Stephen M Walt, Professor of International Relations at Harvard University, recently published an article in the leading US journal, Foreign Policy, entitled: “The Dangerous Decline in Israeli Strategy”. He argues that Israel, the US and their supporters are wedded to long-honed, conspicuously bad policies, which “is a prescription for unending trouble, if not disaster”.
Many in the US pay attention to what Walt says. After victory in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, he argues, Israel hubristically decided to create “Greater Israel” by steadily colonising “the West Bank and Gaza”. This exceptionally harmful decision resulted in an apartheid governance system:
“[Israel] could remain a Jewish State only by suppressing the political rights of Palestinians and creating an apartheid system, in an era when such a political order was anathema to growing numbers of people around the world. Israel could deal with this problem through additional ethnic cleansing and/or genocide, but both are crimes against humanity that no true friend of Israel could endorse.”
While acknowledging “the cruel realities of Israel’s founding”, Walt argues that “early Zionists and Israel’s first generation of leaders were astute strategists”. However, that 1967 victory — and continuous, adamant American backing — triggered an extended nose-dive in strategic thinking. This profound lapse has, in turn, significantly paved the way towards the current horrific Gaza genocide. Walt, thus, stresses: (i) how Israel’s new-state creation project lost its strategic way; and (ii) the consequences which have arguably followed.
Meanwhile, Professor Jeremy Salt, a former journalist and Middle East history scholar, offered another recent, more morally-grounded alternative view in a grimly lucid article entitled, “Evil Fruit of Seeds Sown Long Ago – What Makes Gaza Genocide Different”. Here is how Salt’s essay concludes:
“Two American surgeons described the situation when they arrived at the European Hospital as ‘what we imagined the first weeks of what a zombie apocalypse would look and smell like’. (Mark Perlmutter and Feroze Sidhwa, ‘We Volunteered at a Gaza Hospital. What We Saw Was Unspeakable,’ Politico Magazine, July 19, 2024).
“Does the Gaza genocide only seem worse than others because it is the first in history that genocide can be seen ‘happening’ in real-time or in some respects is this one really worse? In response, while women and children are always killed in war, if the Gaza genocide is stamped with one particular characteristic it is surely the mass killing of children, focused, relentless, pitiless, and remorseless.
“As long as it lives, Israel will never get away from this. The dead children of Gaza will follow it, and haunt it until the end of time. The ‘genocide of children,’ of the totally innocent, will never be forgotten as long as Israel lives.
“Older ‘liberal’ Israelis are shocked. They say this is not the Israel they grew up in, but it always was. They just didn’t see it, didn’t want to see it or were too deeply indoctrinated to see it.
“The evidence is all there in the hundreds of villages destroyed and depopulated and the people massacred all the way up to 1967, including children as sweet and innocent as those obliterated in Gaza. The Gaza subset of a long-running genocide is the evil fruit of seeds sown long ago.”
Pankaj Mishra, another widely-read commentator, published a related, steeply critical overview of the creation and development of the state of Israel, in March this year. “The Shoah After Gaza” applied an acute moral-comparative perspective.
As it happens, Michael Young, based at the Carnegie Middle East Centre in Beirut, drawing significantly on Mishra, has lately argued, in another essay that: “Israel’s Exceptionalism is Untenable”, concluding that:
“Mishra is right that as this outrage continues, the tragic value of the Shoah, its universal reference, will dissipate. The past suffering of the Jews will be overwhelmed by memories of Israel’s immorality today, much as Israel’s carnage in Gaza has made many forget 7 October. But beyond that, Western elites should be aware of how this affects their own power and influence. If they are serious about defending liberal values in a changing world, Israel cannot be exempted.”
All of these essays repay careful reading at a time when Israel’s decay poses an increasing danger to world peace, emasculates Western claims of superior political legitimacy and is terrible for Israel.
Richard Cullen is an Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Hong Kong. He was previously a Professor in the Department of Business Law and Taxation at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.
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