Even the Council on Foreign Relations is publishing dire warnings over Israel’s current trajectory.
“The country is on an increasingly illiberal, violent and destructive path,” Ilan Z. Baron and Ilai Z. Saltzman, both professors at US universities, state in a
recent article for the council’s highly influential
Foreign Affairs publication.
Baron and Saltzman acknowledge that back in 1968, following Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights and Sinai Peninsula, scientist and philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz warned that “the national pride and euphoria” that followed that military conquest would only “bring [Israel] from proud, rising nationalism to extreme, messianic ultranationalism.”
This extreme ideology would ultimately result in “brutality” and the undoing of the Zionist project in Palestine, Leibowitz anticipated.
“An illiberal Israel would also become a pariah state,” Baron and Saltzman write. Even if the US continues to provide economic support, other key governments “would cease to coordinate with Israel on security matters, maintain trade agreements with Israel, and buy Israeli-made weapons.”
That would leave Israel entirely dependent on Washington “at a time when more and more Americans are questioning their country’s unconditional support for the Jewish state,” the professors add.
(The Israeli air force is already dependent on US aid, a senior officer recently
told Haaretz, saying that without American weapons, the military could only sustain the war in Gaza for a few more months.)
Meanwhile, according to Baron and Saltzman, “the state would increasingly lose its monopoly over the legitimate use of force, and divisions could inflame to the point of civil war.”