Israel’s New Occupation | The New Yorker
On Monday afternoon, a few hours before the first ferocious attacks on the land offensive of Israel in Gaza City made buildings in Tel Aviv, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in Jerusalem for an economic conference. With his far -right Minister of Finance, Bezalel Smotrich, sitting in the front row, Netanyahu went on stage, looking a little irritated and reprimanded the event organizers to confuse his slideshow. He then turned to the public: a group of treasure officials, which he needed to persuade the national deficit in order to finance the next phase of the war.
Israel “faces a new world,” he said-and reason is not war in Gaza. Rather, he cited two other factors which imposed “limitations” on the country’s prospects. The first, he said, is the “unlimited migration” of Muslims to Western Europe, where they have become an “important minority-very vocal, very, very belligerent”. The second is a digital revolution that has led Qatar, China and other countries to invest in social media platforms that promote an “anti-Israeli program”. The result was “a kind of isolation,” he said, more resembling an expert than the head of a country that a United Nations has just concluded as a genocide.
Since the start of the war in Gaza, triggered by the attacks led by Hamas on October 7, 2023, Israeli officials have experienced growing international insulation. In the event of a blow for the diplomatic efforts of Israel, many countries – including its longtime allies, such as Great Britain, France and Canada – have declared that they will recognize a Palestinian state in the United Nations General Assembly next week. Some of these countries have limited the sale of weapons to Israel; A number of others have entirely prohibited to sell weapons in the country. But this ostracism was also felt more in Israeli society, including among the large number of Israelis who oppose the war. Cultural events, festivals, research subsidies and academic conferences have increasingly excluded Israelis simply because of their nationality. Israeli tourists have been distinguished for abuse abroad, and violent attacks against non -Israeli Jews are increasing.
After the International Criminal Court sought to issue an arrest warrant against Netanyahu on war crimes, in May 2024, he was unleashed against his main prosecutor, calling him one of the “big anti -Semites in modern times”. Based on a feeling of grievance, Netanyahu warned in her speech on Monday: “We will find more and more to adapt to an economy with autarchic characteristics.” This technical term, referring to a closed and autonomous economy, is “the word I hate the most,” he continued. “I believe in the free market, but we can find ourselves in a situation where our weapons industries are blocked.” In a scenario of “Athens and Sparta”, he said, Israel will have to “become Athens and Super-Sparta. There is no choice. In the years to come, we will at least have to face these attempts to isolate ourselves. What has worked so far will not work from now on. ”
The Tel Aviv Stock Exchange has dropped and a public outcry has started. The head of the opposition Yair Lapid described Netanyahu’s speech as “mad”. The Israeli commercial forum, which represents two hundred of the country’s largest companies, has issued a severe warning: “We are not Sparta.” The real problem, he suggested, was that government policies led Israel “towards a political, economic and social abyss”. Yossi Verter, from the Liberal Journal Haaretzwrote a chronicle entitled “Netanyahu transforms the Nation start -up into a Spartan nation – and bows along the way.” He suggested that Netanyahu’s speech was a discharge attempt to reproduce the famous evocation of Winston Churchill of “blood, work, tears and sweat”. But, he added, this rhetorical failure was always revealing: for the first time, Netanyahu had given a “realistic” representation of the position of Israel in the world.
Others focused on the strange choice of Netanyahu’s metaphor. Nadav Eyal, columnist of Centrist Broadsheet Yediot Ahronotposted an tangy historical reminder: “By the way, Sparta lost.” Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli diplomat, said to me: “You might think that a guy who boasts of his understanding of the models in history would know what he is talking about.” During the last century, Pinkas said, four countries behaved like an autarkic Sparta: Nazi Germany, South Africa in the apartheid era, Albania under its communist regime and, more recently, North Korea. “Is this the club you want to join?” Pinkas asked.
The next day, even Netanyahu’s allies were aware of the benefits. Channel 12, the dominant television network of Israel, reported that Smotrich had declared in private to the Prime Minister: “You have done damage. Now you are the one who is repaired.” Netanyahu has in a hurry a press conference, where he alternated between Hebrew and English. “There was a misunderstanding,” he said, weakly arguing that the only area in which Israel risked isolation was in the manufacture of weapons. He reiterated that he had “full confidence” in the country’s economy and that he praised foreign investments. He did not mention that the growth rates per capita in Israel have been negative for two years.
Government supporters suggested that Netanyahu’s mistake was just a framing – and that he needed difficult language in order to persuade bureaucrats of the Treasury to finance his extended military operation. Indeed, throughout his speech to the Treasury officials, Netanyahu continued to implore his audience, in English, to “reduce bureaucracy!” A column in Jerusalem JobAn English -language newspaper on the right, argued that the speech was “an argument for sale, not its ambitious philosophy”.
But Netanyahu’s rhetoric, so impolitic, was resonant: the image of Israel as militarized city-state will be difficult to dissipate. While analysts argued about the Prime Minister’s wording, tanks rolled in the center of Gaza, and tens of thousands of Palestinians fled, heading south of the enclave where there is no infrastructure to welcome them. Hundreds of thousands of others have stayed in Gaza City, incapable or too exhausted to escape. Mohammed Abu Salmiya, director of the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City, published an image of six premature babies piled up in a single incubator and warned of an imminent danger for their lives. Haaretz reported that around a hundred Palestinians had been killed in less than twenty-four hours.
