Hours before unleashing a ground offensive against Gaza City on Monday, journalist Julian Borger reported for The Guardian that “Netanyahu braced his country for a future of mounting economic isolation, urging it to become a ‘super Sparta’ of the Middle East.”
“We will increasingly have to adapt to an economy with autarkic features,” Netanyahu said at a conference in Jerusalem, because “we may find ourselves in a situation where our defense industries are blocked. We will have to develop indigenous defense industries. We will have to become Athens and super-Sparta. We have no choice. At least in the coming years, we will have to deal with these attempts at isolation. What worked until now will not work from now on.” [my emphasis] (1)He argues, based on an off-the-record presentation in 2024 from a former Israeli official, that Netanyahu’s “Sparta” strategy is based on three ugly realities:
- Israel is no longer a democracy.
- Israel is in an historically terrible situation, domestically and globally.
- The growing narrative in Israel is “We can decisively win against all our enemies.”
But realistic expectations are also important. Haaretz editorializes about the hope for American restraint on Netanyahu’s government:
Israel's prime minister fears peace more than he fears war. Instead of seizing the historic moment that Trump created, he once again chose the inertia of refusal, fearing a confrontation with his messianic coalition partners.What the editorial is describing there is that the US government, under heavy pressure from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, where in both countries Trump and his family have lucrative business deals, and from European countries that started recognizing Palestine as a state (an important diplomatic and political gesture), insisted that Netanyahu accept some kind of hostage deal and ceasefire agreement.
In the Knesset, Trump said that Netanyahu is "not the easiest guy to deal with," but praised him for understanding "better than anybody" that it was time. He didn't say how he made him understand that. The truth is that Netanyahu gave in to American pressure. Trump must continue to exert this pressure on Netanyahu and on Israel. If he insists and doesn't give up, the skies he spoke of might truly be the limit. [my emphasis] (2)
Despite the optimism of the moment, it’s important to keep in mind that what Israel has firmly, officially, publicly committed itself to is actually very limited: essentially, only the hostage swap itself and a ceasefire. And even that very short-term stability is unstable: (3)
The ill-fated “Oslo process” is a major cautionary example. It began with a high-profile agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PA) brokered by the Clinton Administration that was meant to lead to a two-state solution. In reality, its concessions to Israeli settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank eventually eliminated that possibility.
Surprises can happen, of course. But the two-state solution has effectively become a diplomatic zombie. Despite a wide range of ideological shades, from militant socialist to flaming reactionary, the Zionist project in practice has always been about displacing the Palestinians, not creating a parallel Palestinian state. In the rarefied language of high diplomacy, the recent round of recognition of a “Palestinian state” is a significant sign of disapproval of Israel’s current policies.
As Ilan Pappe has explained:
The [Oslo] peace process was a busted flush from the outset. To understand the failure of Oslo, one has to widen the analysis and relate the events to two principles that remained unanswered tl1roughout the Accord. The first was the primacy of geographical or territorial partition as tl1e exclusive foundation of peace; the second the denial of the Palestinian refugees' right of return and its exclusion from the negotiating table. (4)As long as Israel maintains its insistence on continuing to rule both Israel and the occupied territories as an apartheid state and to carry forward the goal of dispossessing ethnically cleansing the Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank, there will be no genuine peace solution in the foreseeable future. Add to that Netanyahu’s ambition to destabilize the neighboring countries of Lebanon, Syria, and Iran, and the prospects for a stable regional peace will continue to be dim.
And Netanyahu himself currently faces a criminal trial on corruption charges as soon as he leaves office, as Donald Trump ham-handedly reminded the world in his recent address to the Knesset. Aside from his territorial and geopolitical ambitions, Netanyahu’s desire to stay out of prison – Israel still has a functioning judicial system at least for Israeli citizens – gives him an open-ended incentive to foment continual crises and military conflicts. In particular, dragging the US into a regime-change war against Iran is a decades-long goal of his.
Zvi Bar’el gives a sober evaluation of the actual prospects for peace emerging from the Trump-Netanyahu reality-TV show. He notes that at Trump’s Gaza Peace Summit meeting in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt:
Wanting to thank the president of the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Donald Trump ordered him to stand up to receive his allotted measure of praise only to discover, to his surprise, that Sheikh Mohammed was not present.Bar’el notes that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) both have the heebie-jeebies about the Islamist Hamas group being still in power and operating in Gaza. Then there’s the crackpot arrangement of a Peace Board for Gaza run directly by Donald Trump and Tony Blair to function essentially as a colonial vice-regency, which will almost certainly turn out to be one of history’s worst jokes of this period.
The fact that Trump had failed to notice that the man who pledged to invest about $1.4 trillion in the United States did not show up for the historic gathering should have offended the absent leader, perhaps; more importantly, however, it raises questions about the feasibility of the next stages of the president's 20-point plan for Gaza. …
That is because Sheikh Mohammed was just one of three heads of state from the region, along with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the ruler of Oman [Sultan Haitham bin Tariq], who failed to honor Trump and the host, Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sissi, with their presence. (5)
Add to all of this the fact that the Israeli publicly may be highly critical of Netanyahu but nevertheless has been widely supportive of his genocidal war on Gaza, as Amira Hass notes:
At some point, the optimists believe, the Israeli media's obscuring of reality will cease to brainwash and numb hearts. The phrase, "the context," will not be considered a profanity and the public will connect the dots: Oppression. Expulsion. Humiliation. Deportation. Occupation. And all the suffering between them. They are not parts of slogans that self-hating Jews coined, but describe the life of an entire people, for years, under our orders and our guns.
People are not born cruel; they become such. The cruelty of Palestinians towards Israelis is covered extensively in our media, articles and close-ups. It developed in response and resistance to our foreign and hostile rule. Our cruelty, that of Israeli society, is getting ever more sophisticated with the aim of protecting our spoils: the land and the water and the freedoms from which we expelled the Palestinians. [my emphasis] (6)
Despite the pause in the fighting and the genocidal violence against Gaza Palestinians, peace and stability for Israel is a long way off.
Notes:
(1) Cirincione, Joe (2025): Netanyahu Wants Israel to Become a Pariah State. Strategy & History Substack 09/17/2025. <https://joecirincione.substack.com/p/netanyahu-wants-israel-to-become> (Accessed: 2025-15-10).
(2) Netanyahu Fears Peace More Than He Fears War. Trump Must Keep Up the Pressure. Haaretz 10/15/2025. <https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/editorial/2025-10-15/ty-article/.premium/netanyahu-fears-peace-more-than-he-fears-war-trump-must-keep-up-the-pressure/00000199-e6b9-d705-a5bb-fff9f6670000> (Accessed: 2025-16-10).
(3) Ceasefire Is OVER: Israel Killing, Bombing And Starving Gaza. Owen Jones YouTube channel 10/15/2025. <https://youtu.be/qJZYiTN81Ho?si=eEa8SfnIxAG9rYpF> (Accessed: 2025-16-10).
(4) Pappe, Ilan (2024): Ten Myths About Israel, 99. London: Verso.
(5) Bar’el, Zvi (2025): Trump's Middle East Visions Face a Long Road to Reality. Haaretz 10/15/2025. Full link: <https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-10-15/ty-article/.premium/trumps-gaza-plans-face-a-long-road-to-implementation/00000199-e55b-dde4-a7bd-fd7fa08b0000> (Accessed: 2025-15-10).
(6) Hass, Amira (2025): Will Israelis One Day Say of Their Country's Atrocities in Gaza, 'I Was Always Against It'? Haaretz 10/15/2025. Full link: <https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2025-10-15/ty-article-opinion/.premium/will-israelis-one-day-say-of-their-countrys-gaza-atrocities-i-was-always-against-it/00000199-e7c4-d705-a5bb-ffcc7c810000> (Accessed: 2025-15-10).
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