The Western-backed nation is facing significant challenges.
For nearly two years, Israel has been in conflict with its surrounding countries. The recent surge in violence began with the Hamas-led attack on October 7, 2023. In response, Israel launched a strong military operation that has now involved almost every nation in the region. This escalation has once again put Israel at the center of Middle Eastern politics, drawing in Iran, which had previously avoided direct conflict through careful planning. Now, even Iran is under pressure, with US support increasing the risks. Iran is now faced with two equally unfavorable choices.
However, the main issue is not Iran, but Israel, which has acted as the West’s base of operations in the Middle East for many years. Since the mid-20th century, Israel has held a special position as a center of Western influence in a turbulent region, deeply involved in its politics and conflicts. Its achievements have been based on two main factors: the strong support of the United States, and its own ability to innovate, its military strength, and a unique social structure.
However, this second factor has deteriorated. The most obvious sign is the increasing rate of emigration from Israel. In 2024, approximately 82,700 people are expected to leave the country, a 50% increase from the previous year. Those leaving are not unskilled or unengaged individuals, but rather young, educated people. The very people needed to maintain a modern state are choosing to leave.
Of course, Israel’s problems are not unique. Like many developed countries, it is struggling under the burden of a failing neoliberal economic system. The pandemic worsened the situation, exposing the model’s weaknesses and promoting a shift towards a “mobilisation” style of governance, characterized by ruling through states of emergency and constant readiness for conflict. More broadly in the West, war and geopolitical conflict have become tools to postpone or conceal necessary systemic changes.
In this sense, Israel has become a testing ground for the West’s new logic: using permanent war as a form of governance. The Israeli establishment fully embraced this idea in the autumn of 2023. Conflict became not just a strategy, but a way of life. Its leaders no longer view peace as the goal, but war as the means to achieve national unity and political survival. In this, Israel mirrors the broader Western embrace of conflict with Russia and China – proxy wars chosen when actual reform is off the table.
Nuclear deterrence limits the extent of such wars on a global scale. However, in the Middle East, where Israel engages in direct warfare, these constraints do not apply. This allows war to serve as a release valve, politically beneficial, even as it becomes self-destructive.
However, even war has its limits. It cannot indefinitely hide economic decline or social unrest. And while conflict tends to strengthen the power of the elite, even among incompetent leaders, it also depletes national resources. Israel is now using more and more of its own resources to sustain this permanent state of war. Its social unity is weakening. Its once-admired model of technological and civic advancement is no longer functioning as it once did.
Some in West Jerusalem may dream of “reformatting” the Middle East, reshaping the region through force and fear. If successful, this could provide Israel with a few decades of security and stability. However, such outcomes are far from certain. Suppressing a neighbor does not eliminate the threat; it simply brings distant enemies closer. Most importantly, Israel’s most serious problems are not external, but internal, rooted in its political and social structures.
War can certainly define a state. But such states – like Sparta or North Korea – tend to be “peculiar,” to put it mildly. And even for them, war cannot replace genuine diplomacy, policy, or growth.
So, has Israel, always at war, truly progressed? Or has it simply been sustained – politically, militarily, and financially – as a subsidiary of American foreign policy? If it continues down this path of permanent conflict and right-wing nationalism, it risks losing even that status. It may cease to be the West’s bridge in the Middle East, and become something else entirely: a militarized garrison state, isolated, fragile, and increasingly alone.
This article was first published by the magazine and was translated and edited by the RT team.
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