The Fall of Israel

In The Fall of Israel, Dan Steinbock provides a much-needed perspective that is usually absent from the oft one-sided American debate and media coverage about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is more biased in favor of Israeli actions than debates even in Israel. Many times, such criticism of Israel is even shouted down as “antisemitism,” which is taken to mean bigotry or hostility toward people of the Jewish religion. Yet only about half the world’s Jews live in Israel, and a significant number of those who do and don’t, disagree with the Israeli government’s discriminatory and harsh policies toward Palestinians in lands conquered by force in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War or the more than 20 percent of Israelis who are Arab Muslims or Christians. Like Islam or Christianity, Judaism is a religion but Zionism, whether based in the Jewish or Christian faith, is the belief that a Jewish state should be created and maintained in biblical Palestine. The boundaries of this biblically based area, however, historically have been vaguely defined on purpose and have generated much controversy. Even some ultra-orthodox Jews oppose Zionism because they believe God will establish a Jewish state in Palestine only when the messiah and end times arrive.

According to Steinbock, an even bigger problem with the Zionist dream is that about 750,000 Palestinian Muslims and Christians—many of whose ancestors had lived in Palestine during the almost two thousand years between Roman ejection of most of the Jews from the region during biblical times and the creation of Israel in the mid-twentieth century—were “ethnically cleansed” (documented in detail by Israeli historian Ilan Pappe’s book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Oneworld, 2006) from their homes before and during the 1948 war that birthed the state of Israel. During that “cleansing” the socialist Zionist movement (really a proto state) and its militias—at the time, backed even more by the Stalinist Soviet Union than the United States—drove Palestinian Muslims and Christians out of their homes by force and terror, bulldozing many houses so that the war refugees could never return. Some Zionists claim that “no such thing as a Palestinian identity exists,” which seems irrelevant if a state or proto state is using armed force to remove residents from their land, destroy their homes, and prohibit their return after hostilities have ended.

Also, the book destroys the myth that the Zionists have always been outgunned by their more numerous opponents. From 1936 to 1939, when the Arabs rose against British colonial allowance of mass immigration to Palestine, the British military and Zionist militias smashed Palestinian armed capabilities for good. Thus, during 1948, after the well-armed Zionist militias (well-funded from U.S. sources) had used terror tactics to drive out the British in 1947, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by the Zionists was very one-sided.

In 1948, at the time of Israel’s creation, Steinbock notes that Zionists owned only six percent of the land in Palestine. At the end of the war, their proto-state militias, now folded into the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), had commandeered, using forced ethnic cleansing. another 72 percent, yielding 78 percent of Palestine. (This percentage exceeded even the unfairness of the United Nations’ 1947 plan to partition Palestine: in that plan, Zionists, with only a third of the population, would have received 55 percent of the land, with the two-thirds Palestinian population getting only a fragmented 45 percent.)

The IDF gained control of the remaining 22 percent of Palestine in the 1967 allegedly-preemptive Israeli War against the Arabs by conquering the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, during which another 300,000 Arabs were cleansed from Palestine, bringing the total removed to over one million. The use of state military power by Zionists to confiscate private Palestinian land continues to this day in the West Bank and, according to Steinbock, may soon resume in the now unlivable Gaza, which should clearly violate libertarian sensibilities.

Nowadays, the Israeli state confiscates valuable private Palestinian land—often claiming national security, conservation, or other government needs—then later makes it available to private Zionist settlers in the West Bank. All Zionist settlements in the West Bank, both “legal” ones and “illegal” ones under Israeli law, are flagrantly illegal under international law, because nations are not allowed to settle occupied land they have gained in conquest.

Furthermore, Steinbock argues that Israel conducts ultra-apartheid rule in the occupied West Bank by restricting travel of Palestinians with a labyrinth of military checkpoints and by providing land and giving preferential treatment to Israeli settlers in their escalating conflict with the resident Palestinian majority. As for Gaza, even before disproportionately killing about 44,000 Gazans, many of them civilians, and blasting 70 percent of the buildings in that formerly occupied territory into rubble during the current over-the-top military response to Hamas’s October 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel (which killed 1,200 Israeli military personnel and civilians), the Israelis ruled indirectly by blockading Gaza by air, land, and sea and creating the “world’s largest open-air prison.” Israel and Egypt restricted trade, food, water, and medical supplies into Gaza. Now, after the current war began, Israel is being accused of tightening the existing blockade to cause near famine conditions there. Cabinet members of the current right-wing revisionist Zionist government—who go even further than the original socialist secular Zionist founders of Israel in their thirst to acquire the maximum amount of territory—have made noises about expelling Gazans (similar to what was done to many of the Palestinians who were living in Israel in 1948) and resettling the territory with Zionist settlers, in further violation of international law.

And the second-class citizenship doesn’t just apply to Palestinians in the occupied territories. By a 2018 Israeli law, only Jews are allowed national self-determination in Israel proper, Hebrew was made the official language, and Arabic was downgraded. Also, Arab citizens of Israel face everyday discrimination and are not allowed to serve in the Israeli military, much like apartheid-era South African blacks were not allowed to serve in that country’s defense forces.

Although Hamas’s October 7 attack was a heinous attack on both civilians and military personnel, Israel’s disproportionate response by using huge 2,000-pound bombs in urban areas, striking many hospitals and residential apartment buildings, and further constricting the blockade on the territory to the point of famine clearly violate international law. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defense minister have been indicted by the International Criminal Court for such actions. Furthermore, the world did not begin on October 7. Israel has been using wildly disproportionate military actions for decades to enhance “deterrence.” Steinbock tallied total casualties for the Israelis and Palestinians from the creation of Israel in 1948 through all the intervening wars to 2023 and found that the Israelis have incurred about 70,000 while the Palestinians have suffered about 110,000. Of course, he notes that the casualty ratio in the current war is by far the worst ever for the Palestinians.

Steinbock also mentions that the Israeli intelligence had warned the Israeli government of a major Hamas attack well in advance, but even then, the government kept approving Qatar’s funding of the group right up until it attacked southern Israel. This fact seems revelatory of Israel’s true motives in the region. Israel was tacitly allowing a radical group in Gaza with at least a theoretical objection to Israel’s very existence to be strengthened to compete for Palestinians’ allegiance against the more moderate Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Ironically, this policy is an adaptation of the British Empire’s divide-and-rule strategy in pre-Israel colonial Palestine, pitting the Zionist minority against the Palestinian majority.

In a country that got impetus and immigrants for its creation from the horror of the Holocaust in Europe, one would expect better behavior toward a people who already had lived on the land for centuries. In 1917 during World War I, to attempt to enlist the help of the United States in their conflict with Kaiser’s Germany, the British Empire, using the Balfour Declaration, pledged a homeland—not a state—for Zionists in Palestine at the expense of the Arabs, who Britain also earlier had promised independence for rebelling against the then-ruling Ottoman Turks, an ally of Germany. After World War II, in 1947, as noted earlier, the United Nations proposed a partition of Palestine into two parts. However, the Palestinians have never received their part, as promised by the Israelis in the Oslo Accords during the 1990s, even though the Palestinian Authority recognized Israel’s right to exist. However, Steinbock says that the two-state solution actually had died many years earlier with the assassination of the U.N. mediator, Folke Bernadotte, by the Stern Gang, a Jewish terror group acting on behalf of the new Israeli government in 1948.

So, if the two-state solution has long been dead, Israel will be forced to adopt a one-state solution, which will mean either giving up its identity of being a Jewish state or an abandoning its apartheid-style democracy. Now about seven million Jews and seven million Arabs live in Israel and the occupied territories of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. According to Steinbock, the birth rates of Palestinians and ultra-orthodox Jews exceed that of moderately religious or secular Israelis. Given the Israeli right’s desire to abandon one of the few domestic checks and balances on the government by drastically reducing the power of the judiciary, it looks like democracy is more likely to be abandoned than the desire for Zionists to control the state and therefore the Palestinian populations.

Steinbock believes that the Gaza War is likely a breaking point for Israel. The conflict is sapping the strength of the military from Israel’s aggressive actions to turn it into a multipronged regional war against Hamas, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and Iran—thereby dragging in its more powerful U.S. ally. And because Israeli Arabs are not allowed to serve in the Israeli armed forces and the burgeoning ultra-orthodox Jewish population gets ever more government subsidies from a friendly government but isn’t required to serve in the military, Israel depends heavily on mobilized reserves to fight wars. The reservists, some highly skilled, have other jobs, which puts a huge strain on the Israeli economy when war is extended and expanded for political reasons, as it has been. Finally, wars tend to be bad for democratic checks and balances, and the massive prewar protests against the revisionist Zionist far right’s attempted coup against the judiciary indicate that Israel’s flawed political system was already fragile. Thus, the title of Steinbock’s book best sums up the current precarious state of affairs in Israel, and his thorough, fact-based indictment of Israeli policy should be examined by American policymakers of both parties to assess whether continued U.S. complicity in financing Israel’s costly and militaristic oppression of Palestinians, in a continuing slow-motion land grab, is moral or even in the U.S. national interest.