Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is an extremely wily politician. So what is one to make of what looked like a major admission against interest in a speech Monday at the Finance Ministry’s accountant general, that Israel is being cornered economically and has no ready way out? As we’ll discuss, Netanyahu attempted to walk his remarks back the next day after the Israel stock market had a wee sad and business leaders and politicians pushed back.
But what Netanyahu said cannot be unsaid, particularly in light of evidence that the Israeli economy has taken serious damage below the water line. And anyone with an operating brain cell knows Israel cannot become an autarky, or even an autarky as in terms of its own weapons supply. Larry Wilkerson, who both regularly reads Israel press and has many contact, has repeatedly said Israel has taken such serious economic and societal damage that he predicts it will no longer exist in ten years.
So what might have led him Netanyahu to admit serious weakness while packaging it in prototypical “Israel is the David who will prevail against odds”? Is Wilkerson’s that trajectory now starting to become painfully evident even at top level is Israel? Or might Netanyahu be trying to create the justification for even more radical action?
Perhaps Netanyahyu can no longer deny that Israel’s extermination of Palestinians and belligerence in the region, which is overextending its military, is putting Israel in a long-term untenable position. The fact that the next day, a UN commission of inquiry released a report finding that Israel has engaged in four of five genocidal activities as defined by relevant law puts even more pressure on the ethnosupremacist state. The UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide places strong obligations on member states to act to stop genocide.1 Nevertheless, this finding makes it harder for governments facing calls from citizens to Do Something about the genocide to shy from taking action against Israel. Expect a lot more like this:
🚨Jeremy Corbyn MP has written to Yvette Cooper asking for an immediate statement on the UN Commission of Inquiry's finding that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
"Does the government accept the findings of the UN report?", he asks. pic.twitter.com/y7yU6O2Aov
— Declassified UK (@declassifiedUK) September 17, 2025
And the report named potential corporate targets for action.
Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Palantir, IBM and HP are named in a groundbreaking UN report for their role in automating apartheid and accelerating genocide.
Tech companies and weapons manufacturers are the most complicit enablers of Israel’s economy. Escalate BDS pressure against… pic.twitter.com/C1Zg5yIvye
— BDS movement (@BDSmovement) September 12, 2025
What if states that are starting to sanction Israel like Belgium were to sanction them if they don’t cut ties to Israel? And others nations joined them? Goldman might seem to be immune to pressure…but what if a nation were to sanction Goldman and any domestic banks and brokers that traded with them? The threat of license suspension wonderfully focuses the mind.
GOLDMAN SACHS YOU CAN'T HIDE!
Goldman Sachs is the biggest holder of Israeli bonds and a key investor in the weapons companies making the bombs Israel drops on Gaza.
We must take our money out of this violent and extractive war economy.
BOYCOTT & DIVEST! pic.twitter.com/imX6Xg9Tob
— CODEPINK (@codepink) September 4, 2025
I believe Netanyahu made the Finance Ministry’s accountant general speech in Hebrew, since I cannot find it on the English language version of the English language version of the Prime Minister’s Office site.2 But the Times of Israel went through it in detail in Netanyahu admits Israel economically isolated, says will need to become ‘super-Sparta’:
“Israel is in a sort of isolation,” Netanyahu acknowledged…
“We will increasingly need to adapt to an economy with autarkic characteristics,”…
Faced with a scenario of “Athens and Sparta,” Israel would be “Athens and super-Sparta,” Netanyahu said. “There’s no choice; in the coming years, at least, we will have to deal with these attempts to isolate us.”
Israel is facing two new threats since the start of the war, Netanyahu explained: demographic changes in Europe as a result of immigration from Muslim-majority countries and the influence of anti-Israel actors on digital platforms, aided by new technologies.
“I am a believer in the free market, but we may find ourselves in a situation where our arms industries are blocked. We will need to develop arms industries here — not only research and development, but also the ability to produce what we need,” he said.
Netanyahu fingered China and Qatar as the prime “anti-Israel actors on digital platforms”. Continuing with the Times of Israel account:
Netanyahu first addressed demographic changes in Europe, where “limitless migration” has resulted in Muslims becoming a “significant minority — very vocal, very, very belligerent.” These countries’ Muslim citizens are pressuring European governments to adopt anti-Israel policies, he claimed.
“Their focus isn’t Gaza, it’s opposing Zionism in general, and sometimes an Islamist agenda that challenges those states,” the premier added….
“This is creating limitations, and all sorts of sanctions, on Israel….It’s a process that’s been at work for the last 30 years, and especially in the last decade….Clear as day,” he said.
The situation could bring arms embargoes and — though these are only threats for now — “the beginnings of economic sanctions,” the prime minister warned…
“This puts us in a sort of isolation,” he said, adding that Israel can fight demonization and incitement if it invests “very large sums” into efforts to counter those narratives.
So per Netanyahu, the calls for sanctions on Israel and BDS campaigns are all the doing of Muslims, and not decent people generally. Back to the article:
The second challenge, according to Netanyahu, is the investment of Israel’s “rivals — both NGOs and states, like Qatar and China” — to “influence Western media with an anti-Israel agenda, using bots, artificial intelligence, and advertisements.”…
Israel can fight demonization and incitement if it invests “very large sums” into efforts to counter those narratives.
But for now, he said, Israel must quickly establish the capacity to produce everything it needs militarily without depending on foreign trade.
Netanyahu regularly says deranged things, but they hew to well-established tropes, like Israel is the blameless victim of Hamas savagery. This is an entirely new line. And it’s as ludicrous as his Zionist chest-thumping. Israel produce everything it needs militarily without trade,.as in without chips, unless it takes to the Russian practice of harvesting them from washing machines? Or will Israel rely on slingshots and nukes?
And as for information dominance, the fact that Israel has succeeded in enlisting governments in the West to suppress of pro-Palestine protests and even speech aggressively says otherwise. The Israel protection racket also likely explains the limited information available about the poor condition of Israel’s economy.
When we pointed to the initial sharp contraction after October 7, and the level of professionals leaving particularly in tech, readers argued that Israel could still be propped up with infusions of external cash. We said that would not work long term if enough skilled people departed and did not return. Experts estimated that Israel depended on a mere 300,000 professionals and technicians. And those would skew to the Ashkenazi who have been more and more politically marginalized as right wing extremists have taken the helm. What is left is not an economy of productive manufacturers and services but a welfare state.
That appears to be what has happened.
UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese is 100% Right
Israel’s economy was collapsing after Oct 7, but banks, charities & universities stepped in to fund and profit from the genocide pic.twitter.com/MGadsTaIhU
— Ryan Rozbiani (@RyanRozbiani) September 8, 2025
Similarly, Shir Hever describes Israel as having a zombified economy:
ISRAEL IS A ZOMBIE ECONOMY
Israeli scholar, Dr. Shir Hever says all economic indicators show Israel’s economy has collapsed & no sane person should give Israel any credit or expect repayment on Israel Bonds
So why is our Gov passing laws to force us to purchase Israel Bonds? https://t.co/stlJLqYZ4A pic.twitter.com/o9pRo8hIqV
— GenXGirl (@GenXGirl1994) August 14, 2025
From an interview at Electronic Initifada at around the same date as the video clip above, Hever unpacks his argument a bit more. Hever is prominent in the BDS movement, so one might argue he has a bias. And he initially argued that Israel was collapsing after the October 7 raid, But he admits to his error in not foreseeing how big infusions of foreign funds could prop Israel up.
A key section at 4:55:
Hever; And that’s why I call it the zombie stage of of the economy because of course the the economic crisis is terrible and everyone who is able to leave is trying to leave except for for people who are basically committed to sacrificing themselves and their families and their children and that’s also horrible. Um, and in that in this situation, it’s it’s not relevant to talk about whether the Israeli economy is going to collapse because it has already collapsed. It’s just acting with struts that are imposed by external forces that enable it to continue to exist.
Barrows-Friedman: Sher, let’s uh talk a little bit more of like the granular details of um of the the economic uh impact. Um Israel is facing a budget crisis. It had been projecting an already large deficit of about 5% of its GDP, its gross domestic product. But uh just uh in the last few days, credit rating agency Moody’s says that Israel’s budget shortfall is more likely to be about 8% of GDP, which works out to be about 43 billion of spending that it can’t cover just for 2025 alone. and Moody’s, which had uh previously downgraded Israel’s credit rating to the lowest level ever, maintained a negative outlook in its most recent analysis following um the Iran war….
Hever: what is precedented is the complicity of organizations like Moody’s or SNP these I mean what you’re describing as negative outlook is in fact sugarcoating the actual situation and and this is still um an assessment by these credit ratings as if they expect Israel to ever be able to pay its debts. Maybe they say the risk has increased that Israel will not fully be able to pay its debts. But this is not the reality. The reality is that these debts have no guarantee and no nothing to to uh cover them. Last time we had this conversation, it was shortly after the budget was passed. And I remind you that the budget was passed on March 17th, one day before Israel violated the ceasefire. The only way that Israel was able to pass the budget is by saying h that this is a ceasefire budget. Meaning that resources will be uh trans transformed from the military to very necessary, very urgent social needs, the collapsing education system, transportation system, health system that cannot wait any longer. Uh but as long as the military says we need more uh weapons, more bombs, more soldiers, no the reser cannot go back to work, then all of these things are are not possible and Israel passed the budget and then violated the ceasefire. So the budget was was a a sham from the beginning. Now, according to this budget, the Israeli Ministry of Defense was supposed to get a massive increase in spending, but um this massive increase has already been exceeded within the first month after Israel violated the ceasefire and that is before the war in Iran, the the war with Iran, right? So really the the budget has no meaning in and any other country which would be breaking its own budget in this way and spending without any consideration to what it means and getting deeper and deeper into debt at such an alarming rate. any other country that would be doing this sort of policy would be done shut down by the international community which has happened to Argentina in 2000 and to Greece in 2007 but it’s not happening to Israel because of this complicity.
Note that even though the US has guaranteed Israel bond issues up to set dollar limits, that program expired in 2023.
Right before the speech, top experts took a shot at Netanyahu. . From YNet:
Earlier Monday, eighty of Israel’s most senior economists warned that a full-scale invasion and military occupation of Gaza would cause unprecedented economic harm to the country, deepening an already severe crisis caused by the ongoing war.
In a letter obtained by Ynet, the economists said the government’s plan to capture Gaza City and displace about one million people in a months-long military operation would lead to an exodus of young professionals, long-term damage to Israel’s international standing and devastating effects on its economy and society.
Netayahu’s “autarky” remarks generated fierce responses both from critics of his policies and key members of the business community. Again from Times of Israel:
Opposition Leader Yair Lapid said in a statement: “Isolation is not fate. It’s a product of a wrongheaded and failed policy by Netanyahu and his government, who have turned Israel into a third-world country, and aren’t even trying to change the situation.”…
Manufacturers’ Association of Israel President Ron Tomer said that Netanyahu “said publicly what we’ve been feeling and warning against: The Israeli brand, of creativity, demand, and success, has been seriously harmed in the world.”
“Israeli industry will ensure that we are never lacking — not in security, not in food, and not in anything vital to the Israeli economy. That being said, an autarkic market will be a disaster for Israel’s economy and will influence every citizen’s quality of life,” he said.
And the fallout continues two days later. From Globes:
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s remarks yesterday, that, because of its diplomatic isolation, Israel would have to “adapt to an economy with characteristics of autarky” and become a “super Sparta” struck many with dismay. Senior economists, including some who have worked closely with Netanyahu, are wondering what to make of such an extraordinary statement.
“A statement like this in the twenty-first century amounts to saying that we’ll go back to the Stone Age,” Prof. Manuel Trajtenberg told “Globes.” “The Israeli economy is very simple,” he says, “We sell brains to the world, and we buy all the rest. Autarky means that you sell Jewish brains to one another, and produce all the rest.
“There is no way that the Israeli economy in its present format can exist if we go in the direction of reducing economic ties with the world. We’re talking about the essence of the Israeli economy,” Trajtenberg says. “The upshot will be not just a dramatic fall in the standard of living, but in our ability to maintain an army, security, and of course all our social services.”
From the Jerusalem Post: “The main indices on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange continued to fall this morning.”
And Forward:
In a speech yesterday, he shocked Israelis by warning that Israel may soon be forced to become a globally isolated “super-Sparta” with “autarkic features” — meaning little or no engagement with international trade. This vision is a disaster that would erase the qualitative edge that has enabled Israel to build a society that is not only a refuge but also a magnet — for immigrants, investors, trade, cultural exchange and tourism. A preview of the isolation it would bring was evident in today’s United Nations committee ruling that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
In his “Super Sparta” speech, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu unwittingly admitted his resounding failure and then announced that he planned to continue marching Israel deep into the pit that he dug for it….
Behind the visions of Sparta lies a simple demand: to permit Netanyahu unrestricted, one-man rule, all in the name of the forever war. To establish these enormous arms factories, he said, every legal or bureaucratic obstacle must be removed from the prime minister’s path. This was the bottom line of his speech: Remove all restrictions from his path; end the bureaucracy; end the legal limitations: Netanyahu alone will decide, and no one will stop him.
Haaretz, which has had the misfortune to have to follow Netanyahu attentively, may be correct that this was not a misfired effort at a “blood, toil, tears, and sweat” speech but a justification for a power grab.
Another clue may be his call for “very large sums” to counter messaging by the likes of China and Qatar. This level of alarm may have been intended to spur the moneybags that have kept Israel on life support to dig even deeper.
A third possibility is that Netanyahu was trying to gin up the argument for Israel again attacking Iran and hopefully getting US support. Iran is an autarky. The necessity of creating Fortress Israel would justify the US coming to Israel’s aid to subdue Iran to keep Project Israel going. That line of reasoning, of Israel’s increasingly desperate condition, would also justify a nuclear attack.
Let us hope I am wrong.
____
1 As most readers know, the means of effecting these punishments would be the International Criminal Court, and Israel, the US, and Russia among others have opted out of its jurisdiction. However, Article VIII below does open a path for to act against Israel, as opposed to individuals, such as the current case making its way through the International Court of Justice, which has jurisdiction over all UN members. However, given that a ruling is not imminent, the commission of inquiry finding and report is more likely to have near-term inpact, via emboldening more governments and businesses to take action individually:
Article IV
Persons committing genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.
Article V
The Contracting Parties undertake to enact, in accordance with their respective Constitutions, the necessary legislation to give effect to the provisions of the present Convention, and, in particular, to provide effective penalties for persons guilty of genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III.
Article VI
Persons charged with genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III shall be tried by a competent tribunal of the State in the territory of which the act was committed, or by such international penal tribunal as may have jurisdiction with respect to those Contracting Parties which shall have accepted its jurisdiction.
Article VII
Genocide and the other acts enumerated in article III shall not be considered as political crimes for the purpose of extradition. The Contracting Parties pledge themselves in such cases to grant extradition in
accordance with their laws and treaties in force.
Article VIII
Any Contracting Party may call upon the competent organs of the United Nations to take such action under the Charter of the United Nations as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III.
Article IX
Disputes between the Contracting Parties relating to the interpretation, application or fulfilment of the present Convention, including those relating to the responsibility of a State for genocide or for any of the other acts enumerated in article III, shall be submitted to the International Court of Justice at the request of any of the parties to the dispute.
2 If any readers can find it and will be so kind as to send me a link to yves-at-nakedcapitalism-dot-com, I will run it through an online translator and post it as an embed at the end of this article. Please put “Netanyahu speech” as the subject line.
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Are there more meanings?
Yes. This sentence from the Perry article in the Forward sheds further light, “The next stop on Netanyahu’s path to building his “super-Sparta” is a takeover of Gaza City, and the likely subsequent creation of a military administration in the entire Gaza Strip.”
The Palestinians, in this metaphor, are the helots.
But that’s where history played some tricks on the oh-so-disciplined Spartans.
(I won’t mention Hollywood tricks of depicting them in black-leather underpants, intoning such chestnuts as “Freedom Isn’t Free.”)
Epaminondas. I filch from his English Wikipedia entry:
After the decline of Athens because of its defeat in the Peloponnesian War, he led [Thebes] “out of Spartan subjugation into a pre-eminent position in Greek politics called the Theban Hegemony. In the process, he broke Spartan military power with his victory at Leuctra and liberated the Messenian helots, a group of Peloponnesian Greeks who had been enslaved under Spartan rule for some 230 years following their defeat in the Third Messenian War ending in 600 BC.”
Yet twenty-seven years after his death, Thebes fell to Alexander the Great. Sparta continued its descent into well-deserved insignificance. Even today, Thebes has a larger population than the remains of Sparta do.
One thing I learn from history is to watch for reversal of fortunes. I also learn that talent can arise just about anywhere, unexpectedly.
Can the Israelis pull off being a kind of Sparta? No.
Ah but they think they are Sparta and Athens–the whole ball of wax.
Of course one should point out that Israel has changed from earlier when it pretended to be a real democracy and gave more rights to the Arabs who were left after the Nakba. It’s surely true that the country’s American supporters–Jewish and otherwise–have encouraged and enabled the turn to the dark (or darker) side. You have to ask what connection someone like Trump has to all this other than it gives him the excuse to bully his enemies.
The Israelis have in effect been a kind of Sparta, a militarized, hyper-unequal state, but for so short a time and with such catastrophic regional impacts that in future histories, they’re likely a footnote. An out-of-time settler project, making no attempts to either assimilate into or cooperate with the people of the region, projecting the geopolitical and economic power of a far-off sponsor, collapsed within 100 years. A fun trivia answer for our great-great-grandchildren.
The analogue to the helots is shifting from Palestinians to Thai and Indian workers, as we saw on Oct 7th, 2023, and after, when ‘guest workers’ from Gaza were expelled from the Israeli economy en masse. It’s the same dream the Saudis and Emiratis, among others, have: to have the in-group work in tech and finance and the professional services, and to import out-groupers to hew wood and carry water, lay roadways and clean toilets. Let’s see how sustainable that kind of inequality is.
I’m glad the article touched on the bond ratings. Historical parallel, while fun, carries risks for analysis; nevertheless, there is precedent for a nuclear-armed apartheid state disarming and reconciling, to a limited extent, with its neighbors and the victims of its internal repression. For South Africa, the bond ratings fell (this wasn’t the result of ‘bond vigilantes’, but raters at Moody’s et al.), then they give up their nuclear weapons. Something similar is to be devoutly wished for.
One final comment on the subject: I was reading W.H Auden the other day; he went to Spain in 1937 (speaking of halfway-useful parallels) to be an ambulance driver, like Hemmingway. What he saw there shocked him, and he couldn’t do it. He wrote a poem entitled Spain, 1937, which ends
“The stars are dead; the animals will not look:
We are left alone with our day, and the time is short and
History to the defeated
May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.”
This seems to me, finally, the only appropriate remark.
Israel’s military doom is implicit in simple arithmetic. If 10% of incoming ballistic missiles can get through Israel’s defenses, then there is a total number N of incoming missiles that can entirely devastate the country. The states surrounding Israel can afford to buy N missiles, and unless Israel makes peace, they will.
Sparta only “worked” the way it did because the 10% of the population who were Spartan citizens subjugated and oppressed the vast majority of the population, the Messenians and other Helots who were non-citizens. The Spartan citizens were warriors first not to fight outside invaders but to maintain a proto-police state over the Helot population. The Spartans didn’t want foreign trade because it could destabilize the social hierarchy.
Did Netanyahu mean that Israel must maintain a police state over the Palestinians and other Arab populations nearby, subjugate them, and exploit them for cheap labor in the Israeli economy?
Some scholars have argued that Sparta bred its way out of existence due to it’s largely successful attempts to keep the “elite” Spartans from mixing with the riff raff. Here’s hoping Israel follows Sparta’s trajectory.
In The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World de Ste Croix cites the example of Sparta to portray ruling class hostility at its most extreme:
How much of a farce will this second time will be?
Netenyahu is always grasping for another crisis to keep him in power and out of court. Permenant open war is not sustainable, but a permenant cold war or state of economic emergency could serve as a vehicle for his permenant crisis-ocracy. Turning Israel into a North Korea-lite and the required radical economic restructurings allow him to hold power while seeking new patronage and power structures within that new economy as his previous high tech Askenazi model economy evaporates.
The energy for all of this will be ongoing transfers of capital and financing from the US and Europe. So long as this continues, re-tooling Israel from a software to a hardware shop is simply a question of time. Another Trump promise, reindustrialization, again promised to Israel instead.
Rogue governments led by scoundrels and thugs will raise terrorism to the level of a sacred principle, as teased out at the conclusion of “ISRAEL’S SACRED TERRORISM: A study based on Israeli Prime Minister Moshe Sharett’s Personal Diary” / by Livia Rokach (1980, 1986):
“As a so-called moderate Zionist, interim Israeli Prime Minister Moshe Sharett’s lifelong assumption had been that Israel’s survival would be impossible without the support of the West; that Western so-called morality as well as Western objective interests in the Middle East would never allow the West to support a Jewish state which “behaves according to the laws of the jungle” and raises terrorism to the level of a sacred principle… But his political rivals proved him wrong, thereby dealing a crushing blow to his personality as well as to the very hypothesis of moderate Zionism. What they proved was that his supposedly rational assumption was not only fallacious but also unrealistic. In the final analysis the West, and in particular the U.S., led itself .. into supporting Israel’s megalomaniac ambitions because an objective relationship of complicity already existed and because once pushed into the open this complicity proved capable of serving the cause of Western power politics in the region. Just as Zionism, based on the de-Palestinization and the Judaisation of Palestine, was intrinsically racist and immoral, thus the West, in reality, had no use for a Jewish state in the Middle East which did not behave according to “the laws of the jungle”, and whose terrorism could not be relied on as a major instrument for the oppression of the peoples of the region. There was a fatal but coherent logic in this newly acquired equation, which would determine the course of future events. Sharett would write in his Diary on 4 April 1957: “I go on repeating to myself: Admit that you are the loser! They showed much more daring and dynamism… they played with fire, and they won….””
I highly recommend the eye-opening “Israel’s Sacred Terrorism”. In it I learned, among other things, that Israel conducted the first hijacking of a civilian airliner.
“We sell brains to the world.” Perhaps step one for climbing out of this mess would be to listen to themselves talk.
At any rate thanks for the fill in. Hubris precedes nemesis. Never seems to fail.
From reading all this, I can see that there are a helluva lot of plates spinning with the question of which will be the first to fall. It occurs to me that if the Israel project starts to collapse, that instead of a final bunker scene Netanyahu would just take a jet out of that place and go to America for asylum, maybe even Florida. And like the mustache man, he too will claim that his people were not worthy of him but failed him.
‘Netanyahu first addressed demographic changes in Europe, where “limitless migration” has resulted in Muslims becoming a “significant minority — very vocal, very, very belligerent.” ‘
How much of this immigration is a consequence of the endless Mid-East wars that this sociopath promoted?
To your point, a LOT. Recall that IIRC over a million Syrians went to Europe in 2015-16.
“These countries’ Muslim citizens are pressuring European governments to adopt anti-Israel policies, he claimed.”
This firmly aligns the Israeli government with the US/UK/European far right.
Hints of great replacement theory and stigmatising any opposition as being Muslim biassed, rather than broadly humanitarian, is almost as racist as it comes.
Muslims in the UK are 6% of our population, and its about the same across Europe.
Their influence is actually often disproportionately small, perhaps except in medicine where Muslims are 15% of NHS doctors – but with only 3% of NHS staff overall being Muslim.
I’d question whether Muslims in medicine can remotely be considered as represesenting a negative contribution to society – except perhaps to fascists.
The privately educated in the UK are roughly the same % as Muslims but with a massive factor in favour of their joining the political class – with 23% of MPs being privately educated.
The notion of Muslim political dominance in Europe is basically a neofascist trope.
Unlike China for much of the last 150 years, Netanyahu’s Israel is illsuited to survival as an autarky. An autarky does present an existential threat, or will do if the USA joins in.
Incidentally, the largest % of Syrian refugees in the UK is on the Isle of Bute (pop 6,498) where more than 100 Syrian refugees have been welcomed. And they have.
The local community has been very supportive with individual kids going to Rothesay Academy (325 on roll) being buddied up with personal mentors, and several Syrians setting up businesses in the town.
At that time the right wing ‘Daily Mail’ sent a columnist to try to find (and create) schism between locals and refugees, but was heavily slagged off and virtually kicked off the island.
Whatever the far right narrative that their commentariat like to present as being ascendant in the UK, this small Scottish island, with its slowly declining economy, has shown how empathy and a supportive community are far from dead as social norms.
A good friend of mine is working with an Israeli startup in the health care space. They started their engagements at the end of 2024. In that time, the company went from setting up a US-domiciled entity to make it easier for them to raise money from US-based investors, to now, working through the process of moving several of their key management personnel full time to the US and changing their legal corporate headquarters from Tel Aviv to Delaware.
File under anecdotal evidence, but certainly a tale that validates the whole “professionals fleeing Israel” narrative.
To add another wrinkle, the first executive to make the jump made his career previously working for one of the largest Israeli military contractors for 10+ years. He is now using the skills he learned as a technologist in that business to now save lives rather than take them; wonder if there’s a guily conscience underneath the surface somewhere…
Nah, probably not.
Of the billions of dollars in military aid sent to Israel to prosecute its Mideast attacks, is this mainly in the form of grants or loans?
A large portion of US Gov’t ‘loans’ to Israel are quietly forgiven a few years later, so the distinction isn’t that meaningful.
Just on your Genocide Convention point, the Convention requires signatories to prevent and punish genocide, but obviously only within their own jurisdiction. That is to say if a state discovers that one group on its territory or otherwise within its jurisdiction is preparing to commit acts of genocide against another it should prevent them or punish the perpetrators if it has already occurred. Obviously this can’t apply to other countries, the more so since there is no threshold, or the US could invade South Africa to prevent the genocide of the Afrikaner population, which of course it would successfully do by definition.
So states are limited to what they can do effectively on their own territory. But you need two things. One of course is to establish that genocide is actually occurring or is reasonably threatened. In spite of the “I know it when I see it” lobby, proving genocide is extremely difficult, because it requires proof beyond reasonable doubt of the contents of someone’s skull, as well as a robust chain of evidence showing that person’s direct personal control and responsibility for a series of proven crimes within the terms of the Convention. Twitter postings are not evidence. The small number of successful genocide convictions over the last thirty years have come from ignoring the text of the Convention, or just making stuff up. I actually think that the obsession with “genocide” is a tactical error, because it enables apologists for Israel to argue about technical legal points of definition, whereas its seems to me unarguable that Crimes Against Humanity are being perpetrated. This is the more true because crimes charged as genocide are not necessarily “worse” than other crimes, since the only difference is the motivation. I’ve had lawyers suggest to me that you could mount a successful genocide case without a single death: forced movement of populations for example, which was certainly in the minds of the drafters of the Convention in 1948.
The other is actions you can actually take, bearing in mind that the defence would be that these are allegations of a politically-motivated court hostile to Israel, and so almost anything a government did would be open to legal challenge. This would leave governments (and others) free to use harassing tactics, but that’s all they would be. As to the Art VII point, I don’t know what judges would say, but the Article is envisaging a standard situation where a political refugee from a war or a dictatorship is due to be extradited, and successfully claims that the acts they are charged with are political in nature. The Convention is saying that if they are charged with genocide that argument cannot be used, but again, we’re thinking here of someone being pursued by a national court on the basis of a national arrest warrant. I don’t think it was ever envisaged that there would even be an international court in 1948, and whilst IANAIHL, I find it hard to see how the Convention could override the normal assumption that states are only legally bound by treaties they sign. Otherwise Ukraine could indict Putin for genocide tomorrow, and the Chinese would be obliged to hand him over.
What would the Chinese have to do with it? This seems a very odd argument.
Genocide is the accusation used for moving in to stop the killings. The effective charges would be war crimes, crimes against humanity, committed mass suicide in confinement or. simply, s/he/they tried to resist arrest/attempted to escape/gave me the evil eye and we were forced to act unfortunately terminating his/her/their life/lives in the process.
Military forces, lawyers and politicians can very often find effective solutions to the most intractable legal problems. And they can apply the same solutions to those believed to be complicit in crimes against humanity.
I thought my point was clear enough. If the obligation in Art VII overrides customary international law, then any country can indict anyone they don’t like in the world for genocide, and any other country is obliged to arrest them. The Chinese point is simply a reductio.
I don’t see much “moving in”, under that or any other slogan. If the idea is that genocide would outrage the public when simple gratuitous killing of children (and frankly I fail to see how any intention would make that better or worse) has not, well, that has not panned out – not in a way that would do much to stop the killing, anyway.
Law nerds can endlessly debate definitions of words, but in the end words mean whatever people think they mean, and that is doubly true for politically charged and (relatively) rarely occurring things like genocide.
So I think it’s actually tactically smart to pin the genocide tag on Israel, since normal people understand it as deliberately killing largish number of humans and as something really really bad. When you have parade of western NGOs, the UN, genocide scholars, etc. all saying it’s genocide, and the only counter is to claim that maybe Israel’s leaders explicitly said Palestinians are animals and they will cut food, then proceed to do exactly that and watch how they starve, but technically there can be reasonable doubt about what they meant by all that because <insert some incomprehensible and anyway insane lawyer argument>, I don’t think you will go very far with that.
And since genocide is commonly understood as bad thing, western politicians are having harder and harder time to support what Israel is doing. I also think that if the ICJ will decide that Israel is guilty of genocide, it will be only because most people in the west already think they did it and so it would be very controversial if they tried to acquit.
Israel’s economic troubles are about to get worse: the European Commission presented today its proposal to the Council to suspend certain trade-related provisions of the Association Agreement between the EU and Israel.
This still must be voted on by the Euro Council and doesn’t yet go far enough, but popular pressure in Europe certainly is beginning to crack the elites’ attemp to disregard it. I suspect that it’s only going to get worse for Israel as far as European trade and financial/arms support. There will be certain holdouts but they aren’t important enough economically and arms-wise to make a big difference.
“Larry Wilkerson, who both regularly reads Israel press and has many contact, has repeatedly said Israel has taken such serious economic and societal damage that he predicts it will no longer exist in ten years.”
Something to consider:
People not separated from them by oceans don’t have the luxury of waiting through 10 more years of scorched earth. Not even 5 more years.
Whence the red heifer?
I think this is likely a power grab first and paving the way for the next round of hostilities with Iran second.
Relevant to item the first: Israel’s opposition is plotting a return to power. But it remains its own worst enemy | +972 Magazine
Remember there were 5 elections in less than three years between 2019-2022 in Israel as the center left collapsed and there were mass anti-Netanyahu protests. The government in power in Israel is the one that held together and only remains by the thinnest of margins. The most extreme wing (Ben Gvir/Smotrich) have the power to keep it together or bring it down. Keeping it together means keeping Netanyahu out of jail, and it means advancing their Kahanist Greater Israel aims. There is still no unified opposition coalescing around a leader to provide an alternative to Netanyahu for now. The link above makes it clear the opposition can only form a government if they join with Palestinian parties. This was the makeup of the final government prior to the current and prior to 10/7 and the Gaza war. The Iran war this past summer barely registered in terms of polling sentiment in Israel. It wasn’t linked, in their mind, to Gaza, so it is not a natural conclusion that another round with Iran where they take off the gloves will lead to a government that aligns with Palestinian parties.
Regarding item the second, another round of Iran hostilities and timing:
Laser-based ‘Iron Beam’ interception system declared operational | Times of Israel
Netanyahu’s “super Sparta” comments about defense industry autarky are probably related to how another round with Iran needs to address the fact that they almost ran out of interceptors in less than two weeks the last round. So they’re clearly attempting to cut down on intercepts by the big guns:
It’s also possible that the Doha strike was a test run for next round with Iran:
How Israel Used Ballistic Missiles From the Red Sea to Carry Out Its Audacious Qatar Attack | WSJ, Archive
How Israel’s mysterious air-launched ballistic missile reached Qatar via space | Ynet
Netanyahu is already trying to walk back the ‘super Sparta’ comments today. High holidays start next week so everything will be closed in Israel off and on until mid-October. IDF chief reported earlier this month Netanyahu isn’t sharing plans for the next phase in Gaza. All the speculation about Israel/Kirk and surveillance devices in bathrooms sounds exactly like the stuff that was in the pre-12 day info dump that Netanyahu was also deposed for and multiple witnesses have claimed at his corruption trial. I think there is major factional fighting barely behind the scenes that is starting to spill over into international affairs and I still think a military coup following Iran taking the gloves off next round is the most likely scenario for the end of Netanyahu.
If he is not got rid of it is only a matter of time and circumstance before he uses their nukes. He has gone too far to ever turn back now. That is also the risk for the US, how can people in the Trump administration ever give up power after leaving themselves liable the way they are ? Only the president is immune, though I will say Mr Trump is making noises like he will respect election outcomes but I think these next elections will not be like past ones.
So during the next Israeli attack on Iran, the Iranians will make sure to target the Israeli power grid?
That would be taking the gloves off.
There are multiple ways to raise the bar relative to the previous round by striking:
– desalination plans
– Haifa port facilities
– Haifa refinery facilities
– Israeli governing facilities in Jerusalem (note this is nowhere near the contested areas of Old Jerusalem where holy sites are)
– Ashkelon gas shipment facilities
– Dimona
– HaKirya (again, it was hit the first night of bombardment of the 12 days – it’s in downtown Tel Aviv in a very tony area, it has already been rebuilt, impossible to hide for long, I think it did not take a direct strike on the structure)
– Rafael manufacturing facilities
– electricity distribution facilities
– residential housing blocks
The final item was what caused Tel Aviv residents to flee for the suburbs or country the last four or five days of the 12 day war. I don’t think there were more than 5 or 7 hit, but they were large residential blocks, the structures were fully destroyed, there were casualties (although not as many as you might expect since they had shelters to flee to), and their destruction was unable to be censored. Several colleagues told me that they were ‘using big missiles’ on them and the mandatory shelters all Israeli homes have weren’t strong enough to protect from them.
By demonstrating they can bounce air-fired ballistics off the upper atmosphere and avoid ground-based air defense, Israel may believe they can do direct strikes on Tehran governing structures in the next round as part of an overwhelming decapitation strike. The leaders are gamblers and they are desperate. Even though the majority of their gambles so far in the war have failed, some were successful (if dishonorable and with terrible long-term consequences) and I fear they will go for it.
Another interpretation of this statement: Bibi is floating a trial balloon to draw third parties into stating that Israel lacks the resources for Russian-style autarchy. So whose resources does he covet and want a public rationale for seizing…?
If Greater Israel is to be more than a pipedream, he needs chunks of Syria (arable, minerals, oil) and perhaps Iraq. Sinai and trans-Jordan might be a stretch too far but Egypt and Jordan will be handy for grey imports, especially Egypt because Israel’s needs are a rounding error in its trade figures given the population difference. Cyprus and Israeli offshore fields can provide energy if Turkey ceases to play along.
And, of course, without exports Israel will be in economic trouble. But again Egypt etc. represents an easy way to disguise country of origin and a potential maquiladora strategy for physical products. Software can be created under any flag of convenience.
Regardless of who is in the governing body, Israeli society will not want to terminate their holocaust or leave their neighbors in peace.
Poles taken suggest that this is the case.
They are raised to believe they must eliminate the indigenous people who exist to exterminate them.
They will be supported in their endeavors because of the profitability of doing so and I fear they will succeed in nearly exterminating the indigenous people of occupied Palestine before the state becomes impoverished.
The UN has been a failure.
Unsurprisingly, the military situation mirrors the economic situation—not surprising, as in attrition warfare (Hamas vs. IOF – not Israel’s Palestinian genocide), industrial depth is critical, and the US military backstop (or basis) faces similar limitations due to following the Hitlerian and Napoleonic leads of pursuing a Russian land war.
Ironic that the genocidal ethnosupremicist state is pursuing the same Thucydides trap path as its patron (who also genocided its indigenous peoples) of over-extension and hollowed industrial base. And of course, the Israeli goal to get the US involved in a war with Iran has the potential to close the trap.
Most of this thinking about Israel’s situation seems to be firmly rooted in the past, when the country had an overwhelming military presence in the Middle East, and never more than one or two enemies at any given time. So, this line of thinking goes, as long as Israel can keep reproducing an armed presence of a certain size, and it’s enemies remain manageable, it will continue to exist.
I think the present world is very different from this. Most non-israeli countries in the Middle East have formed a defacto alliance which is hostile to Israel, and which in many cases has been attacked or invaded in recent memory by Israel. Many of these countries have outside military aid, and they have large populations that dwarf the one tiny country in their midst.
Equally important, the technological nature of regional warfare has changed. We are no longer talking about tank battles and infantry invasions. We are now talking about missiles which have a range of thousands of kilometers and are very cheap. We have also seen concrete evidence that anti-missile defenses don’t work very well, and at best will protect you from some fraction of the attackers drones, cruise missiles, hypersonic missiles, and ballistic missiles. US-produced missile defenses seem to not work very well, are in short supply, and are very expensive. Israel is a very small country that is dependent on a small number of fixed installations for ship and aircraft traffic, water, sewage, electric power, and so on. It will be straightforward for Israel’s enemies to move the country back to the stone age without ever leaving their own borders whenever they decide to do it. It could easily happen next week.
So leaving aside the multifaceted economic problems Israel faces, which are discussed in this piece, it also has a multifaceted reality problem that does not favor the continued existence of Israel.
Since 2023, how many Israelis have been killed by those so – called “miraculous weapons” you mentioned (drones, ballistic missiles, hypersonic missiles)? And how much IDF equipment has been destroyed by them?
Seems doubtful Israel would make this information public.
Israel’s GDP ：
243.2 billion US dollars in the first half of 2023,
260.7 billion US dollars in the first half of 2024,
280.4 billion US dollars in the first half of 2025.