The End of Israel

As the Zionist experiment falters, the last vestiges of the pre-WW1 world are disappearing--which begs the question: where will the Jews eventually go to?

Editorial prelim: I don’t take any pleasure writing these lines; moreover, I don’t condone gratuitous violence directed against anyone. Finally, given the essay’s topic, I shall closely monitor the comments and reserve the right to remove any statement that celebrates the deaths of Palestinians or Jews. If you are inclined to ‘celebrate’ my analysis, please consider joining the tens of thousands of Moslems calling for the annihilation of Israel.

I don’t claim any special insights into what is going on; I’ve written about the present situation a few days ago; if you’re interested in the evolution of my argument, please see:

As Anti-Semitism and Anti-Moslem Sentiment Increase in the West, Hard Questions Emerge About Mass Immigration and #standwithisrael

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As its Agit-Prop Breaks Through, Hamas is Winning

At least on the propaganda front, and, given the Israeli ‘reluctance’ to commit ground forces (just yet), that is what matters.

Hamas and the radical, ‘death to Israel’-shouting factions of fellow travellers have increased their clout markedly in the past 10-15 years. The preliminary results are in, and they are not pretty; in fact, far from it.

Sure, esp. US campuses are crowded by people who, positioning themselves ‘with Palestine’, are actually standing shoulder to shoulder with the likes of Hamas and Hisbollah. The most moronic ones among them are, without a doubt, those who self-identify as part of the ‘queer’ communities, for they will certainly be the first ones who’d feel the wrath of radical-militant Moslems, such as the members of Hamas and Hisbollah.

Truth be told, the influence of 20-somethings on campuses must not be over-rated, but Hamas and its ilk has actually several fellow travellers, incl. the Austrian federal president. You see, yesterday, Alexander Van der Bellen (Greens) tweeted the following:

Source impossible, as Mr. Van der Bellen has since deleted his Tweet—after more than 24 hours.

I’ll let Austrian tabloid Österreich tell you the rest (my translation and emphases):

Wednesday, at 1:44 p.m., Van der Bellen tweeted about ‘hundreds killed’ by ‘rocket fire’ in Gaza. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs told the [president’s] Cabinet since Thursday morning that there was no evidence for ‘hundreds killed’ other than Hamas statements. On the contrary. EU intelligence services talk of far fewer....

[German Chancellor Olaf] Scholz tweeted without taking over information from Hamas...

The [Austrian] Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed to Österreich that as of Thursday morning—Van der Bellen had written the tweet on X in German and English—they had tried ‘several times’ to draw the attention of the Cabinet of the Federal President to the fact that there was no confirmation of this claim outside the Hamas terrorist group.

Astonishment at VdB Tweet also on X

Diplomats express their ‘astonishment’ that the Hofburg has still not deleted the tweet. Incidentally, as of Wednesday evening, some on X also took notice of VdB account…

The Federal President received the Jewish Welcome Service yesterday and explained there that ‘never again is more relevant today than ever before’. Why his team then did not delete the Tweet deleted by 3:15 p.m. on Thursday remains an open question. The Hofburg’s official statement as to why the Tweet was not deleted: ‘Because it reflects the information we had at the time of the tweet was posted’.

Now, you could possibly care less about Austria, its senile president, and the inanities spouted by Mr. Van der Bellen virtually every time he says something, really: anything.

You should care, though, for it shows how far the rot reaches by now, with the president of a European country acting as a water—rather: spear—carrier for a terrorist organisation. This is bad, but it’s not all.

As reported by yet another tabloid, Heute, members of the Socialist Youth of the Social Democrat Party (SPÖ) also, and blindly so, came out strongly in favour of Hamas and its ‘official’ aim, the end of Israel and the mass killing of its Jewish inhabitants (as above, my translation and emphases):

A posting by the Socialist Youth [SJ, or Sozialistische Jugend] Vorarlberg caused an uproad on Tuesday. It speaks of a ‘merciless war against the entire Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip’. It goes on to say ‘Down with hypocrisy—for the defence of Gaza!’ Although the group speaks of an ‘attack by Hamas’, and the [Socialist Youth] nevertheless expresses ‘solidarity with the Palestinian people’.

However, the party youth did not respond to criticism of this, which also came from their own ranks, with an explanation, but instead doubled down. In another posting, they spoke of a ‘character assassination campaign’ and a ‘wave of slander’ against them, and also clearly positioned themselves on the side of Palestine in the current conflict. The latest attack was attributed to oppression by Israel…

The [national party leadership of the] SPÖ reacted the next day [i.e., Wednesday] with a statement: ‘The posting of the SJ Vorarlberg does not correspond to the position of the SPÖ.’ And: ‘Anti-Semitism has no place in the SPÖ and our youth organisations.’ This statement did not yet mention possible consequences.

These have now been drawn by the SPÖ Vorarlberg. ‘As the SPÖ Vorarlberg, we stand behind the joint declaration of solidarity by the parliamentary parties and can therefore not tolerate such actions by the SJ. The SJ leadership bears responsibility for its actions and must therefore also expect consequences for them. Such ideas have no place in our party’, said Vorarlberg state party chairman Mario Leiter. He said that he had not found any understanding in personal talks with those responsible.

See what I mean?

Sure, parts of the labour movement (esp. in German-speaking lands) has held strong anti-semitic convictions since the mid-19th century; these sentiments are part and parcel of the explanation of the eventual rise of the Nazi party. As this history has never been really acknowledged by left-wing parties, let alone thoroughly investigated by scholarship, these sentiments linger on. If anything, the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 merely added strong pro-Arab sentiments, esp. since the Arabs back then were mainly socialists, too. The world has certainly seen stranger bedfellows than that.

One thing you’d need to know about German-speaking party youth and student organisations is that they are almost completely dominated by various shades of extreme left-wingers, ranging from ‘regular’ socialists (like the ones referenced above) to ‘Green and Alternatives’, and literally every shade of dark red (Leninists, Maoists, and worse). Most centrist or conservative students don’t really bother about student or party youth politics, hence the domination, to certain degrees, of left-wing radicals among ‘young’ politicians (who typically hail from such backgrounds).

Facts Don’t Matter, Hamas Has Won the Propaganda War

Perhaps not everywhere in ‘the collective West’, but certainly among the Islamic world and vast sections of the Global South. Moreover, just look at the position of Russia and China: for decades, Moscow stood alongside its socialist Arab brethren, and while there are tentative signs that Mr. Putin is moving closer to the Israeli cause, his prime interest right now appears to be the safeguarding of Mr. Assad’s government.

Same with China, whose clout in the Middle East has increased markedly, most notably because of Beijing’s facilitation of direct talks between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

With the images of Gaza burning flickering across the TV screens and being shared on social media across the Islamic world, Western attempts to lie to themselves and the rest of the world about the differences between ‘Ukraine’ and ‘Palestine’ are reaching the end of the runway.

As an aside, as regards the incident in or near the Al Ahli Arab Gaza Hospital, I found the following ‘fact-check’ by Norwegian state broadcaster NRK relatively helpful; yes, Norway is a NATO member and very close vassal of the US, but I shall, in the interest of the topic, reproduce a few key passages (and even if you don’t read Norwegian, do check it out with machine translation, if only it contains a helpful compilation of links and tweets; translation and emphases mine, pictures from the linked website).

No-one has claimed responsibility for the attack yet.

Hamas quickly reacted and called it an Israeli attack.

Israel claims it has evidence that the Palestinian Islamic Jihad is behind the incident…

The number of casualties has not been independently confirmed.

According to a statement from the WHO, early reports indicate several hundred dead and injured…

Health authorities in Gaza, which are controlled by Hamas, wrote in a statement on Facebook on 18 October that 471 people have been killed, while the Israeli Defence Forces believe that the number of deaths is lower than what has been reported.

Curiously, there is also video footage available on Twitter that shows the parking lot in question:

Source as given above; note the windows of the building in the rear appear to be intact, and that the windshield of the car on the left looks oddly different from the burnt car in the front.

Source as linked above; caption: ‘This image shows the alleged crater in the hospital’s parking lot where an explosion occurred on 17 Oct. The picture was taken on the day after, 18 Oct.’

The crater seems quite small, too, and more in line with literally hundreds of comparable holes that are caused each year around New Year by exploding fireworks, in particular ball-shaped ones:

Source; caption: ‘New Year’s Eve incident in Lower Austria: Man (53) killed by ball-shaped fireworks’. For size, the wooden boards appear to be 2x4s, hence, the diameter of the ‘crater’ would be roughly 40-50cm, very close to the size of the crater in the parking lot in Gaza. As regards the pavement in Gaza, note that the ground is typically frozen around New Year, hence I do think, all other things being equal, this instance is instructive.

NRK also cites a number of ‘experts’, namely Reinhardt Skøien, master-sergeant for ammunition supply and explosives clearance in the Norwegian Army:

It is impossible to conclude what caused the explosion without seeing shrapnel, debris and parts of the object that has detonated. This cannot be seen in the images that have been verified...

‘Given that what we see in the images is actually the crater after the impact, the object has entered at a relatively oblique angle. We see traces of what may be splinters on the cobblestone nearby. The object probably detonated first on the ground, which has reduced the shrapnel effect’

I’ll not reproduce the ‘composite image of the impact area’, which has been cobbled together by none other than known Western intel laundromat Bellingcat.

NRK also provides the opinion of one Trygve Johannes Smidt, a lieutenant colonel and researcher at the Norwegian War College, who also saw the photos and ‘believes it can be ruled out that the injuries from the explosion were caused by an Israeli air strike.’

‘I don't know of any aircraft-delivered weapons that cause such injuries. The bombs Israel drops from aircraft will create large craters in the ground that are several metres deep. Such bombs can also detonate above the ground, but then cars and buildings would suffer major damage from a large number of shrapnel. We don’t see that here.’

Smidt emphasises that he has only seen pictures of the damage after the explosion that have been published in the media.

There are some more ‘experts’ cited who provide essentially comparable statements, their affiliation with Norwegian, and hence NATO, military notwithstanding. There are but two options to figure out what happened:

Israel could either release all the surveillance data they surely have or a fact-finding mission to the site could be done. Both options are, in my opinion, irrelevant by now: the former will not provide any more information about what happened as I’m highly sceptical of an organisation that allegedly f****** up royally on 7 Oct. and who could now hold the, or any, answers to the incident. As regards the latter, all I’m saying is OPWC and the infamous psy-op some still call the ‘Douma chemical weapons attack’, to say nothing about the massive ‘contamination’ of the impact site (as opposed to, say, official aircraft crash site investigations).

All we can say with certainty is that we don’t know what happened, and that we will, in all likelihood, not learn the truth in the near future.

Yet another thing we can state quite confidently is that it doesn’t matter what happened, as the Hamas-spun narrative has proven to be highly successful, as the above-related account of the Austrian politicians and activists show.

The Shape of Things to Come

And this is where things get ugly. Check out the following interview with Member of the Knesset (MK) Ofer Cassif, a politician from the Hadash party. He is introduced as an ‘anti-Zionist’, but keep in mind that Hadash is a ‘left-leaning’ faction that advocates ‘for a socialistic economy’ (source). That said, MK Cassif is also spouting nonsense when he claims, around the 1:30 mark, that ‘about 50% of the population’ between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River are excluded from Israeli ‘democracy’.

He also makes many other claims, including his visions of ‘rivers of blood flowing in the streets’, but what MK Cassif calls ‘democracy’, Israeli style, is by law an apartheid system. As cited by, e.g., The Times of Israel, one must not fail to remember what is written in the Basic Law (my emphases):

A. The land of Israel is the historical homeland of the Jewish people, in which the State of Israel was established.

B. The State of Israel is the national home of the Jewish people, in which it fulfills its natural, cultural, religious and historical right to self-determination.

C. The right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.

Much has been written about this amendment, but when MK Cassif decries the non-participation of ‘50% of the population’, this is done by constitutional law. No matter what MK Cassif, you, or I think about this notion, no matter how much one would deplore the bloody consequences, it is what is is: some call it discrimination, others call it apartheid.

Yet, it doesn’t really matter, for one thing is obvious: absent the expulsion (ethnic cleansing) or mass-death (genocide) of the vast majority of these ‘50% of the population’, Israel will, at some point, become a failed state (if if hasn’t become one already).

There is, however, also the flip side of this argument: if Palestine wins, the ‘other 50% of the population’—that would be the Jews—that lives between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River will be subject to expulsion (ethnic cleansing) or mass-death (genocide).

One could, possibly, argue that the imposition of ‘martial law’ by the current national unity gov’t of Benjamin Netanyahoo is either an implicit recognition of Palestine (as ‘war’ is, strictly legally speaking, a well defined state of affairs between states) or it should be called out for what it is: the declaration of a state of exception without justification, which has traditionally been labelled—a coup d’état.

Leaving such rather ‘technical’ matters aside, we shall focus on the impending explosion of violence in Gaza and, possibly, across the whole Middle East, if not vast swaths of the world.

The Shape of Things to Come—the End of Israel

The proverbial fog of war is dense right now, but here’s a few things that are, in my opinion, quite certain:

Israel’s continues existence is at stake, which is very much in line with statements issued by Mr. Netanyahoo and others.

Arguably, this has been the case since the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, but so far successive Israeli governments have always enjoyed the overwhelming (mainly military) support of ‘the Collective West’, in particular the US.

These days, however, and despite the deployment of four (!) US carrier strike groups destined for the Middle East, questions about the efficacy of such moves are emerging; in fact, the value of US support is in question.

Israel has already attacked neighbouring Lebanon and Syria, both of which fall under the category of ‘aggression’ (as defined by the UN Charter) and cannot be classified as ‘self-defence’.

Moreover, with Russian troops (in particular anti-ship missiles) in Syria and repeat statements by Mr. Putin warning the US of launching an attack on Mr. Assad, tensions are running higher than for some time.

Reportedly, the Israeli Defence Minister has clarified that a ground invasion of Gaza is imminent, which will result in staggering numbers of casualties on both sides. This much is certain, and the only question here, to my mind, is when will these casualty numbers exceed the ‘toleration threshold’, either on the Israeli side or on the Palestinian side.

The former relates more to public sentiment, economic crisis, and the issue of what kind of troops are used (as the IDF also regularly drafts women, but I’d bet you my hat that women will not be deployed in the front lines, for obvious reasons). The latter relates to the number of dead Palestinians that must be achieved before Arab leaders must ‘do something’ about this.

In the end, it won’t matter, if only because Israel cannot ‘win’, for the following reasons:

• If Israel ‘wins’, it means the mass expulsion (ethnic cleansing) and/or mass slaughter of Palestinians (genocide) in Gaza and, arguably, across the West Bank.

• If Palestinians ‘win’, it means the mass expulsion (ethnic cleansing) and/or mass slaughter of Israelis (genocide).

Please don’t ask me what option I prefer (neither), but I will add that Israel has nuclear weapons, a plan of operational use—the ‘Samsom Option’—in the event of impending military defeat, and questionable levels of support.

So far, as The Guardian reports, ‘Israel has said it used 6,000 bombs in the first six days of the conflict, more than the US used in a year during its operations in Afghanistan’.

Let that sink in: a year of US bombing of Afghanistan is equal to the amount of bombs dropped on the Gaza Strip in the past fortnight. Afghanistan has a surface area of 652,867 km2, the Gaza Strip encompasses 365 km2, i.e., size differential of the factor of 1,789.

In the end, though, none of this will matter. As per the conversation with MK Cassif (my emphasis):

‘Palestinians are the new Jews, to the extent that they are being prosecuted and killed and the international community is silent. We know as Jews what this means and we do the same. I am ashamed.’

The implication is obvious—ask yourself who, then, would by the genocidal Nazis in that particular equation?

‘They distributed thousands of arms to the radical right to provoke mass killings of Arabs and Israeli leftists within Israel. Fascist thugs are are armed to the neck, more than ever…Milititas, organized fascist militias are training with the arms they get from the state with lists of names of democratic citizens, not only Palestinian citizens but leftist Jews that must be targeted and the police is part of this militia.’

MK Caffir cannot remain coherent, for his ramblings are…what exactly? Remember, this is the purportedly ‘sane’, ‘reasonable’, and leftist-anti-Zionist voice here.

‘The massacre [of 7 Oct.] is cynically and violently used by the fascist government of Netanyahu and his thugs to realize the fascist, racist subjugation plan by adopting and using three strategies: 

A genocidal assault on Gaza that amount to almost a national elimination. Ethnic cleansing by pogroms including killings in the West Bank and arming fascist militias cooperating with the police against Palestinians and democratic citizens within Israel. 

If you don’t do something now to stop the fascist militias, what we’ve been seeing so far is nothing compared to what we are going to see. Israel proper (not Gaza or the West Bank), the streets from the South to the North in Israel will be colored in red and massive rivers of blood are going to be there if you don’t stop them. The writing is on the walls written in blood already.’

If we would take MK Caffir at his word, we’re looking at option #1 outlined above.

Given the preponderance of Hamas on the propaganda front, this does not bode well.

Israel might ‘achieve’ the realisation of parts of the logic written into its constitution in 2018, that is, the mass expulsion (ethnic cleansing) and/or mass slaughter of Palestinians (genocide) in Gaza and, arguably, across the West Bank.

This will result in the loss of confidence and, more importantly, support in the West, even before anyone would need to invoke the thorny issue of the mess in Ukraine to make the same argument in favour of Russia’s intervention.

The contradiction is as big as it is obvious, and the consequences can be spelled out as follows:

Any further Israeli escalation against Gaza will only bolster support for Palestinians.

Any further Israeli delay signals weakness to Palestinians and the Islamic world in general.

Hence, even if Israel ‘achieves’ an at best tactical ‘victory’ now, its opponents will be emboldened.

Therefore, we can state with elevated confidence that Zionism has failed.

All that remains for the State of Israel are rearguard actions.

Epilogue

All that remains for the majority of Jews in Israel is the preparation for their eventual departure, or flight, from the State of Israel.

Many already hold dual citizenship, hence I think the most important question for ‘the Collective West’ is where to go.

If anything, Western countries better get prepared for this eventuality, i.e., the sudden mass departure of Israelis from an state that will only come increasingly under pressure.

If I’d had to speculate, I’d state that European countries would be loath to welcome tens, if not hundreds of thousands of Israeli refugees. And that isn’t, I’d argue, because of the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of rabidly anti-Israeli Moslems in Western countries.

In short: there seems no safe place to go to.

Today, Christians of all denominations are the most persecuted religious group; the implication here is that Jews will eventually (re)claim the top spot, if only because there are way fewer Jews than Christians.

In the final analysis, Zionism is the last vestige of the pre-WW1 era. It has had its ups and downs mainly after WW2, but the implications of its failure are obvious. The overly ‘long’ 19th century (as Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm would call it) is finally drawing to a close.

Whatever happens next will be breath-taking and stunning.

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P.S.: Michael Chabon, in his 2007 novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, related a fictional account of the aftermath of the defeat of Israel. Although set in an earlier alternative timeline, most survivors eventually ended up in something like a ‘reservation’ in Alaska, far away from everything and everyone else; see a review here.