican anti-fascists amongst an exhausted population. His despotic new order won international recognition, becoming a de facto NATO ally, on the back of the new power-political reality. Brute force and terror marginalised the republicans’ cause for a lifetime. Brutality can repel opinion, true enough, but usually only in conjunction with other forces: others’ interests and relative levels of power. Otherwise, the Soviet Union, fascist Italy or B’aath Syria would have fallen much earlier than they did. When international audiences don’t care enough to truly bring pressure to bear at scale, isolation is unlikely.
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Whether or not Israel faces longer-term existential problems, if there is a regional power in more immediate trouble, it is Iran and its once-feared “Axis of Resistance”. It may or may not have green-lit Hamas’ attack in October 2022. Regardless, Tehran is that movement’s chief sponsor. And it must now be concerned about the course of the struggle that the pogrom precipitated. Until recently, observers agreed that Iran presented a hard target and could threaten Israel with a multi-front war, that the combined missiles of Hezbollah and Iran itself could overwhelm its air defences and that Israel could hardly maintain operations in Gaza given the peril on its northern front.
Now, and in short order, Israel has weakened Iran’s air defences and missile production base, helped accelerate its energy crisis and pummelled its proxies not only in Gaza but in Lebanon, Yemen and Syria, its devastation contributing to the collapse of the Assad regime, an important Iranian client state. Hezbollah for the time being is off the board of the Gaza conflict. Israel has not eliminated Hamas nor curtailed its ability to fire rockets. But its assaults have degraded Hamas as a governing and military outfit. If not because of “deep operational damage”, why else has it agreed to cede the future governance of Gaza to a unity committee with Fatah, its rival?
For its part, Iran’s power position has declined so precipitously that the Biden administration at the behest of National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan — not exactly a foaming war hawk — recently reviewed whether to launch air strikes against Tehran’s nuclear facilities should it race for the bomb, significant given the Biden administration’s own presumption against over-entanglement in Middle Eastern war and strife.
Even “end the forever wars” Biden is tempted to strike: Iran as a result of this war has quickly both become weaker and been revealed as weaker in the first place than we thought. That, too, carries dangers. But those who now declare Israel’s “strategic defeat” aren’t paying enough attention.
It is not Israel but Iran that is now threatened and depleted on multiple fronts. The Prussian strategic mind Carl von Clausewitz, wrestling with the difficulty of war’s shocks and the difficulty of making it work, asked “Would Prussia in 1806 have risked war with France with 100,000 men, if she had suspected that the first shot would set off a mine that was to blow her to the skies?”
On a similar note, would Iran have given its surrogates such latitude or supported their attacks to the hilt after the fact, if the net result was to put it into renewed crisis? There is indeed an overreaching imperial power and destabilising war-maker in the region that now faces setbacks and should refocus away from aggrandisement and towards survival. Critics preoccupied with the idea of Israel’s fall have little to say about it.
The notion that Israel is isolated and headed rapidly for destruction because of its brutality is wrong about the reaction of the wider audience and the present correlation of forces. It is not only based on a rather scholastic tendency to be taken in by outward, formal statements and the choreography of moral outrage by wily rulers. It is also based on an enduring Whiggish belief that history is directional.
This view presents the wishes of whoever has it as the trajectory of the future, presuming Time has an “arc” or that it picks “sides”, a crooked line perhaps with regressions, but ever moving toward a fixed end. Yet this doesn’t reckon with the stubborn and selfish way states tend to behave under pressure, especially ones reluctant to be shown the door. As Adam Smith quipped, “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.” Especially the Israeli nation.
