I am always leery of hubris. It may be true that all people of good now want ‘the fall’ of Israel, after a century of lies, deceit, killing and more killing, first by the British and European Jews, then by the US and European Jews, now by Britain-US-EU-Israel and European and Arab Jews. But compassion does not pay the bills. The stakes keep mounting, along with high tech death toys, and it’s very hard to image Israel on the verge of collapse. It, and world Jewry, have never been so rich, so powerful in all history.
The major world powers – the ‘collective West’, China, India, Russia – provide it with most of the death toys and the fuel to run them. None of these hard-nosed political schemers want to see Israel collapse, nor do any of them lose much sleep over the plight of the Palestinians. I, like many others today, am devoting my life to help free Palestine and really, really don’t want to be disappointed, so I’ll temper my enthusiasm, hold off on celebrating the end of the monstrosity. I am not counting any chickens yet. It’s a long way till the final act when the fat lady belts out her last hava nagila.
Steinbock is a leading international economic expert who has put his chips on the side of BRICS and multipolarism. That’s where the future is and the ‘collective West’ better wake up soon as it is being left behind. And that includes Israel, as the West’s swan song to 19th c imperial glory. He is CEO and founder of Difference Group (Paul Krugman is a member of the board), its purpose: In the past, the West drove the global economic prospects. Today, that role belongs to the Global South. We help governments, institutions, businesses, and NGOs navigate in the new and complex, multipolar environment.
The thesis of The Fall is simple: Aiming to turn a secular democracy into a Jewish autocracy/ theocracy, the most far-right government in the history of Israel has continued to push this judicial coup amid the fog of war. These cleavages in the Israeli society figure large in its political disintegration.
Most analysis of the dilemmas Israel faces looks to the occupation of the Palestinian territories in the 1967 War and the subsequent expansion of Jewish settlements as the chief problem. They are its proximate effect; following directly on the ethnic expulsions of the Palestinian Arabs in 1948. Steinbock makes it clear the Israelis never had any interest in anything but one Jews-only state, which was sort of achieved in the 1950s. Everything thereafter is footnotes.i A pro-forma future two-state solution with present de facto one-state realities.ii
The US is both the problem, having encouraged Israel in its expansion from 1948 on, feeding it with lethal weapons, financing settlements condoning ethnic cleansing and murder on a daily basis, and the solution, as the current genocidal monster Israel would indeed ‘fall’ at the ‘twinkling of an eye’ if the US closed the spigot.
The last US president to try that was Bush I, whose feeble attempt to stop the settlement expansion led to his humiliating defeat from a vengeful Israel lobby a few months later in 1992. The penultimate protest, JFK’s stand against Israel acquiring nukes, led to his assassination and replacement by Israel sycophant LBJ. With both Republican and Democratic parties in lockstep today, supporting Israel’s textbook genocide, the only hope is public opinion, anti-apartheid activism, which is increasingly criminalized in the ‘collective West’.
Steinbock points to the mid-50s as the moment of truth, though we can go back to Jabotinsky in the 1920s, or Ben Gurion in the fateful 1948, when the slaughter began in earnest and was clear, certainly to the Palestinians, if not to a still naive collective West. The ‘bilateral’ ties with Washington and massive US military aid kicked in then and have reached staggering proportions now, a virtual blank cheque to reak havoc, no end in sight.
These ties led to such new-old doctrines as the Dahiya (suburb) doctrine of carpet bombing civilians, the Hannibal directive to murder Israelis stupid enough to be taken hostage, and mass assassination factories, backed by pioneering artificial intelligence. The socialism of labor Zionism was replaced by the hard-right coalitions driven by revisionist Zionism, thanks to US neoliberal economic policies, assertive neoconservatism and Jewish-American donors. It also explains the rise of the Messianic far-right, centrist parties, and the failure of the Left.
The Fall of Israel covers the country’s political and ethnic divides, economic polarization, social and military changes, the shifts in the Palestinian struggle for sovereignty, the apartheid regime in the occupied territories, the genocidal atrocities, the regional and global reverberations, and the ensuing human and economic costs, both prior and subsequent to Israel’s fatal war on Gaza. Not to mention the domestic hell – the economic polarization, the collapse of innovative, high tech start-ups, the talent brain drain, the undermined welfare state, rising poverty and the subsidized religious sector.
Steinbock documents the three waves of settlers from 1948, the last following the 1993 Oslo Accords, which should have ended the settlements, but was so flawed that it allowed their acceleration, now under policing by the Palestinian Authority, even as Hamas was elected in Gaza, and the PA totally discredited, but still the de facto ‘authority’, now just a fig leaf for creeping genocide. Israeli attacks on Palestinians increased, killing Palestinians on a daily basis, with occasional massive bombings of Gaza (2008, 2009, 2014, 2023) killing thousands each time.
Steinbock documents the atrocities, the complicity of the US. His many charts show the massive increase in West Bank land seizures in 2023, clearly part of a push to fully steal all the West Bank, even as there is no ‘exit strategy’ for the millions of Palestinians still alive. We know what Netanyahu would like to do to each and every one of those vermin, and at this point US politicians are more or less united on letting him ‘finish the job’. Steinbock (and all of us) pin our hopes on world mass opinion. None of the world leaders apart from the Axis of Resistance can be counted on. Arab leaders loathe the pesky Palestinians almost as much as US-Israel does. It is only the revolting masses that stand between them and the Palestinians.
Tactics? Strategy? Duh …
Their only strategy to achieve Apartheid 2.0 is denial of the facts on the ground, starting from 1948, denying the ethnic ‘cleansing’, the mass slaughter, the erasure of hundreds of Palestinian villages. Israelis pay no attention to the current slaughter, most hoping that the IDF and settlers kill all Palestinians still breathing. Israelis tactics are violence, murder, theft. In short, terrorism. But this is also its strategy since 1948, along with ‘divide and conquer’ of its Arab neighbors.
Steinbock doesn’t take seriously the option of total erasure of the Palestinians, though that is the stated goal of Israeli leaders. The victory of the dead. But even if they could dump the Palestinians in Sinai, that is not a strategy which can bring peace, which would require negotiating with your own dispossessed citizens, and neighbors. In good faith. Which is impossible for Israel, as it is terrorizing its own Arab and its neighbors. In short, Israel can only survive through 24/7 terror, which is very expensive and means 24/7 US military aid. This can continue only as long as the US can keep printing dollars to cover its own massive debt. 18% of government spending is just to pay interest on this debt. As this continues to increase, eventually the US will be bankrupt, unable to function under the mountain of debt. This inevitable bankruptcy of the US will finally hit Israel, bringing to an end the blank cheque on its daily horrors, but I keep reminding myself, it took Rome four centuries to finally collapse collapse.
What is particularly creepy is how Israel has used Palestinians as guinea pigs for testing its weapons of crowd control, now touting itself as the leader in the technology of totalitarian mind-body control. The only growth industry now for Israel is producing weapons, spyware, i.e., anything disgusting and lethal. This also began in the 1950s as Israel settled in to its schizoid de facto one-state- Jews-only state. The Israel Military Industry (IMI) began collaboration with the IDF, aiming to develop the most technologically advanced small arms systems for troops fighting in urban areas and harsh environments. The state-owned IMI (i.e., socialized death toys) was privatized in 2018, when it was taken over by Elbit Systems. (Poor Elbit is now the victim of western activists, who forced it to close up shop in Britain. Elbit has become our calling card for smashing windows and splashing red paint.)
Israel has had to work very hard to overcome its notoriety as terrorist and mass killer. And it worked! By the early 1980s, more than 50 countries on five continents had become customers for Israeli killing technology. Israel added some sugar to its military toys, famously bragging about its agricultural successes in ‘making the desert bloom,’ and uses that as PR abroad about how nice Israel really is. That and weapons, ‘butter and guns’, though its ‘butter’ is all milked from stolen land, and its guns are used not to defend, but to suppress popular uprisings in oppressive Israel-like regimes around the world.
Yes, Dahiya and Hannibal, but these ‘doctrines’ are merely (disgusting, inhuman) tactics rather than winning long run strategies. Israel’s tactics/ strategy have been violence, denial, theft with the goal of a Jews-only state, ignoring the natives who lived there, and then more violence. Which apparently works for world elites, including not just the US, but Chinese, Indian and Russian. No one besides plucky South Africa, Colombia and Bolivia have broken relations with the monster, despite rivers of crocodile tears.
The Palestinian strategy is primarily nonviolent resistance with a militant wing occasionally fighting back, which is fully legal for a nation under occupation but condemned as terrorism. Funny how the real terrorists call the shots. The militants address the egregious crimes of the occupiers; they do not target civilians, even medevac helicopters.iii This strategy of compassion for the wounded is based on Islam, where rules of engagement with the enemy are nonnegotiable. Another religious principle rejects assassination of enemy leaders.
Such ethical behavior is alien to Israel, which has assassinated hundreds of Palestinian, Lebanese, etc leaders, ‘rationally’ reasoning that the enemy will collapse without them. When Israel assassinates Palestinian leaders, they are mourned, they become martyrs, inspiring the next generation. Whatever personal flaws Nasrallah may have had, he is now a saint, an inspiration to all freedom-loving people. His body parts were gathered and temporarily hidden to prevent Israel from bombing them, and eventually will be buried probably in Karbala. Sinwar’s body was captured by Israel and most likely will not be returned (maybe dumped from a plane over the ocean like Bin Laden) as it will be a potent sword hanging over Israel’s head.
Israel’s mass murderers, such as Meir Kahane are gruesomely worshipped, but only by nutcase settlers. Israel has few such martyr-heroes, but then neither the Palestinians nor their Muslim allies target Israelis for assassination, not believing that it is a useful tactic or strategy, rather giving a romantic aura of martyrdom to any victim as indeed is the case when Israelis target Palestinians. The Palestinians’ goal is jannah, the path/ strategy is moral and ethical living, prayer, jihad, martyrdom. Tactics are waging war to the death against the enemy, picking up unexploded Israeli bombs and reusing them. All the time, appealing to humanity, to the basic decency of the outside world, calling on world opinion, boycotting, bringing criminal charges to bring peace.
Steinbock introduces necrotization, which seeks to transform a world of life into a world of death, because that is what displacement, dispossession and devastation ultimately require. It is the collective psychological obliteration of those who have nothing to lose, and therefore fight for their homes, refuse to move away, risk nothingness for being.iv Is this a strategy, or again just a tactic meant to kill or so disillusion Palestinians, so that whoever remains alive will be glad to leave. Whatever. It ignores the ‘last stand’ psychology of the dispossessed, who prefer to die fighting for their homes than to flee to a desolate refugee camp, so it really just amounts to genocide. It just occurred to me that a crude policy of terror, dispossession and genocide doesn’t need any subtleties like tactics vs strategy. The victory of the dead.
Jew vs Jew, Arab turmoil
The real showdown should be between the more universalist Jewish diaspora and the nationalist, racist Israeli Jews. Even as Trump is showered with Adelson’s millions to complete the Israeli dream of total control of the Middle East, some Jews are protesting, but have made zero difference politicly as the Democrats and Republicans are still in lockstep. So much for that strategy. What’s left? The brain drain and increased emigration of Jews from Israel as the crisis deepens. But that leaves the Kahane-ites in control. So much for that strategy.
He considers the rise of Islamic movements in particular the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt under al-Banna, which spread to all the Arab world, rivaled by Arab nationalism under Nasser and Hafez Assad. In all cases, the MBs were crushed by neocolonial regimes, and then attempts to promote Arab nationalism failed, descending into personal dictatorships. Muslims make poor nationalists. Islam rejects ideologies that interfere with being good Muslims. In Iraq the Baath party reformers finally ending in the humiliating defeat of atheistic Saddam Hussein (who called on Allah in a panic at the end). Though battered, the MBs remain the only survivors of a century of anti-imperialist struggle, still determined to face off against the Zionist occupiers.
With Israel commanding everyone’s undivided attention, the Arab world remains shamefully ‘divided and conquered’, resentful, even hostile to Shia Iran’s lifeline to Gaza and Lebanon. Jordan and Saudi assistance to US-Israel to shoot down Iran’s missiles will never be erased. Jordan and Saudi leaders have a lot to account for before their people. Only when Israel is eventually brought to justice, can the Middle East develop more naturally. Islam remains the bedrock, and Islamic reforms will be the way forward, based now on the experience of the past century, including Egypti’s MB, Islamic Iran and Afghanistan. The Saudis and Gulf emirates are remnants of 19th c British imperialism and do not represent the future of the Egyptian, Iraqi, Palestinian, Jordanian, etc masses. But until the enemy is defeated, we must stand shoulder to shoulder (though the Saudis et al should keep a look out over theirs).
Russia, China
Steinbock doesn’t make predictions on their account. He puts his hopes on BRICS, especially China’s hint at engagement, its brokering Saudi-Iranian reconciliation, and Palestinian factions uniting. The latter was called the Beijing Declaration, calling for a larger-scale Israeli-Palestinian peace conference and a timetable to implement a two-state solution.
I think it is a mistake to be too hopeful. Russia and Chinese have highly developed economic relations with Israel; Russia provides it will the oil to use to bomb Palestinians; China is Israel’s largest trade partner – 18% of trade vs 10% for US and 2.5% for Russia. Chinese investment is more than US$15b, spawning seed capital in Israeli startup companies, as well as the acquisition of Israeli companies by major Chinese corporations that incorporate Israel’s know how to help invigorate the development of the modern Chinese economy more efficiently. China ranked second in 2015 after the US on collaboration with Israeli high-tech firms that are backed by Israel’s Office of the Chief Scientist. Neither Russia nor China want to see Israel collapse. BRICS is not a coherent economic force. We are stuck with US-Israel, the Axis of Resistance, the Palestinian now scattered around the world, working with the handful of anti-Zionist diaspora Jews, until the US itself collapses. That seems to be our strategy.
All countries listen to China, Israel included. It would be lost if China made an serious move to threaten its economic ties. China’s recent two-state proposals prompted Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Jordan, Egypt, and the Palestinian Authority to move forward with plans to present a joint political vision for rehabilitating the Gaza Strip and establishing a Palestinian state after the Israel-Hamas war. To preempt such schemes, Netanyahu’s office presented its own vision of ‘Gaza 2035’ in May. The Israeli proposal labels Gaza as an ‘Iranian outpost’, taunting the quisling Arab leaders as ineffectual, traitors, allies of the hated Israel. So Gaza can be taken, as it isn’t really part of the Arab world, but an Iranian outpost which must be destroyed. More tactic than strategy and very silly. Israel would mobilize the emirates and Saudis to divvy out aid to Gazans and hunt down and eliminate Hamas, much like the Oslo Accords got the PA to police Palestinians as settlements proceeded. After 15 years, if things go well, some limited autonomy would be allowed, all the while under Israeli hegemony.
Steinbock puts his eggs in China’s basket in his vision of any future Middle East peace. At each step, China is filling in where the US fears (or is too lazy) to tread. Re Egypt, in the absence of Israel’s full withdrawal from the occupied territories, the bilateral trust with Israel has been eroding for decades. Today it is sustained mainly by US aid, which is vital to bottomless-pit Cairo. Meanwhile China’s multibillion-dollar economic cooperation initiatives are fostering rather than undermining Egyptian development. Ditto Jordan, where China is building a national railway network, an oil pipeline to link Iraq and Jordan, and a new Jordan-China university. Egypt and Jordan, weak and corrupt, are throwing themselves at China’s feet, much like Iran did over the past decade. China is waging a positive-sum war against/ with the world, promising prosperity and Chinese hegemony as a package deal. (At least this is not the subtle Bretton Woods ‘prosperity and US imperialism’.)
China’s Belt Road Initiative has reached around the world, despite US attempts to sabotage China with its own rail-ship road from India through the Middle East to Europe, but that assumes Saudi compliance, which is dead-on-arrival now. One can only laugh in disbelief as US hegemony is being K-Oed by the Chinese economic fist – everywhere. Unlike US-Israel, China has a clear strategy of nonzero sum cooperation with all, promising advantages where past ‘aid’ meant corruption, misuse of funds, more debt.
The US-China economic rivalry is providing lots of brainstorming by potential participants in both hopeful outcomes, but China remains cautious, more or less abiding by US sanctions on Russia. BRICS at least has raised the profile of the South, given them collective clout though still much less than the collective West.
With the Ukraine war unending, Russia is now unofficially joining all anti-US efforts, probably providing Iran and the Houthis with satellite information to keep the Suez Canal out of commission and for accurate bombing, possibly even providing a few missiles and drones. Why not? The world really is going to Hell in a handbasket, and the ride is rocky but exciting and even hopeful, considering the bad guys seem to be doing everything wrong, pushing Putin into the hands of enemy.
Nuke time?
The ongoing war on multiple fronts from the Axis of Resistance, with 100,000s of Hezbollah bombs ready, could push Israel to use its nukes.v The Begin ‘doctrine’ was ‘formulated’ to justify bombing Iraq’s nuclear facilities and is still in play against Iran. Several nuclear sites were bombed in October, though not the main sites, and were accompanied by a promise to bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities after the election.
Trump has already voiced his approval. But Iran’s success in bombing Israel twice in 2024 shows it has jumped ahead of Israel (and the US) in hypersonic missiles, which can be mobilized to really destroy little sitting-duck Israel. Israel is still loudly threatening Iran but my gut reaction is to imagine hundreds of hypersonic missiles reining down on Israel. Israelis are uniformly racist monsters now, so the civilian-military distinction is moot. When the whole world feels that way about you, all the king’s horse and all the king’s lackeys won’t be able to put Humpty-Dumpty together again.
In the West, Israel’s peace treaties with Egypt (1979) and Jordan (1994), and the Abraham Accords (2020–2021) with some Gulf states are often portrayed as steps toward a two-state solution. In Israel, they are seen more as bilateral “normalization” deals with individual Arab countries that will over time marginalize or exclude Palestinians from a final peace solution. The Gaza War has jeopardized the future of such normalization agreements, while severely shuttering the existing deals. The trouble is neither the US nor Israel ever took the negotiations seriously. No one believed then or now that the two-state solution is possible. Meanwhile even US presidents don’t control things, as congress is completely in thrall to Israel and will not allow any pressure to be put on Israel to negotiate. The Knesset voted unanimously against a Palestinian state for the nth time (68, 9 Arab Israelis voting for a Palestinian state).
Given the likely Trump second term, funded by Adelson, probably none of this matters at all. Trump’s Project 2025 includes Project Esther, which plans to crush all anti-Israel dissent in the US and Europe and to create a Potemkin villlage of acceptable Palestinians, to be kept in line by Arab sheikhs with Israeli puppet masters. Netanyahu couldn’t have said it better.
Steinbock is hopeful re Russia, with its offer to Iran of S-400 anti-missile defense (a decade after Iran paid for them), showing the US that it is not the only kid on the block with nukes. But Steinbock’s only real hope is that world opinion, backed by a Jewish diaspora, will somehow click in and bring the US to its senses. I would add the Palestinian diaspora, which is already larger (in 2003 9.6m) than the Jewish one (8.5m), working together, will be the driving force of change. And Islam. It is the fastest growing religion (always has been) and the Middle East is now multiple-birthing Ziophobia and Islamophilia. It’s never been a better time to be a Muslim. We have a huge diaspora in the House of War. And we have Boycott Divest Sanction as the secular version of jihad. When Jews, Christians* and Muslims can join forces, we can do anything.
The first real sign that South African apartheid would be dismantled was when (Jewish) MP Harry Schwarz met with ANC’s Mangosuthu Buthelezi to sign the Mahlabatini Declaration of Faith in 1974, enshrined the principles of peaceful transition of power and equality for all, the first such agreement by black and white political leaders in South Africa. But it took another 2 decades of struggle until de Klerk opened bilateral discussions with Nelson Mandela in 1993 for a transition of policies and government.
It seems we have reached that first stage today. Ehud Olmert, who served as the Israeli prime minister from 2006 to 2009, and Nasser al-Kidwa, the Palestinian foreign minister from 2005 to 2006, met Pope Francis October 17, 2024, to promote a peace plan that would see a Palestinian state existing alongside the state of Israel ‘on the basis of 1967 borders’ with a few territorial adjustments. Their plan calls for the city of Jerusalem to be the capital of both Israel and Palestine, with the Old City being ‘administered by a trusteeship of five states of which Israel and Palestine are part.’