BY THE DG TEAM
Dr. Steinbock’s new book “The Fall of Israel” demolishes many myths, including the idea that the attack of Oct. 7, 2023, was a “surprise.” This is the second part of his interview.
THE path to the obliteration of Gaza was paved by a confluence of a set of longstanding forces, the subject of Dr. Dan Steinbock’s new book, “The Fall of Israel: The Degradation of Israel’s Politics, Economy and Military” (https://www.claritypress.com/product/the-fall-of-israel/).
Question (Q): Why did you write the book?
Dr Steinbock (DS): Just 2-3 days before October 7, 2023, I began to write a brief on the impending storm between Israel and the Palestinians, due to the 50-year anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. I’d been projecting that storm since the late 2010s.
A ticking nightmare
Q: On the other hand, the book also has a long history.
DS: It does. Prior to the 1973 Yom Kippur War, I toured all the occupied territories, interviewed both the colonizers and the colonized. I talked with leading members of Israeli polity, society and military. The Israelis saw a bright future and thought they were paving the way to a lasting peace. The Palestinians saw no future and dreamed of a land of their own. It was an untenable status quo; one that compelled me to join the protests against the first Jewish settlements in the West Bank in the mid-‘70s.
Q: Did talks with Yael Dayan, the daughter of Gen. Moshe Dayan and the future parliamentarian, feminist and peace activist, also affect your views?
DS: At the time, she was one influence on the peace movement. But my views evolved amid travels and talks with all parties, including the Palestinians. I also met settlers’ idols like rabbi Meir Kahane who believed in violence promoting the expulsion of Palestinians and Jewish supremacy doctrines.
Q: This was already in the 1970s?
DS: Yes, I saw the settlements as a ticking time bomb that could subvert Israel’s fragile democracy, endanger its Jewish and Arab citizens and Palestinians, morph into apartheid, and cause a cycle of “forever wars” with its Arab neighbors.
Israel’s 9/11 or a 50-year time bomb?
Q: But to many October 7 was a major surprise.
DS: It’s a very convenient view and fully misguided. Right after October 7, 2023, CNBC interviewed Eurasia Group’s Ian Bremmer and myself. Bremmer said the Hamas offensive was “no less than Israel’s 9/11.” By contrast, I said the attack “certainly did not come out of the blue.” It was “a logical result of 50 years of failed military policies.”
Q: It was a time bomb.
DS: Yes, but it’s no longer just ticking. The explosions have begun.
Q: So, was October 7 a “surprise”?
DS: Not exactly. Israeli border soldiers saw signs about an impending attack for months and warned about it repeatedly, particularly in the prior weeks, as I show in the book. The warnings of these largely female “spotters” were ignored by the top echelon. It wasn’t a failure of intelligence. It was a massive political failure. And the question is why.
Q: I don’t recall seeing the spotters’ interviews, though.
DS: Most were killed by Hamas. But the survivors have been interviewed widely in Israel since October 2023. Yet, their stories were picked up by mainstream media far later, if even then. It reflects a stunning professional and moral failure of the international media. Exceptions – the bold coverage by Al Jazeera, particularly its correspondents in Gaza – just confirm the rule.
Messianic far-right
Q: What’s the role of Israel’s Messianic far-right in all of this?
DS: It has evolved hand in hand with the huge settler expansion since the 1970s, but its rise has drastically intensified in the past 25 years. With the inclusion of the far-right in the Netanyahu cabinet, the foxes entered the henhouse. Hence, the efforts to turn the secular democracy into a Jewish autocracy, to demolish Gaza, to annex the West Bank and devastate southern Lebanon – and ultimately, to go after Iran.
Q: You argue that the infiltration of these groups into Israeli institutions has been downplayed for decades by international observers.
DS: Correct. They do not conform with the image Israel would like to project internationally. So, they were explained away. Yet, extremist rabbis have legitimized supremacy doctrines since the 1967 Six Day War, by justifying killings, massacres, and collective punishment with full disregard of international law.
Like Weimar Germany
Q: You see parallels with the 1930s Germany?
DS: Yes, armed with xenophobic dogmas, the Messianic far-right identifies with fascist canons. These changes have taken place with the rise of a dual state, as in Weimar Germany after 1933 when democratic institutions were being penalized by far-right populism, violence, and xenophobia.
Q: Is the threat recognized in Israel?
DS: Yes, but not by the mainstream. Historians like the late Ze’ev Sternhell and Moshe Zimmerman have warned about such trends for years. Yeshayahu Leibowitz saw that future already in 1968, as did novelist Amos Oz, the co-founder of the Israeli peace movement whose book on the settlers I translated in the early 1980s. And so did Primo Levi, the Holocaust author whose works I promoted at the time. Like them, I condemned Israel’s 1982 Lebanese War by Prime Minister Begin, the successor of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the pioneer of revisionist Zionism who flirted with Mussolini’s fascism in the 1930s.
Q: So, there is a long continuity from revisionist Zionism to Netanyahu-led right-wing Likud and the far right?
DS: Yes, Netanyahu’s father, a lifelong revisionist and onetime assistant of Jabotinsky’s secretary, befriended revisionists such as Abba Ahimeir who sought to create a Jewish fascist state in Palestine and was one of the assassins of a Zionist labor leader. Netanyahu himself has always advocated the “iron wall” security policies.
Algocide
Q: In The Fall of Israel, you coin new terms, such as “algocide,” “ultra-apartheid,” “necrotization” and so on. Why?
DS: New concepts are needed for new realities. In particular, the Israeli deployment of the Dahiya doctrine since 2007 has resulted in genocidal atrocities, which moved to a new phase in Gaza.
Q: You call them “algocide.” Why?
DS: Algocide means the systematic use of algorithmic war, or algorithms and artificial intelligence, in genocidal atrocities. That is, algo(rithm) + (geno)cide = algocide. Pioneered in Gaza, it has now spread to southern Lebanon.
Q: How can such devastation be allowed to happen?
DS: The atrocities will continue as long as the United States is willing to remain complicit and the international community fails to intervene. Without US weapons, monies, and training, these massacres would not have occurred.
Undermined peace prospects
Q: Recently, Israel’s foreign minister Israel Katz, one of the architects of such atrocities in Gaza, declared UN chief António Guterres persona non grata banning him from entering Israel for kowtowing to Hamas and Hezbollah.
DS: An absurd allegation, but it’s nothing new. The path to this surreal status quo was paved in the late 1940s when the UN’s first mediator Count Folke Bernadotte was assassinated in Jerusalem by the Stern group of far-right Jewish extremists. One of those who ordered the hit was Yitzhak Shamir, Israel’s future prime minister and head of Likud prior to Netanyahu.
Q: In the final chapter of The Fall of Israel, you argue that the tacit aim has been to undermine any major international effort at a binational state.
DS: On the basis of mounting historical evidence, that seems to be the case. Since then, too, the generic solution models – that is, confederation, federation, Palestinian autonomy – have been undermined, one after another.
After the dust settles
Q: What’s left?
DS: Given the absence of restraint by the Netanyahu cabinet and the Biden administration, and the tacit resignation of the international community, the effective outcome would be a unitary Jewish state. Effectively, that seems to be the goal of Prime Minister Netanyahu and revisionist Zionism. In July, the Israeli parliament, too, voted overwhelmingly against Palestinian statehood.
Here’s the problem: How do you implement a two-state model amid one-state realities?
For The Fall of Israel: The Degradation of Israel’s Politics, Economy and Military (Clarity Press), see https://www.claritypress.com/product/the-fall-of-israel/ Available also via Amazon US and Amazon Canada, Barnes & Noble, !ndigo, Bookshop etc.
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Dr. Dan Steinbock is an internationally recognized strategist of the multipolar world and the founder of Difference Group. He has served at the India, China and America Institute (USA), Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). For more, see https://www.differencegroup.net
