Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent comments that Israel must start making its own weapons and become a self-sufficient “super Sparta” signals that the small colony might be willing to embrace its isolation – all in the name of annihilating Palestine.

History in the small colony of Israel has a way of circling back on itself, presenting old dilemmas in new clothing. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent remarks — warning of Israel’s growing isolation and the  need to evolve into a kind of “super-Sparta” with an autarkic economy — echo back across decades. To hear him speak of a self-reliant arms industry freed from the grip of foreign politics is to hear the ghost of the Lavi fighter jet haunting Israel’s present.

In the 1980s, the Lavi project embodied Israel’s quest for independence in the skies. Washington served as both patron and sceptic, underwriting its development while questioning its logic. Why, American officials asked, should Israel pursue its own advanced fighter when US-made F-16s were cheaper, readily available and already battle-tested? The Lavi’s story became a paradox: an ally’s money nourished the dream, while the same ally’s strategic interests sharpened the knife that would kill it.

That paradox has not vanished. Today, as Europe edges toward arms restrictions and sanctions, Netanyahu’s warnings about the fragility of foreign supply chains feel like a direct descendant of that old unease: Israel’s reliance is risk, and its dependence is a strategic vulnerability. Its recent war with Iran  brought this reality into sharp relief: it exposed the fact that Israel remains a dependent colony whose ability to launch and sustain military campaigns is almost entirely reliant on the uninterrupted flow of arms, munitions, and money from the West.

Israel was compelled to end its military campaign against Iran, perhaps prematurely, after Trump’s admonishments. After all, what would Israel be without dominance in the skies? Airpower is not simply a tool of defence, but the linchpin of Israel’s regional dominance. Without it, the state would be forced to face what it has long evaded – an unfiltered reckoning with its actions in Gaza and the West Bank, and across decades of occupation. To lose command of the air is to lose the veil of impunity.

Then, as now, the fiercest debates were not only with the world but within Israel itself. In the Lavi’s time, supporters hailed it as a once-in-a-generation leap in self-reliance; critics decried it as financial folly that robbed schools, hospitals and infrastructure of resources. Today’s vision of a “super Sparta” sparks a similar divide. Business leaders and unions protest that Israel cannot — and should not — wall itself off, warning of a political, economic and social abyss.

Then, it was the price of a jet. Now, it is the price of isolation. But the question is the same: how much can a small, embattled colony committing daily war crimes afford to gamble on sovereignty purchased through self-sufficiency? When Israel killed the Lavi project in 1987, it didn’t just leave behind scrapped prototypes, but also a moral lesson – self-reliance has a cost and, sometimes, that cost is too steep. Yet the knowledge gained from the attempt assisted Israel’s rise in drones, avionics and advanced defence exports. In fact, the dream of colonial sovereignty did not die, but mutated, finding expression in technologies less visible but no less transformative. Netanyahu’s remarks rest on that legacy. He points to the booming defence industry as proof that Israel can, if pressed, build its own wings and weapons.

Yet his critics see only danger – that an obsession with autarky will leave Israel diplomatically stranded and economically diminished, trading the promise of Athens for the austerity of Sparta.

The Lavi was never launched, but it still hovers like a mirage over Israeli policy. Netanyahu’s “super Sparta” may be nothing more than rhetoric. But it may also be a turning point in the colony’s long argument with itself. The question now hangs over Israel: Is the dream of standing alone, without the constant phone calls from American and European leaders, worth the cost of isolation that comes with it?

The Zionist paradox

For all the rhetoric spun by Netanyahu, a consummate master of evasion and lies, one truth remains unshakeable: Israel is paying a heavy price for its campaign to annihilate the Palestinians. That price is reckoned not only in blood and mounting international condemnation, but in a deeper paradox that defines the state itself. On one side, Israel’s right-wing coalition remains defiant and indifferent, maintaining that “the world has despised us for two thousand years, and that hatred will not go away". But beneath this defiance is a latent anxiety that no slogan can paper over: what is Israel’s worth if its claim to be a refuge and haven is undermined by its own imperial structure? A sanctuary built on dispossession and alliances with great powers, nourished by the perpetuation of Islamophobia, trading upon the exploitation of antisemitism, and secured through the continuous subjugation of another people — itself requiring the continuous recruitment of a financial and industrial base not located in Tel Aviv, but in London, Washington, Paris, and Berlin — is no sanctuary at all.

Israel’s economy thrives on foreign capital. Its arsenal rests on American support, and its diplomatic standing depends on the goodwill of powers it alternately courts and scorns. Even the maintenance of its settler population requires the comforts of a social system designed to keep life attractive: subsidised healthcare, efficient public transport and the illusion of a vibrant, carefree existence on Tel Aviv’s stolen beaches. Even its cultural production often rests on quiet appropriation, with “Israeli restaurants” that rely on recipes lifted from Palestinian kitchens before being repackaged as a national brand and marketed abroad. A society propped up by global flows of capital, technology and cultural legitimacy risks collapse if cut off from them.

But Israelis have long mastered the art of having their cake and eating it too – simultaneously courting an imperial patron and chafing against the conditions it places on them.

That paradox is inscribed in Zionism’s history. In the 1940s, the Haganah and its offshoots turned their guns not only on Arab villages but also on the British Mandate authorities, sabotaging railways, attacking installations and assassinating and killing British officers and UN officials, even as British arms and diplomacy had laid the groundwork for Zionist security. Later, moments of friction erupted with France, once Israel’s closest military supplier, when Paris imposed arms embargoes after 1967. Even the US, the indispensable ally, has not been spared Israel’s rhetorical barbs, with Israeli leaders railing against Washington’s pressures while cashing American cheques.

We can read Netanyahu’s comment in light of this paradox between independence and integration. A neoliberal leader, who did more than anyone else to reframe Israel’s economy for the few, now turns to the language of siege and self-reliance, rebelling against the very structures that sustain him. “Super Sparta” is less a vision than a symptom, the cry of a void that cannot be filled. But it could also be the other way around – Israel’s way of signalling a future of rogue lawlessness that it’s ready to embrace, all so that it can solve the “Palestinian question".

The dark logic of what comes next

Since at least 1948, and especially after 1967, Israel — with the backing of its global patron — has constructed an entire architecture in the region that allows for a relatively effortless existence, maintaining its system of dominance with surprisingly few consequences. Protected by military superiority, shielded by diplomatic cover and financed by foreign capital, the state has been able to insulate its citizens from the costs of occupation, projecting normalcy even as it entrenched control. It served as a lab for ideas, technologies, ideologies and everything novel — not in the good sense of the word — while using Palestinians as its (sometimes) unwilling test subjects.

But that reality of a cost-free occupation relied on the perpetuation of a stable status quo that would have to settle for the slow erosion of Palestinian existence rather than its wholesale and rapid annihilation. After 7 October 2023, the rapid acceleration of the machinery of death put the entire architecture that has sustained Israeli dominance in jeopardy. The question now haunts the small colony: what is it willing to do in the name of annihilating the Palestinians? To rupture its ties with Jordan and press Egypt into deeper submission? To unmake Qatar — by cutting it back down to its actual size — and force the Arab states that once cheered it on to swallow the reality of their naked subordination?

The events of recent weeks signal that Israel might. The recent strike on Qatar is the most salient development and can be read as Israel’s readiness to upend the very regional order that has long shielded it, testing the limits of its patrons’ indulgence and its neighbours’ tolerance. This vulgar conduct, betraying equal parts defiance and desperation, is a reckoning with the fact that the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians demands the total remaking of the regional balance. And in the quiet corners of the Arab world, some may already be thinking what they will not yet say aloud: we were so stupid to wish for Israel to subdue the Axis of Resistance – it turns out we’re next.

Fantasies of civilisation

Netanyahu’s invocation of “super Sparta” is not only about economics or weaponry. It calls up the very mythology of the West, which Israel has long claimed as its inheritance.

Athens, Jerusalem and Rome: three cities that form the symbolic pillars of Western civilisation. Athens, the restless city of democracy and philosophy, taught the West to dream in marble and argue in public. Jerusalem, the city of prophets and law, gave it its moral voice and sense of history as redemption or ruin. Rome, master of order and empire, built the institutions of power that still shape the modern state.

But always in their shadow, Sparta lingered – severe, disciplined, and austere, a reminder that survival may demand sacrifice and the spear.

Israel has long tried to drape itself in Athens’ robes, marketing itself as a Mediterranean cosmopolis. It has invoked Jerusalem’s prophetic gravitas, casting its wars as moral struggles and its survival as biblical destiny. And it has borrowed Rome’s mantle, building an empire of settlements, highways, and walls, extending its order over another people.

In a  recent lecture, Palestinian scholar Khaled Odetallah spoke with his characteristic sharpness about the lingering residue of tension between Athens and Sparta, characterising it as a contradiction that refuses to disappear. He outlined both the impossibility and the violence of this contradiction, asking: can a layered army — one that filters some into air-conditioned offices where algorithms, AI, and surveillance are refined — ever be reconciled with the theatre of blood and the obscene genocide carried out by Israeli knights who return home either burdened with fatigue or haunted by a thirst for more blood? Can Israel claim to be Sparta when its material structure speaks of something else?

Perhaps I do not have an answer. But Palestine has long been the victim of these deadly fantasies – the fantasies of outcasts playing knight, of constructing Athens, Rome, or Sparta over its body; of Mike Huckabee’s end times and Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Third Temple; and of all the ideologues who imagine that civilisational clashes must be staged among Palestine’s olive trees. In the end, it is the saturation of these metaphors and myths, circulating without pause, that makes one sick.

But what we can be sure of is that, whatever Israel is, it is none of the above.

Republished from Mondoweiss, 18 September 2025

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.