As that country approaches the end of its eighth decade, many Israeli politicians, historians, and thinkers worry that its current situation offers ample grounds to fear that the curse will strike again.
For my part, I believe their pessimism is well-founded and that the reasons for it are the very factors that will ultimately bring about Israel’s demise in its current form, which is to say as an exclusively Jewish state. Practically and theoretically, such a process, however long it takes, would inevitably lead to the one-state solution to the Palestinian question.
Former prime minister Ehud Barak, former prime minister Naftali Bennett, and former far-right minister Avigdor Lieberman are among the most prominent Israeli politicians who have sounded the alarm about the end of Israel. They place the blame primarily on Netanyahu and his decision to ally with ethno-supremacist, religious extremist parties, threatening what they claim are Israel’s values rooted in equal citizenship, secularism, democracy, and modernity.
They point out that the ultra-Orthodox minority, the Haredim, who form the support base of the extremist parties, neither pay taxes nor serve in the military and receive subsidies from the state so they can dedicate themselves to religious studies. Critics also worry about the Haredi demographic bomb because of their high fertility rates compared with other segments of Israeli society.
The secular-ultraorthodox sociocultural tensions have recently culminated in the sharp political polarization over a legislative project aimed at undermining the autonomy of the judiciary, or the judicial coup, as some have called it. The broader tensions within Israeli society are reflected in chronic government instability.
Since the 1990s, no Israeli government has completed its constitutional term apart from the current one. Ironically, this government is viewed by many, both inside and outside Israel, as the worst in that state’s history, a government whose survival in power has been widely attributed to its ability to start wars.
Historians and thinkers add other aggravating factors that have heightened concerns over the imminent repetition of the eighty-year curse.
In addition to the partisan and religious divides within Jewish society, they cite ethical and philosophical concerns, foremost among them the consequences of ruling another people, the Palestinians, through extreme force, degradation, and actions constituting crimes against humanity. Such behaviours, they argue, manifest a tendency toward racial superiority, not only toward Palestinians, but also toward neighbouring peoples and, indeed, all other peoples.
This tendency is another face of a deep-seated aggressiveness in the Israeli psyche, resulting in the paradox of yesterday’s victim becoming today’s executioner.
The growing visibility of the structural dysfunction in Israeli society, and therefore in its collective mindset, psychology, and political life, is matched by an unprecedented deterioration in Israel’s image and its regional and international standing. This is true even in the US, especially among younger generations and political leaders.
For example, the project extending the Abraham Accords to Saudi Arabia and, by extension, normalizing relations between all other major Islamic countries and Israel, has been postponed indefinitely. By contrast, not only has Iran gained in prestige and influence, but it has also achieved a remarkable degree of deterrence, I stress deterrence, vis-à-vis the US-Israeli alliance.
Meanwhile, the constant swaggering of Israeli officials as they reiterate visions of “Greater Israel” and their endless boasting of the ability to reshape the region under Israeli hegemony have antagonized all the other regional powers, from Egypt to Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and even Pakistan.
These countries are now discussing how to contain the imperial ambitions of that tiny state that originated from outside the region.
Yet perhaps the most significant development in the Middle East conflict since Operation Al-Aqsa Flood is the collapse of the illusion that Israel is free of its traditional dependence on the US, especially in security and defence. President Trump has recently driven this point home in his blunt, idiosyncratic way on several occasions.
When we consider all the above-mentioned factors, Israel’s major failures, its structural deficiencies, its continued perpetration of morally reprehensible strategies, the regional shifts against the Zionist project, and the reassessments of Israel by societies and governments around the world, and when we add these factors to the dead end reached by the two-state solution due to intensified settlement activity, the inability, indeed cowardly refusal, of Israeli political elites across the political spectrum to support this solution, and the impossibility of implementing the plan for “voluntary” transfer (the euphemism for the forced mass expulsion of Palestinians, especially from the West Bank), then Israel is left with only two options.
Either it can continue to live as a regional pariah state, increasingly isolated internationally, including eventually from the US, and in a state of endless war, or it can swallow the bitter pill of the one-state solution: a truly democratic secular state for all its citizens, Jews and Arabs alike, even if this outcome arrives somewhat later than the eight decades prescribed by the “curse.”
In fact, this was the original demand and project adopted by the Palestinian national movement. A single secular democratic state for all citizens, Jews and Arabs alike, was at the core of the Palestine Liberation Organization's (PLO) charter.
This goal was abandoned only after enormous Arab and international pressures and inducements, especially from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the US, were brought to bear on the PLO. Ultimately, however, it was Israel that reneged on its commitments, as everyone knows.
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