Israeli Opinion| The reason we collapse from within

Carolina Lindsman

“This Israel, which has nuclear weapons and air force fighters, is the strongest in the region. By God, it is weaker than a spider’s web.” This is what Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah said in his famous “Spider’s Web Speech” speech in the year 2000. 

In his speech, Nasrallah predicted the collapse of Israel from within, as a result of its societal disintegration. According to Nasrallah, we are a society of conflicting and warring immigrants, lacking the unity necessary to prevail in regional confrontations. 

Israelis are spoiled, sensitive to loss of life, and unwilling to fight and sacrifice their lives to protect their national interests.

It is difficult to put our finger on the day Israel's internal collapse began. I think the answer to such a question depends on one's political perspective. 

Some will say that the assassination of Rabin and his political approach, the approach of peace, represents this breaking point, while others will say that the signing of the Oslo Accords represents this point. In contrast, others will seek to point to the Six-Day War and the occupation of the territories as a Pyrrhic victory (since “occupation creates corruption,” so Israel is collapsing). There are also those who believe that the year 1948 (and the crimes of the Nakba) is the mother of all sins (the Zionist project is a colonial plundering project, etc.). Whatever the case, the collapse of Israel is closely linked to the Palestinian issue.

Whatever ground we stand on, it is difficult to dispute the fact that Israel, especially since 2018, has been in a state of accelerating internal collapse: the nation-state law, five election cycles in less than four years, the sectarian genie being released from its bottle, the crystallization of the supporting movement. 

Netanyahu, the Balfour Street protests [protests in front of the Prime Minister's Residence], the normalization of the Kahanist movement, the strengthening of settler power and the spread of religious Zionism, judicial reforms (or, let's say, a coup against the regime), and the civil struggle against it, the “Brothers in Arms” protest movement [an organization he founded Israeli reserve officers in the context of protests against the “judicial reforms” initiated by the Netanyahu government], threats to reject military orders, the presence of a leadership isolated from its people and leading them towards disaster, and others.

In light of Nasrallah's terrifying prophecy, mentioned above, and in light of our ongoing internal collapse for years, there is something that raises our morale, and it lies in the fighting spirit and sacrifice shown by our fighters and officers in Gaza. Here we see Israelis ready to fight and not spoiled. It is also easy to identify with the general need to highlight unity in our ranks, and to recognize the effort made to raise the fighting spirit. All of this is achieved not only as a response to Nasrallah's speech, but rather as a healthy instinct. 

It has become clear to everyone that the dismantling of society has weakened us, and that our strength lies in our unity.

From this point, anger emerges against everyone who dares to pose obstacles to our unity, or who doubts the inevitability of our victory. The problem here is that, in order to achieve victory, we must talk about the day after the war, and we must calculate our calculations for that day. We urgently need a leader who believes he is able to articulate a vision for that day, and we urgently need a government capable of agreeing on that day. While we do not, in fact, have any of these needs. The only use of the word “together” appears conditionally in the slogan “Together We Win” [the slogan raised by the Israeli government in this war], but we are not originally together to agree on the cause for which we will fight, or to set a political goal for the army, because contradictions eat away at us. To the bone.

This, in fact, is the source of our internal collapse. It is our weakness that apparently led to the outbreak of this war. This weakness is represented by the inability of Israeli society to formulate a common vision of the Palestinian issue. Well, we are indeed "fighting together," but how do we win, if we don't know what victory looks like?