The Zionist entity was never prepared for a war of attrition

On August 22, Israeli Brigadier General Yitzhak Brik wrote an article for Haaretz in which he predicted the collapse of the Zionist regime within a year if the war continued. As it now becomes clear that the occupying entity is in an existential crisis, which some Israeli officials recognize, it is important to look at the underlying issues that have made this situation inevitable.

The Zionist Entity had sold the world on the idea that it was the most powerful military regime in West Asia, it boasted undeniable supremacy in its weapons capabilities and its roots appeared to be unshakable. However, as the secretary-general of Lebanese Hezbollah, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, said in 2006: the Zionist entity is like a spider's web.

When we look at almost every war that the Zionist Entity has been involved in, they either briefly took place inside the borders of occupied Palestine or occurred in neighboring countries, with the exception of 1948. Even the brutal assaults on Gaza in 2008/9, 2012, and 2014 were all reduced to a relatively limited exchange of fire where neither side was forced to commit all it had to the battle.

The reality is that the Israelis had prepared themselves with the weapons capabilities to pulverize entire nations and the technology to deal with limited projectile threats, while boasting a military that, when combined with reservist soldiers, could amount to a force of over 500,000 people. On paper, armed with a nuclear arsenal, the Zionist regime was capable of somewhat deterring its opposition and even attracted collaborators from across the Arab and Muslim World who were drawn to its material powers and influence.

Inevitable Defeat

The Zionist regime has to be understood in its proper context. Emerging as a settler-colonialist movement, led by irreligious Jews from Europe who sought to replicate the experience of other persecuted or economically disadvantaged Europeans, Zionism emerged as the answer to the “Jewish Question”. 

Without going into too much detail, the Europeans had historically attacked, killed, ethnically cleansed, and wiped out entire swathes of populations that did not agree with or prescribe to their dominant religious beliefs or identifying cultural/ethnic markers. One of the escape methods for some of those persecuted peoples, or those that were economically disadvantaged, was to travel to the colonies of the dominant nations. If we take the British example, those who would not have fared quite as well in their mother country had the opportunity to travel to India or what was then Burma for instance, earning themselves small fortunes to enjoy.

In such an environment, where colonization was not a dirty word, but instead the norm, the idea of traveling to an occupied land in order to set up a new life and even form a State was not frowned upon at all. In fact, if we take a look into the early history of Zionism, it was French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte who recommended there be a Jewish State in Palestine to begin with. Napoleon was also the man credited with birthing Nationalism.

So, for the early Zionists, the idea of traveling to a foreign land to set up a State for their European minority group was one of many obvious options that presented itself. At the time of Theodore Herzl and other foundational figures within the Zionist movement, these were the days of pseudo-race-science and orientalist philology, when a pernicious Darwinian ethno-supremacist doctrine was so prevalent that it was just accepted as “fact” that non-Europeans were inferior beings. 

That being said, the native inhabitants of Palestine were not exempt from this racism, and so, killing, occupying, expelling, and forcing newly invented forms of governance upon them was not seen as a real issue. At this time, there was also a small segment of Europe’s Jews who had managed to amass great economic wealth and were beneficiaries of the Capitalist system. The Rothschild family and others, decided therefore that Herzl’s vision for the Jewish people, to settle a foreign nation and create a new nationality was the best way forward. 

Of course, there were European Jews who did not support this idea. Yet evidently, these voices did not end up winning the debate on how to answer the Jewish Question.

Therefore, the Zionist settler project pushed full steam ahead with its intended goal of seizing Palestine. In doing so, it sought to create “the new Jew” culturally, physically, and linguistically in a State that would be exclusively for them. In the beginning, the leaders of this movement were almost entirely secular and most of the earlier Zionist political parties were quasi-socialist in their outlook. 

But the Zionists ran into a huge problem, and the world suddenly changed. Although the events of World War II, with the mass extermination of Jews and placing them into forced labor camps had convinced the wider European Jewish population that Zionism was justified, something else also came out of the Second World War. As the power of what we call the Western Empire shifted from France and Britain, into the hands of the United States, the colonial era began to fall and the United Nations was setting forth its foundational legal documents, establishing its organs of international regulation, and new Nation States were rapidly being created.

While the creation of “Israel” in 1948, through the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, happened at a moment when the truth could be hidden and the crime against humanity could be ignored, this was only the beginning for the Zionist Entity. The problem they faced from that point onwards was that the Palestinian people never forgot who they were, never gave up, and never stopped resisting and were surrounded by nations who were tied to their cause for self-determination on an ideological level. 

This idea of the Palestinian cause ran so deep in the hearts of the Arabs and Muslims, not only because many of them had also suffered at the hands of the Zionists and/or their Western backers, but managed to transcend dogmatism based upon political ideologies. The Palestinian cause never had a specific country, but it lived on through the collapse of Egypt’s Socialist Arab Nationalism, it was still alive after the defeat of the Marxist and nationalist groups, never relenting even through the collapse of the Soviet Union. No matter how bad the military defeats were, whether in 1967 or 1982, the Palestinian Resistance would continue taking different forms.

The Israelis believed that the Oslo Accords [1993-5]  would be able to shut the Palestinians up, that if they were given a Palestinian National Authority in the 1967 occupied territories, they would simply continue to steal more land quietly and condense the Palestinian people into smaller and smaller enclaves. 

While the Israeli public may have been focused on the Palestinian issue for some time, especially during the Second Intifada [2000-2005] when the armed Resistance would carry out frequent attacks, following this, the issue would fade into irrelevance to a certain extent. If you were to follow the election cycles, over the last decade, in the Zionist entity and look at their internal political debates, it was not focused on whether Palestine would become a State and if such an issue reared its head it was not considered the main issue for the majority of Israelis. 

What was happening during the post-Oslo period, however, was actually a process of rot and decay domestically for the Zionists. First, there was the rise of Benjamin Netanyahu’s brand of the Likud Party, the party which was seen as the ideological inheritor of the Revisionist Zionist movement that had drawn inspiration from Italian Fascism. The aggressive ideology that Netanyahu promoted began to take over the minds of the Israeli public, leading to the collapse of the once-powerful Labor Party in the polls.

In 2005, with the withdrawal of Israeli illegal settlers from their settlements in Gaza, a new monster also began to form and was aided along the way by Netanyahu. As Israeli society shifted further and further to the extreme Right, so came the rise of Religious Zionism spearheaded by a violent and aggressive settler movement in the West Bank. 

This rise in religiosity, combined with a far-right political doctrine, eventually culminated in the current coalition government that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu leads today. This ended up leading to the clash between the religious far-right and the more secular-leaning far-right, culminating in the mass street protests that were taking place in “Tel Aviv” and other occupied cities until October 2023. The secular brand of far-Right Zionism, which many calling themselves liberals prescribe to, began clashing with the supporters of Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition who were accused of trying to overthrow the Israeli judiciary and Judaize the country. 

Why This All Matters

From the beginning of the Zionist Entity, the problem was that the Zionists failed to exterminate and ethnically cleanse all the Palestinians and they failed to kill the cause. As Israeli Historian Benny Morris admitted: the idea of transfer [ethnic cleansing] is "inevitable and inbuilt into Zionism". In the end, the only answer the Zionist Entity ever had for what was to be done with the Palestinian people was a combination of extermination, ethnic cleansing, and subjugation. 

While the Israelis had not had to fight a war against any country since 1973, only wars against Resistance movements, it developed what it calls its “deterrence capacity” to deal massive concentrated blows against the likes of Hezbollah and Hamas when it saw fit to do so. If you look into the Israeli war games or military exercises, where they prepare for conflicts with Hamas or Hezbollah, or in some cases a multi-front war, it is always assumed that the war will end within weeks, or maximum months. 

When October 7 happened, based upon the model set forward by the regime, its response was in many ways predictable. They used unimaginable firepower to pulverize the cities and refugee camps, and mass murdered civilians, before entering with their ground troops in heavily armored vehicles, cowering away from engaging in street battles and depending upon their technology. They believed that this medieval maximum force strategy would work and here they are 11 months later with not a single one of their objectives achieved.

They never anticipated that a war with the Resistance in Gaza would last this long, just as they couldn’t have anticipated Yemen’s blockade in the Red Sea or Hezbollah continually firing upon their position in the north of occupied Palestine on a daily basis.

With no way of bringing about a plausible victory, all of the Zionist Entity’s problems began coming to the surface. 

The Israelis have come to realize that there will be no “Israel” without the elimination of the Palestinian people from the equation, whether you look at it from a demographic perspective in the long term or a perspective of unrelenting resistance. 

Then there’s the Israeli society, which is deeply divided in what they believe their ethno-supremacist regime should even look like and what legal system they seek for it.

Another problem is that their economy, society and military were not prepared for a long war of attrition against a variety of fronts: Hundreds of thousands of settlers are internally displaced, their industry is dead in the north, the Port of Eilat is bankrupt, their tourism industry is gutted, around a million settlers are said to have left the country, 46,000+ businesses have gone bust, investors are withdrawing, multi-billion dollar deals are being abandoned, inflation is taking hold, their currency is devaluing and the list goes on.

But what of their 500,000 strong mighty militaries? The cost of calling up the reserves for so long is one issue, but the bigger problem is their willingness to serve and how exhausted they are, in addition to inefficient training. To quote the Haaretz article written by Yitzhak Brik:

“Israel is sinking deeper into the Gazan mud, losing more and more soldiers as they get killed or wounded, without any chance of achieving the war's main goal: bringing down Hamas. The country really is galloping towards the edge of an abyss. If the war of attrition against Hamas and Hezbollah continues, Israel will collapse within no more than a year.”

The truth is that the most authentic iteration of the Zionist ideology is now on display for the entire world, a racist settler-colonial entity that is only in disagreement about what their exterminationist ethno-regime will look like and in what way they will get rid of the Indigenous population. While such a murderous criminal entity may have gotten away with its ambitions 100+ years ago, it started too late and failed to defeat the Palestinians. Now, with modern weapons the Israelis are trying to finish their Zionist project, but in a world that doesn’t accept this and in an era when smartphones provide us with the ability to follow their genocidal actions with minute-to-minute updates.

They failed to look at the reality staring them in the face and instead consumed themselves in their own sense of security, believing that their greed could not know bounds. The Resistance shocked them and now the entire world can see the reality if they so seek to. This war of attrition was inevitable and they have already lost. 

The Israeli public lived in a number of delusions, kinds of bubble worlds that were shaped by their unlimited capacity for self-deception, where they could just continue living their lives as usual while destroying an entire national group. In this sense, in a way, the likes of Israeli Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who we all call an extremist, are actually more sober than the rest of Israeli society when it comes to the situation in which they live. These kinds of settlers admit to the world that the only way to continue maintaining their privilege in an Apartheid regime is to continually kill and expel innocent people because the Zionist Entity’s war was never with Hamas or Hezbollah, it is with the Palestinians and anyone else who dares question their “right” to maintain supremacy at the expense of the indigenous population of the lands they occupy. 

Believing that they could just continue tormenting Palestinians indefinitely and that nothing would be done and that they could perpetually cause suffering in the nations surrounding them, while only planning for limited confrontations that won’t cost them greatly demonstrates the sheer maniacal arrogance of the settler entity. This also explains why they are behaving in a much more extreme manner now as a society because they are beginning to realize that the pre-October 7 world will never return and the only way to maintain their racist regime is through a never-ending conflict.

Al Mayadeen