Israel: Beginning of the End

Israeli protest in Tel Aviv calling for an agreement to release Israelis held captive or hostage, Sept. 1, 2024. (Nizzan Cohen, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)

Contrary to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s bellicose July 24 speech before a joint session of the United States Congress pledging to achieve “total victory” over Hamas, Israel is being decisively defeated – militarily, economically and as a society.  

On the battlefield — despite Israel’s genocidal campaign of bombing, mass starvation and assassinations — the prospect of victory over Hamas and Hezbollah is now seriously disputed by many of Israel’s former and current military and intelligence officials.

“The country really is galloping towards the edge of an abyss…losing more and more soldiers as they get killed or wounded,” wrote former General Yitzhak Brik in Haaretz. 

“…Every passing day the Israel Defence Force grows weaker and the number of dead and wounded in action among our soldiers rises…If we continue fighting in Gaza by raiding and re-raiding the same targets, not only won’t we bring Hamas to collapse, but we’ll collapse ourselves.”

Brik’s assessment is shared by other top Israeli officials. “It’s evident that we are unequivocally losing [the war]” former Mossad deputy chief Ram Ben-Barak told Israel public radio. “Show me one thing we have succeeded in?”

And according to Major General Gadi Shamni, a former commander of the Israeli military’s Gaza division, “Our soldiers are winning every tactical encounter with Hamas, but we’re losing the war, and in a big way.”

Even Israel’s own military propagandists are countering the Netanyahu government’s narrative: 

“The idea that it is possible to destroy Hamas, to make Hamas vanish — that is throwing sand in the eyes of the public,” said Israeli military spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari. “Hamas is an idea, deeply rooted in the hearts of the residents of Gaza.”

25th anniversary of Hamas celebrated in Gaza in 2012. (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)

Former U.S. Marine intelligence officer Scott Ritter describes the unsustainable battle on the ground: “[Israel’s] army is exhausted,” he says, “their tanks are broken down, they’re running out of spare parts, they’re running out of ammunition…Their army is demoralised…the desertion rate is now between 12 and 24 percent.”

Official figures for dead and wounded soldiers in Gaza (almost certainly an undercount) are beginning to leak out. In an interview on Israel’s Channel 12, Knesset opposition leader Yair Lapid said that 890 soldiers had been killed and 11,000 injured in the first 12 months of the war. 

Battle-Hardened Hezbollah

The casualties are also mounting in southern Lebanon as Israeli soldiers encounter a battle-hardened foe.

“Hezbollah has had 18 years to prepare for this,” says Ritter.  “Nothing Israel is doing is taking Hezbollah by surprise. They know what kind of weapon systems they have and they’re going to lure Israel in and kill them … Israel is going to walk into one trap after another.”

Increasingly, public support within Israel is eroding as news reports pour out about soldiers’ funerals and grieving families.

“The government is portraying the string of recent military successes in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and Lebanon as proof that its strategy has been right and that the war must continue on every front,” writes Amos Harel in Haaretz. “But in reality, it’s impossible to ignore the price that continuing the war for much longer would entail.”

Hezbollah members and supporters parade following the end of the Israeli occupation of Southern Lebanon, May 2000. (Khamenei.ir, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)

On top of mounting military casualties, that price includes the disastrous economic toll as thousands flee their homes, businesses shut their doors and the consumer economy shrinks.

Hamas and Hezbollah shelling in the south and north has displaced an estimated 200,000 Israelis from their homes; foreign labourers are exiting the country and the cancellation of 150,000 Palestinian work permits in the West Bank has brought construction to a standstill. 

Tourism, a mainstay of Israel’s economy, has come to a halt and spending on leisure and entertainment has dropped by 70 percent. An estimated 60,000 Israeli firms have failed this year, Israel’s credit ratings have been downgraded multiple times, technology companies are moving overseas and roughly half a million Israelis (many educated high tech professionals) left the country during the first six months of the war. 

This trend is not just an economic catastrophe for Israel – the mass exodus is an existential threat to the very survival of the Israeli state that has been premised on maintaining a Jewish majority since its founding.

That was the intention behind the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe) that drove 750,000 Arabs out of Palestine and the privately acknowledged goal of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. Now, the demographic trend is beginning to shift in the other direction.

Internally, in the face of impending military and economic collapse Israel is on the verge of civil war. Even before Oct. 7, hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets to protest attempts by Netanyahu’s right wing coalition to abolish the independence of the judiciary. 

Since the start of the war, the country has been rocked by mass demonstrations of furious hostage families and their supporters; soldiers who are defecting or refusing to serve; war zone evacuees unable to return to their homes and a growing schism between the Israeli government and the military over the goals of the war.  

“Imagine what will happen when the masses take to the streets,” Haaretz journalist Uri Misgav presciently warned a few months into the war:

 “…protesters will be presented as traitors stabbing the nation and its soldiers in the back…The streets will be aflame. After all, the country has been flooded with automatic weapons and guns distributed along political lines [a reference to Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s handing out thousands of guns to illegal Jewish settlers on the West Bank]…Democratic Israel is approaching the test of its life. If we don’t win it, we simply won’t be.”

Misgav’s dystopian prophesy is now unfolding; Israel is collapsing from within while externally it has become a pariah state in the eyes of the world. 

Mass demonstrations against Israel’s genocidal war have exploded across the Global South and in major cities in the West as the entire international community watches in horror at Israel’s genocidal bombing and mass starvation of Gaza’s civilian population. 

Twenty eight countries in Africa and Latin America have cut all ties with Israel and the U.N. General Assembly recently voted 170 to 6 for a resolution “reaffirming the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, including the right to their independent State of Palestine.”

And now, the International Criminal Court, recognised by 124 countries, has ordered arrest warrants on Thursday for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity.”

Although the Israel and the United States reject the ICC arrest warrants, unconditional support from Israel’s staunchest allies is no longer certain according to Scott Ritter. “That which made Israel attractive to the United States — the strategic advantage of pro-American Jewish enclave in a sea of Arab uncertainty — no longer holds as firmly as it previously did,” writes Ritter in Consortium News.

“The Cold War is long gone,” he says, “and the geopolitical benefits accrued in the U.S.-Israeli relationship are no longer evident … the United States, in the end, will not commit suicide on behalf of an Israeli state that has lost all moral legitimacy in the eyes of most of the world.” 

Twenty years ago, former Knesset Speaker Avrum Burg ominously warned of the inevitability of Israel’s defeat. 

Avraham Burg in 2010. (Yossi Gurvitz, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

“It turns out that the 2,000-year struggle for Jewish survival comes down to a state of settlements, run by an amoral clique of corrupt lawbreakers who are deaf both to their citizens and to their enemies. A state lacking justice cannot survive.” 

As Burg forewarned, we are witnessing the beginning of the end of Israel — a state created nearly eight decades ago following a non-binding United Nations resolution. Defeat may come in months or it may take years by which time the next generation of Palestinian resistance fighters will have grown larger, stronger and fiercer.  

Like every guerrilla war from Algeria to Vietnam, the Palestinians will win the political struggle for liberation as Israel implodes from within.

Today, Donald Trump and his rabidly Zionist cabinet appointees may draw out Israel’s offensive but they won’t fundamentally change the calculus. In the foreseeable future, Israel will cease to exist as a nation, hopefully replaced by a secular, democratic state where Palestinians and Jewish citizens will be able to live side by side in peace.