Dying regimes do funny things.
Dying superpowers plan for a future that never comes. I have a 1992 Soviet ruble note, redesigned the year before. Considering that the USSR closed shop in 1991, they probably should have focused on something more pressing than their next Five Year Plan.
Dying dictatorships bluff and bluster. Despite the obvious facts, Gaddafi claimed to control Libyan cities his forces had fled. “Victory will be ours soon,” Saddam assured Iraqis as U.S. forces closed in on Baghdad. “We are firm as a monkey’s tail,” ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier bragged as he boarded a plane fleeing Haiti.
Dying genocidal regimes ramp up the killing. Driven by a combination of ideological fanaticism and a desperate attempt to erase evidence of industrialized mass murder, Nazi Germany intensified the pace of killings at death camps in the final months of World War II, particularly in 1944 and early 1945, as the government faced impending defeat. With the Allies advancing, the Nazis intensified the “Final Solution,” determined to exterminate as many Jews and other victims as possible before losing control of the camps. The Khmer Rouge, facing imminent invasion and overthrow by Vietnam, accelerated the Cambodian genocide at the end. The 1994 Rwandan genocide, targeting Tutsis and moderate Hutus, was executed with extreme speed and intensity from the outset and remained relentless until the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) began liberating areas. However, in its final weeks before their defeat, the perpetrators intensified localized massacres to maximize deaths.
Now Israel is dying. As horrific as the genocide in Gaza has been, there’s a danger that a desperate Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right allies will kill Palestinians faster—and that they might even carry out Israel’s long-threatened “Samson option,” using its illicit nuclear arsenal as massive retaliation against its Arab neighbors if the Jewish state faces existential destruction.
Like Idi Amin, who assured his remaining staff that he was “still going strong” shortly before left Uganda for exile, Israel is ranting that it’s winning on all fronts. Ignoring the fact that he was speaking to a mostly-empty UN meeting hall, Bibi bombastically declared victory against his Middle East neighbors. His government, still backed by Donald Trump and few others of note—even in the U.S., most Americans say Israel is dead to them—is flogging a take-it-or-leave-it demand for Hamas to unconditionally surrender, lay down its weapons, and agree that Palestine will never be free or sovereign. Perhaps, the Israelis hope, no one will notice that they have already been destroyed.
The visuals make it appear as though has won Israel, and won big. Gaza has been flattened; tens of thousands of Gazans have been murdered. 60% of the West Bank has been stolen by 700,000 violent Jewish colonists; 850 IDF checkpoints have reduced the other 40% to an open-air concentration camp. But the visuals aren’t determinative.
What has decided this final iteration of the Israel-Palestinian conflict is international public opinion, a commodity upon which Israel is uniquely dependent. Israel was created by the United Nations. It is the biggest recipient of military funding from the U.S., including advanced technology and defense systems which constitute a significant portion of Israel’s defense budget. The U.S. routinely vetoes attempts to hold Israel accountable in the Security Council. The U.S. is Israel’s biggest trading partner. Israel relies on access to U.S. markets for exports like technology and pharmaceuticals.
Israel, more reliant on international goodwill than another nation, has become a pariah state. U.N. agencies call the Gaza war a genocide. Amnesty International and the U.N. classify Israel as an apartheid state. Arrest warrants have been issued for and sanctions issued against Israeli leaders. Major cultural and sports institutions are boycotting Israel. The E.U. labels goods and services produced by West Bank settlers so consumers can avoid them, and is moving toward cutting off trade. Israeli tourists are harassed when they travel abroad.
Had Israeli political leaders been open to good-faith negotiations with the Palestinians, had they halted their genocide a year ago, they might have been able to save themselves. They doubled down with cruelty and arrogance. So everyone hates them. Sooner rather than later, Israel will find itself as isolated as apartheid-era South Africa, or more so.
No business will want to work for or with Israeli companies. No nation will want to maintain diplomatic ties. No one will want to visit. Cut off from international markets, Israel will first collapse economically, then politically. Let’s hope the Israelis eschew the Samson option and go out as peacefully as the USSR, close up shop, and join the 21st century as a democratic country with equal rights for all.
Despite the carnage—because of the carnage—there is now a better-than-even chance that we will see a Palestinian state within the next decade. The world demands it. Here in America, the imminent landslide victory of Zohran Mamdani, a fierce critic of Israel, as mayor of New York—with the second-largest population of Jews outside Israel—shows that it’s become politically safer to oppose than to support Israel. Soon, possibly in 2028, U.S. voters will elect a president who insists upon it too. Israel as a vestigial post-colonial Jewish ethnostate is on the way out.
Hamas won.
Hamas knows it won.
Everyone knows, including the Israelis. “Israel is in a sort of isolation,” Netanyahu acknowledged at a conference of the Israeli Finance Ministry in Jerusalem. “We will increasingly need to adapt to an economy with autarkic characteristics.” Autarky, an economic policy of complete self-sufficiency, was attempted primarily by other politically-extreme regimes the world wanted nothing to do with: Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, North Korea, Albania under Enver Hoxha, and Kampuchea under Pol Pot. Autarky has always failed. Self-sufficiency does especially poorly for countries like Israel, which has few natural resources. No wonder the Tel Aviv stock exchange crashed after Bibi’s speech.
The Israel Business Forum, which comprises the CEOs of 200 top Israeli companies, published a statement in response: “The policy of the government headed by Benjamin Netanyahu is leading the State of Israel to a dangerous and unprecedented economic and diplomatic nadir. We are not Sparta…Prime minister, we are marching with certainty to a diplomatic, economic, and social abyss that will endanger our existence in the Land of Israel.”
I collect political propaganda posters. One of the last missives that the retreating Nazis posted on the walls of French villages in 1944 was a warning: We’re leaving for now, the Nazi authorities advised, but we’ll be back. And when we return, we will execute Frenchmen who disobeyed German law in our absence. Watching Netanyahu and Trump bloviate about their ersatz “peace deal” the other day, I remembered: dying regimes do funny things.
(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Never Mind the Democrats. Here’s What’s Left.” Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com. He is co-host of the podcast “DeProgram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou.”)
