Israel as 'Super-Sparta?'

Netanyahu's Insanity and Arendt's Prophecy

On Monday, the Miriam Adelson-funded tabloid Israel Hayom reported some remarks from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that were both frank and frankly insane:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke Monday at the Accountant General's Conference and issued a significant warning: "Israel is entering diplomatic isolation. We will have to deal with a closed economy. The world is dividing into blocs, and we are not part of any bloc. That makes it easier to isolate us. We also have a technological and scientific advantage that creates dependence on us and gives others an interest in maintaining ties with us."

"We may find ourselves blocked not only in research and development, but also in production itself. Our defense industries could be blocked, and we will have to be Athens and super-Sparta, adapting to an autarkic economy. We have no choice. At least for the coming years, we will have to cope with these attempts at isolation, and we must first develop the ability to manage on our own."

So, Netanyahu understands that the genocide in Gaza—just today, the United Nations commission investigating the war declared it to be a genocide—will result in the isolation of Israel. He has begun to sound like the mad prophet, Meir Kahane, who once declared, “…there are no allies and the United States itself will cut its bonds to Israel as its interests dictate. In the end, Zion and Zionism stand alone with the Almighty G-d who created them.” (Allow me to paraphrase Stalin here and impertinently ask just how many 2,000 lb bombs is Almighty G-d able to produce a year?) But isn’t it a little strange that Bibi would pick the goyim of classical civilization as his chosen examples? After all, there is another ancient Mediterranean people whose history and legends come down to us from the past. They were called “Children of Israel,” and this present state claims to be heir to their Kingdom. That history is maybe not the best to recall at the moment: it is full of divine punishments for arrogance and cruelty, foreign captivity, exile, and a long-suffering people reclaiming their homeland. Its struggles against larger, Imperial powers ended with the destruction of its temple and the 2000-year diaspora of its people. But maybe there is another reason, albeit unconscious, that Athens and Sparta are Bibi’s chosen examples: a recognition that the Israeli people have become, in some sense, something other than the Jews of history. After all, the goal of Zionism was the rebirth of the Jewish people, their “normalization,” and their becoming “a nation like all others.” Of course, in Hebrew, the word for nation is “goy.”

What immediately struck me, though, was the similarity of Netanyahu’s words to another prophecy, that of Hannah Arendt. As the character of the Zionist movement became clear to her, she went from being a Zionist to a critic of Zionism. During the war in 1948, she wrote:

…even if the Jews were to win the war, its end would find the unique possibilities and the unique achievements of Zionism in Palestine destroyed. The land that would come into being would be something quite other than the dream of world Jewry, Zionist and non-Zionist. The “victorious” Jews would live surrounded by an entirely hostile Arab population, secluded inside ever-threatened borders, absorbed with physical self-defense to a degree that would submerge all other interests and activities. The growth of a Jewish culture would cease to be the concern of the whole people; social experiments would have to be discarded as impractical luxuries; political thought would center around military strategy; economic development would be determined exclusively by the needs of war. And all this would be the fate of a nation that—no matter how many immigrants it could still absorb and how far it extended its boundaries (the whole of Palestine and Transjordan is the insane Revisionist demand)— would still remain a very small people greatly outnumbered by hostile neighbors.

Under such circumstances (as Ernst Simon has pointed out) the Palestinian Jews would degenerate into one of those small warrior tribes about whose possibilities and importance history has amply informed us since the days of Sparta. Their relations with world Jewry would become problematical, since their defense interests might clash at any moment with those of other countries where large numbers of Jews lived. Palestine Jewry would eventually separate itself from the larger body of world Jewry and in its isolation develop into an entirely new people. Thus it becomes plain that at this moment and under present circumstances a Jewish state can only be erected at the price of the Jewish homeland.

Netanyahu wants to allay the fears of a culture entirely given to warmaking, which is why he included Athens, but it’s certainly true that it seems that Israel’s “relations with World Jewry” have become “problematical.” And perhaps, it is in the process of developing into a new people. Here in New York, that other Jewish capital, we are less and less taken with our Eastern cousins, as the significant Jewish support for Zohran Mamdani makes clear. Zionist Jews and their Christian Zionist allies like to say Jews like me are “not real Jews.” My response to that is, “Right back at you.” You’re “Super-Spartans” now, I guess. Sparta-Schmarta.