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Israel faces many existential threats but Hamas, Daesh and Iran are not amongst them

September 12, 2015 at 12:00 pm

“Israel will not exist in 25 years,” Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei affirmed earlier this week. He joins a growing number of people, Jews and non-Jews, Zionists and non-Zionists, who paint a very bleak future of the future of the Jewish state. While Khamenei sees many existential threats to Israel, he certainly does not have Hamas, Daesh, or his own country Iran in mind. His prediction, it is safe to assume, was made on the back of the following considerations:

1. Israel faces exceptional challenges

The challenges Israel faces, like other countries in region, are many; but some are as unique to the Jewish state as they are indissoluble. The most obvious of these is the so-called demographic “time bomb”.  Israel has long lived in fear of the fact that the Palestinian population in Israel and the occupied territories is increasing at a much greater rate than that of the Jewish Israeli population. While Israeli Jews may believe that the day they will become a minority is perhaps some time away, increasing evidence suggests that the “bomb” has already exploded and Palestinians are already a majority in the land of historic Palestine.

This problem is of Israel’s making; it exists only if we subscribe to Israel’s world-view. This is another way of admitting that Israel has a racism problem because the ideology of Zionism views non-Jews (and millions of people whose lives Israel controls) as undeserving of the same rights as Jews in Israel. The demographic problem would not exist if Israel saw itself first and foremost as a democratic state, and second as a Jewish state.

It is inconceivable to see how this tension, which is at the heart of Israel, will be allowed to simmer for another 25 years to advance the privilege of Jews over democratic and universal principals. It’s highly improbable for the Jewish state to survive in its current form; at the very least the Jewish state will not be able to maintain its privilege status of impunity in the foreseeable future and simultaneously keep Palestinians under occupation. Israel’s inherent contradictions – the principal reasons for the protracted conflict – have been dramatically and violently played out on the global stage: contradictions that will not be tolerated in the future and that are unsustainable within the shifting regional and global political landscape.

2. Crises of Zionism

Zionism, Israel’s founding ideology, is currently in a state of crises.  To an increasing number of Zionists, Zionism no longer represents a benign political project dedicated to the pursuit of Jewish self-determination and instead is considered a racist settler colonial project, irreconcilable with universal values and principals.

The many sensitive historical and political reasons behind major world powers granting Israel license for the advancement of Zionism is now waning purely because the aspiration of an ethno-religious nationalism is no longer compatible with the values of the 21st century.

The Zionist state has failed to live up to the best aspirations of many Jews around the world. Zionism has transformed Israel into an Apartheid state, fuelling dissent and alienation within its ranks. As one sympathetic commentator notes despondently, “It’s time to admit it. Israeli policy is what it is: Apartheid.

This realisation has caused cracks to form within the Zionist narrative; a fractious crisis currently exists within Zionism that penetrates to the heart of the Israel project. This is the ultimate “test of Jewish power”, writes the well-known Zionist author Peter Beinart. His greatest fear as a Zionists himself is that the expression of “Jewish power” will be judged to have failed to live up to the values and principals of Judaism. Beinart’s polemical commentary in his recent book The Crises of Zionism underscores the moral and political urgency of the challenges faced by Israel as it continues with its incessant land grab and occupation of Palestine.

For American Liberal Jews such as Beinart, Israel is endangering its ties with a vital Jewish constituency, described by some as the linchpin of Israel’s appeal in America; the American Jewish community. “Morally American Zionism is in a downward spiral”, writes Beinart, mainly as a result of Israel’s failure to reconcile Zionism with Liberalism. “For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.”

What liberal Jews like Beinart fear most but are reluctant to admit is that the continued existence of Israel in its current manifestation is ultimately irreconcilable with liberalism; it is simply an ideological construct intended as a bridging concept between two mutually incompatible ideologies: Zionism and Liberalism.

Liberal Jews are right to fear Israel’s metamorphosis into a virulently racist and illiberal state. Socially and politically, the country has moved further to the Right in recent years, thus becoming an embarrassment to liberal Jews around the world. Zionism, the state ideology of Israel, has mutated into a more lethal form of ethno-religious nationalism and, more worryingly, it has become immune to the plight of Palestinians, capable of carrying out “incremental genocide” in Gaza, as well as the routine breech of international law and justice.

3. Loss of international support

While Israel’s nosedive into illiberalism may well lead to a protracted divorce between the Jewish state and its historical allies in Jewish communities around the world, its image has also simultaneously taken a severe blow over the years and its supporters, at least in the public domain, continue to wane. Even in the UK, seen historically as a stalwart supporter of the Jewish state, Israel is currently loathed more than Iran.

However, Israel’s troubles are more than just an image problem, even if its image is unusually more important than most; carefully crafted as a tool of soft power to justify the state’s privileged status despite its many transgressions. It is because Israel is supposedly modelled on the West and ostensibly upholds liberal, democratic values that it is granted enormous latitude compared to other pariah states.

The reasons for the haemorrhaging in support for Israel are easy to see. For a start, people are more aware of the country’s past. It is now universally accepted, except by die-hard Zionists, that Israel’s implanting into Palestine led to the ethnic cleansing of nearly a million Palestinian in an attempt to artificially create a Jewish majority where previously one did not exist. People are also highly attuned to Israel’s colonialism and racism that followed the ethnic cleansing.

Support for Israel beyond the cult-like core of devotees is based on the unfounded belief that Israel can be democratic first and Jewish second, and also abide by international law. Although some maintain hope in the future redemption of Israel following the projected end of the occupation, many more are unwilling to view the country through an unrealised political dream and instead view Israel for what it is now: an apartheid state. The occupation’s “temporariness”, previously exploited by Israel to its advantage, is no longer fooling anyone.  Israel’s so-called “temporary” occupation is rightly seen as a permanent reality; it is no exaggeration to say that the infrastructure of Israel’s occupation is a major organ for the Jewish state’s very survival and any attempt to uncouple itself from the occupation, especially in East Jerusalem and Hebron, will be fatal to the country’s existing stability that effectively rests on the oppression of Palestinians.

This awareness has fuelled the global Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, not dissimilar to the one that brought down the South African apartheid regime. Israeli politicians increasingly see the movement as a strategic threat and it is replacing Iran as Israel’s biggest existential threat.

4. Israel is a political liability

Israel’s troubles are not just with the global public; the continued entrenchment of the occupation places the country on a collision course with the international community. Israel is increasingly seen as an obstacle to the two-state solution, often touted as the political panacea of the protracted conflict for both liberal Jews and the international community.

The right wing government of Netanyahu, which is the new middle ground in Israel, has severely undermined two main assumptions of due political process: firstly that all parties must accept the two-state solution as the general basis for a compromise agreement; and secondly that Israel, as a democratic country, would not want to rule another people through military occupation — thereby denying them their basic human right of self-determination — in perpetuity. Both of these assumptions have been severely dented by Netanyahu renouncing the two-state solution during his recent election campaign.

The rapidity of Israel’s illegal settlement construction, combined with the illegal transfer of Jewish settlers into Palestinian land, is the major factor for the two-state solution remaining nothing but a political pipe dream. There is more chance of Bashar Al-Assad being embraced by the Saudis than for the Israeli state to push against the powerful group of settlers who are currently thieving Palestinian land. While the futility of the first is universally conceded, there is no shortage of people willing to waste political capital on the second.

Israel is also becoming a political liability in other sensitive areas of international relations. The Jewish state found itself isolated over the Iran deal. Despite Netanyahu’s forceful and embarrassing campaigning on the international stage, it remains the only country in the world that tried to rescind the international agreement endorsed unanimously by the UN Security Council.

These are just some of the reasons behind Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s prediction that Israel will not exist in 25 years; perhaps the Jewish state would do well to heed them.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.