By SCOTT RITTER*
Even some Holocaust survivors recognize that modern Israel has become a living manifestation of the very evil that justified its creation—the brutally racist ideology of Nazi Germany.
I wrote previously on the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, calling it “the most successful military attack of this century.” I described the Hamas action as a military operation, while Israel and its allies called it a terrorist action on the scale of what happened against the United States on September 11, 2001.
“The difference between the two terms,” I noted, “is that by labeling, day and night, the events of October 7 as acts of terrorism, Israel shifts the blame for the enormous losses of its military, security and intelligence services to Hamas. However, if Israel were to acknowledge that what Hamas did was in fact an attack – a military operation – then the competence of the Israeli military, security and intelligence services would be called into question, as would the political leadership responsible for overseeing and directing their operations.”
Terrorism employs strategies that seek victory through attrition and intimidation—to wear down the enemy and create a sense of powerlessness on his part. Terrorists, by nature, avoid decisive existential conflict, opting instead for an asymmetrical battle that pits their strengths against their enemies’ weaknesses.
The war that has raged in the Levant since October 7, 2023, is not a traditional counter-terrorism operation. The Hamas-Israel conflict has turned into a conflict between Israel and the so-called axis of resistance, which includes Hamas, Hezbollah, Ansarullah (the Houthis of Yemen), the Popular Mobilization Forces, that is, the militias of Iraq, Syria and Iran. It is a regional war in every sense and must be assessed as such.
The Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz observed in his classic work, about the war, that “war is not merely a political act, but a genuine political instrument, a continuation of political relations, a realization of these by other means.” From a purely military perspective, Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, was a relatively small engagement, involving a few thousand fighters on each side. However, as a global geopolitical event, it has no equivalent today.
The Hamas attack triggered a series of varied responses, some of them intentional, such as drawing the Israel Defense Forces into Gaza, where they would be locked in a perpetual war they could not win, thus triggering the dual Israeli doctrines governing the military response to hostage-taking, the “Hannibal Doctrine,” and the Israeli practice of collective punishment, the “Dahiya Doctrine.” Both doctrines present the Israel Defense Forces to the world as the antithesis of “the most moral army in the world,” exposing the murderous intent ingrained in the IDF’s DNA, a propensity for violence against innocents that defines the Israeli way of war and, by extension, the Israeli nation.
Before October 7, 2023, Israel was able to disguise its true character to the outside world, convincing all but a handful of activists that its actions to target “terrorists” were proportionate and humane. Today, the world knows Israel as the genocidal state of apartheid which it really is. The consequences of this new global enlightenment are evident.
Changing the “face of the Middle East”
President Joe Biden on September 9, 2023, during the G20 summit in India, announced a major policy initiative, the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, or IMEC, a proposed rail, maritime, pipeline and digital cable corridor connecting Europe, the Middle East and India.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, commenting on Biden's announcement, classified IMEC as “a cooperation project that is the largest in our history” that “leads us to a new era of regional and global integration and cooperation, unprecedented and unique in its scope”, adding that “it will bring to fruition a long-term vision that will change the face of the Middle East and Israel”.
But as the world now views Israel as a criminal enterprise, IMEC appears, for all intents and purposes, no longer exist – the largest cooperation project in Israel’s history, which would have changed the Middle East, will probably never come to fruition. For starters, Saudi Arabia, a key player in the project, having invested $20 billion, says it will not will normalize relations with Israel, necessary for the project, until the wars end and a Palestinian state is recognized by Israel, something the Knesset voted on earlier this year and which will never happen.
The disappearance of IMEC is just one part of the $67 billion economic blow Israel has suffered since the Gaza conflict began. Tourism has fallen by 80 percent. port of eilat, in the south of the country, has ceased to function due to the anti-shipping campaign waged by the Houthis in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. The stability of the workforce has been disrupted by the displacement of tens of thousands of Israelis from their homes due to attacks by Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as the mobilization of more than 300.000 reservists. All of this has combined to create a perfect storm of problems that will affect the economy and plague Israel as long as the current conflict continues.
The bottom line is that, if left unchecked, Israel is on the brink of economic collapse. Investment is down, the economy is shrinking, and confidence in an economic future has evaporated. In short, Israel is no longer an ideal place to retire, raise a family, work…or live. The biblical “land flowing with milk and honey,” if it ever existed, is no longer there. This is an existential problem for Israel.
For there to be a viable “Jewish homeland,” demographics dictate that there must be a discernible Jewish majority in Israel. There are just under 10 million people living in Israel. About 7,3 million are Jews; another 2,1 million are Arabs (the Druze and other non-Arab minorities make up the remainder).
There are around 5,1 million Palestinians under occupation, which leaves a roughly 50-50 split when looking at the combined totals between Arabs and Jews. An estimated 350.000 Israelis hold dual citizenship in some European Union country, while more than 200.000 hold dual citizenship in the United States.
Similarly, many Israelis of European descent can easily apply for a passport by simply demonstrating that they, their parents or even their grandparents have resided in a European country. Another 1,5 million Israelis are of Russian descent, many of whom hold valid Russian passports. While the main reasons for maintaining this dual citizenship status are convenience and economy, many see the second passport as an “insurance policy” – a place to escape to if life in Israel becomes untenable. Life in Israel is about to become untenable.
Escape from Israel
Israel was already suffering from a growing emigration problem stemming from dissatisfaction with the policies of Benjamin Netanyahu's government – around 34.000 Israelis permanently left Israel between July and October 2023, mainly in protest against judicial reforms enacted by Benjamin Netanyahu. Although there was a spike in emigration immediately after the October 7, 2023 attacks (around 12.300 Israelis permanently emigrated in the month following the Hamas attack), the number of permanent emigrants in 2024 was around 30.000, a decrease from the previous year.
But now Israel is being bombarded almost daily by long-range drones, rockets and missiles fired by Hezbollah, militias in Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen. The Iranian ballistic missile attack on October 1 vividly demonstrated to all Israelis the reality that there is no viable defense against these attacks. Furthermore, if the conflict between Israel and Iran continues to escalate (and Israel has promised massive retaliation), Iran has indicated that it will destroy Israel’s critical infrastructure – power plants, water desalination plants, energy production and distribution centers – in short, Israel will no longer be able to function as a modern nation-state.
At that point, insurance policies will be cashed in by hundreds of thousands of Israelis with dual passports who express their views by staying or leaving the country. Russia has already told its citizens to leave. And if millions of other Israelis who are eligible for European passports decide to exercise this option, Israel will face its ultimate nightmare – a precipitous decline in the Jewish population, tilting the demographic balance decisively towards non-Jews, rendering the notion of an exclusive Jewish homeland moot. Israel is rapidly becoming unsustainable, both as a concept (the world is rapidly tiring of the genocidal reality of Zionism) and in practice (i.e. economic and demographic collapse).
The changing vision of the US
This is the reality of Israel today: in one year, it has gone from “changing the face of the Middle East” to being an unsustainable pariah whose only salvation is the continued support of the United States for its military, economic and diplomatic sustenance. And therein lies the problem.
What once made Israel attractive to the United States—the strategic advantage of a pro-American Jewish enclave in a sea of Arab uncertainty—no longer holds as firmly as it once did. The Cold War is long gone, and the geopolitical benefits of the U.S.-Israeli relationship are no longer evident.
The era of American unilateralism is fading, being rapidly replaced by a multipolarity with a center of gravity in Moscow, Beijing, and New Delhi. As the United States adapts to this new reality, it finds itself embroiled in a struggle for the hearts and minds of the “global south”—the rest of the world outside the European Union, NATO, and a handful of pro-Western Pacific nations. The moral clarity that the American leadership seeks to bring to the world stage is significantly clouded by its continued and unquestioning support for Israel.
Israel, in its actions since October 7, 2023, has identified itself as a genocidal state completely incompatible with any notion of international law or with the basic precepts of humanity. Even some Holocaust survivors recognize that modern Israel has become the living manifestation of the very evil that served as justification for its creation – the brutally racist ideology of Nazi Germany.
Israel is anathema to everything that modern civilization stands for. The world is gradually waking up to this reality. And so is the United States.
For now, the LOBBY The pro-Israeli movement is mounting a rearguard action, endorsing candidates in a desperate attempt to buy the continued support of its American benefactors. But geopolitical reality dictates that the United States will not ultimately commit suicide on behalf of an Israeli state that has lost all moral legitimacy in the eyes of most of the world.
There are economic consequences associated with American support for Israel, especially in the increased centrality of the BRICS forum, whose growing list of members and those seeking to join is a who’s who of nations fundamentally opposed to the Israeli state. The deepening social and economic crisis in America today will create a new political reality in which American leaders will be forced by electoral realities to address the problems that manifest themselves on American soil.
The days when Congress can devote billions of dollars without question to distant wars, including those involving Israel, are coming to an end. Political operative James Carville’s famous adage, “It’s the economy, stupid,” resonates as strongly today as when he wrote it in 1992. To survive economically, America will have to adjust its domestic and international priorities, demanding conformity not only with the will of the American people but also with a new international order based on law that largely rejects the ongoing Israeli genocide.
With the exception of die-hard Zionists who will remain in establishment With the unelected members of the civil service, academia and the media, Americans will gravitate toward a new political reality in which unquestioning support for Israel will no longer be acceptable. This will be the final straw for Israel.
The perfect storm of global rejection of the genocide, sustained resistance by the Iranian-led “axis of resistance,” economic collapse, and the realignment of American priorities will result in the annulment of Israel as a viable political entity. The timetable for this annulment is dictated by the pace of the collapse of Israeli society—it could happen within a year, or it could unfold over the next decade.
But it will happen. The end of Israel. And it all began on October 7, 2023 – the day that changed the world.
Scott Knight, a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer, he was UN Chief Weapons Inspector in Iraq from 1991-98.
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