Has Israel's Decline Begun?

In the early 20^th century, Israel was created at a time when the Arab Muslim world had little to offer except "potential" oil beneath the sands and perhaps a railroad route to western colonies in the Far East. European settlers in Palestine were deemed by the west, esp. by the Anglo-Americans, as a sure beachhead for access to the oil. The threat of Communism and the Cold War didn't exist yet.

That worked for a while. Israel was protected because its “army” was essentially a western militia against potential robbers coveting the oil further afield in the Arabian Peninsula. 

Now the price for continuing to use the Jewish colony in Palestine as an outpost to protect access to oil is rising steeply, along with serious doubts about its utility. To continue supporting five million western settlers in Palestine, the West is discovering it has been antagonizing hundreds of millions of Arabs and billions of Muslims. 

Geographically, the collective position of the Near East, the Arabian Peninsula, and farther inland into the Middle East (Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan...), PLUS the arc of Muslim central Asian countries that used to be in the Soviet Union (Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kirghizstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan) represent a global strategic choke point against Chinese penetration toward the West. 

None of these countries had any significant strategic interest for the West after the end of WWI and the beginning of the decolonization process, except as mentioned earlier for "potential" oil reserves. Nowadays, these countries and their region have been decolonized, affluent, more or less democratized, with access to information, and with significant deposits of not only oil and gas but more critical metals and rare earth minerals. Except for maritime routes, China's modern silk roads will have to go through this region.

Alienating all these peoples and their countries just to support five million foreign western settlers with dual nationalities in Palestine no longer makes business or political sense. That is why Israel represents the last and obsolete bastion of western colonialism anywhere around the globe. Israel has become an expensive anomaly to maintain, expensive in both money and strategic interests.

When it was founded in the late 19th, early 20th century, traditional barbarian colonialism was still in vogue, and implanting a colony in Palestine seemed like a great idea that was camouflaged under a so-called "homeland" for Jews who were persecuted by the same westerners who came up with the idea of such a homeland. Antisemitism is a purely western concept and practice that took flight when early Christians (themselves rebel progressive Jews) got into a conflict with traditionalist conservative Judaism that rejected the claim of Jesus as the Messiah. At the turn from the 19^th to the 20^th centuries, the wave of antisemitism was growing in Europe and the European-settled Americas: The Dreyfus Affair in France, the rise of Fascism in Spain and Italy, of Nazism in Germany and to some extent in the US itself, and the climax of it all with the Holocaust ... all were couched in profound antisemitism. Thus, it made sense for the Westerners to rid themselves of the Jews by sending them to settle Palestine AND use these fellow westerners as a mercenary militarized outpost in the heart of the Middle East to protect western access to the nascent oil fields in the region.

That formula worked for the most part through the 20th century. All the exactions and barbarity displayed by the western Jewish settlers against the indigenous Palestinians were ignored and forgiven. After all, the colonized are also “lesser” Semites for whom the West didn’t care much, if at all. The utility of Israel for the West was first tested when France and Britain used Israel’s military in the 1950s to prevent Egypt from nationalizing the Suez Canal. Israel failed that test, Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal, and it was downhill from there despite the appearances.

But now, this formula, this paradigm, is beginning to show cracks. For one thing, several wars have been waged with little gains. Generations have passed and western guilt at the Holocaust is fading. I can well imagine today’s generation of Europeans (not only Germans, but French, Poles and others) telling themselves, “We had nothing to do with the Holocaust. Why should we continue to feel pity and sympathy for a barbarian ultra-religious fundamentalist colonizer? And why should we  let that pity stand in the way of justice for other more deserving peoples and for our own interests? The ‘colonized’ are no longer colonized and are not the savages we thought they were. At the very least, they are no more savages than the Zionist settlers themselves. They are free, independent, sovereign and self-sufficient nations, many with wealth and oil and gas. They can no longer be ignored as backward savages that our ancestors believed them to be.”

Israel is now a burden on the West which can no longer support it blindly. Supporting Israel against the rights, wishes and aspirations of Arab and Muslim peoples, with an independent and free Palestine being at the top of the list such rights, wishes and aspirations, jeopardizes much bigger interests that did not exist 100 years ago.

Those who advised Arabs, who were emerging from 400 years of abysmal Turkish Ottoman occupation, to initially bend a little with the wind and accept Israel until such a time as they have developed their nations and brought into the modern world, now see their advice becoming reality. In the past, in fact in the very recent past, someone like Netanyahu could bamboozle the world at the UN by declaring that his puny pathetic and violent colony is a vanguard of western civilization in an otherwise savage and barbaric east. But nowadays, people around the world are wondering who is the real barbarian colonial rapist that allows itself, regardless of whatever affront it might have suffered at the hands of downtrodden abused ghettoized people trying to liberate themselves from its barbaric occupation, to kill hundreds of thousands of people, starve and displace millions, and condescendingly think of millions of people as disposable vermin and human animals. These people were invaded, occupied, raped and their land taken away from them, and millions of them were summarily evicted into refugee concentration camps without any right to return to their places of origin. What do you expect them to do? What would you do if you faced such an existential abomination?

This is no longer the 18th and 19th centuries. Israel may have started as a homeland for Jewish refugees, but 100 years later it has become a savage colonial rapist. And suddenly the West is assessing the balance sheet of the creation of the Zionist colony in Palestine, and is coming to terms with the fact that Israel is now more of an embarrassing burden that costs a lot and offers comparatively little.

Europe and the Americas have to worry about their interests in the Near East, in the Arabian Peninsula and beyond, all the way to the borders of rising behemoths like India and China. For a century, the West could afford to alienate these nations in order to maintain its Jewish Zionist colony in Palestine. But now the math doesn’t add up anymore. There is so much more to gain, and perhaps to fear, from all these Arab and Muslim nations who were powerless up until the recent past. The cost to the West of preserving Israel against the wishes and aspirations of these peoples and nations is becoming too expensive strategically and geopolitically. 

The question of Palestine is now central. It is not true that the Zionist colony has managed to erase the Palestinian tragedy from the world’s conscience. To the contrary, Palestine has seen a monumental return onto the global stage and keeps requiring a solution. If Israel continues on its path of ethnic cleansing and genocide just to ensure it is a cutesy little exclusive Jewish vacation resort on the Mediterranean, it will lose the little sympathy and support it has left from its former colonial creators and breast feeders.  Countries like Spain, Ireland, France, the UK.... are all moving to ostracize Israel and are demanding a free and independent state of Palestine, both for justice’s sake and for strategic objectives. Even the US is growing tired and exhausted from having to be the only country on earth to still defend Israel’s illegality and refusal to abide by international law at the UN. Even Israel's best friend, Donald Trump, the dumb idiot who was led by the nose by Netanyahu into a failing war, has reacted violently to the Israelis refusing to abide by his directives and help him secure a ceasefire, and for generally countering US interests in the region.

As I have argued previously in posts, colonial enterprises generally fail after a while. Algeria, Indochina (Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia….), China, Africa, India, the Arab Moors in Spain, the Crusaders in Palestine, and many other instances where a colonizer had to pack up and leave one day. Colonizers succeed only when the numbers of colonial invading settlers reach a critical mass and overwhelm the colonized natives (e.g. the Ottoman invasion and seizure of former Greco-Roman territories to form modern Turkey; the European invasion and seizure of the Americas...). But when the colonizer is a minority diving insolently and arrogantly into a sea of colonized, and regardless of its momentary power and might, it ends up losing and leaving even after a while. Israel as a colonial enterprise has seen its apogee but is now beginning to wear and tear and depreciate in the eyes of those who created it and supported it. Instead of supporting five million barbarian foreign Semitic settlers, the West will likely, in due course, prefer to support hundreds of millions of indigenous Semites. 

Israel might still have a chance to survive if it knows how to make friends and provide justice for those it is killing and maiming. In its growing confrontation with the rising superpowers of India and China, the West might have to sacrifice puny and insignificant Israel for greater interests. The West already went through such a metamorphosis when, in the wake of two Israeli-Arab wars (1967 and 1973) and the Arab oil embargo (1973) that followed them, the West invited Yasser Arafat in 1974 to the UN where he told the world that “there is such a thing as a Palestinian people”, contrary to what the ugliest female prime minister that ever existed, Israeli PM Golda Meir, declared one day, “There is no such thing as a Palestinian people”. The West responded to the oil embargo by recognizing the existence of a Palestinian people. I wouldn’t be surprised if the West caved once more in the face of similar threats and declared the creation of a free, independent and sovereign Palestinian state.