Is the Israeli model imposed on Palestine failing?

Israel’s global standing has taken a serious beating in the past 12 months, as the extensive savagery unleashed by the Zionist state – resulting in the killings of over 43,000 Palestinians and 2787 Lebanese people, alongside tens of thousands of injuries – has shocked the world.

Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza and Lebanon has also exposed inherent anti-Muslim biases in Western institutions, particularly in the Biden administration and media, and has shifted global opinion away from the influence of both Tel Aviv and Washington.

Many globally acclaimed intellectuals have started to notice the cracks in the Israeli state while Palestinians show no signs of giving up on their dream of liberating their land from the Israeli occupation.

“Israel has suffered a near total loss of legitimacy as a normal state, and is increasingly viewed as a pariah state to an extent exceeding in condemnation even racist South Africa until its government surprised the world by abandoning apartheid in the mid-1990s, having endured debilitating sanctions,” Richard Falk, a leading international relations expert, tells TRT World.

Other experts believe that the Zionist state is imploding because of its unbridled appetite for expansion as well as colonial mindset.

“I would argue that today Israel is in a worse state than it was ever before. In other words, the project of establishing a stable home for the Jewish population has failed. The model doesn't work,” Joost Hiltermann, the Middle East director of the International Crisis Group, tells TRT World.

Since Israel was arguably formed as a homeland for Jewish people after the Second World War and the Nazi Holocaust in 1948, Hiltermann says the state couldn’t find acceptance in the Middle East because of the mass violence and displacement it caused in order to establish itself.

In light of human catastrophe caused by Israel in Gaza, along with ongoing violence from illegal Jewish settlers and Israeli occupation forces in the West Bank, Hiltermann says Israel is left with two choices.

“Either double down and go down what I think is a very destructive way or to come up with a new model. The only person who ever sort of tried [advocating a new model], that was [former Israeli Prime Minister] Yitzhak Rabin, and he, of course, was assassinated for his labours,” Hilterman adds.

For Hiltermann, Israel’s dependence on Western support and its rejection of a real peace agreement with Palestinians are two critical reasons why the Israel model has failed.

Israeli leaders have long thought that the state with big Western support “could impose its presence in the region and did not need to make any serious compromises regarding the Palestinians in order to blend into the Middle East,” he says.

Settler colonialism

Like the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, South Africa and others you can name across Latin America, Israel is also a settler colonial project, according to many historians.

While it took a couple of centuries for Anglo-Saxon former colonies like the US and Australia to reduce indigenous populations to a small, insignificant minority using brute force and then settle White populations on their lands, Israel has employed various methods of violence and cruelty to force Palestinians out of their lands since 1948. Because of the Palestinian resistance movement, however, the Zionist state has been unable to completely take over what was known as historic Palestine.

“The fact that states came to existence because of settler colonialism is not unusual. Usually what happens is indigenous populations annihilated or rendered politically insignificant because of demographics,” said Ian Lustick, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, during a recent interview, referring to colonial settler projects involving the US and other states.

“In this case, which is a very unusual case, indigenous populations, Palestinians, are not annihilated,” added Lustick, the writer of the book, Paradigm Lost: From Two-State Solution to One-State Reality, referring to Israeli settler colonial project. There are more Palestinians and Arabs between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River than Jews, according to the professor.

Is the Israeli model breaking apart?

While Israel has reached peace and normalisations deals with other Arab states, it has always chosen to suppress the Palestinian question, Hiltermann says, adding that both Camp David and Oslo Accords were not good for Palestinians.

Despite all kinds of suppressive Israeli measures, there is still a demographic equation about roughly 7 million to 7 million, says Hiltermann. As a result, “there is no military solution to this conflict,” which requires Israel to pursue a diplomatic course that recognises the rights of the Palestinians, he says.

But “the problem is that while the Palestinian side is willing to accept a two state solution, the Israeli side at this time not before but at this time is explicitly rejecting it,” he says. “What's the way forward for Israel? That's why it's a failed model.”

Hiltermann is not alone in his analysis that alarm bells are ringing for the Israeli model.

“More than 120 years since its inception, could the Zionist project in Palestine – the idea of imposing a Jewish state on an Arab, Muslim and Middle Eastern country – be facing the prospect of collapse?” asked Ilan Pappe, a leading Israeli historian and political scientist, in a June article.

Pappe cites six indicators to respond to his question.

First of all, he sees “the fracturing” of Israeli society, where secular and religious Jews are increasingly “unable to find common ground” as more than half a million Israelis have left the country since October 7. Second, he observes the signs of a declining economy, which slumped nearly 20 percent last year, increasingly dependent on US financial aid.

As a third factor, Pappe cites Israel’s growing global isolation in the face of its brutal Gaza war conduct, which many say carry “a genocidal intent” diminishing Tel Aviv into pariah state status. “The sea-change among young Jews around the world“ against the ruling Netanyahu government is also a bad sign for Israel’s future, says Pappe, referring to the fourth indicator.

Finally, citing the Israeli army’s critical dependence on the US and Western allies in its wars in Gaza as well as other areas and “the renewal of energy among the younger generation of Palestinians” for the resistance as the fifth and sixth indicators, Pappe concludes that the Zionist project is on the verge of collapse.

“Whether people welcome the idea or dread it, the collapse of Israel has become foreseeable,” wrote the Israeli historian adding that “the century-long attempt, led by Britain and then the US, to impose a Jewish state on an Arab country is slowly coming to an end.”

Where is Israel moving?

Israeli bombing campaign in Lebanon, its attacks on the Houthis in Yemen and the tit-for-tat violence with Iran show that Tel Aviv “has been expanding its combat objectives initially justified as retaliation against Hamas for the October 7 attack by adopting a proclaimed goal of exterminating Hamas,” says Falk.

Under the influence of this expansionist agenda, which some see as part of extremist Orthodox Jewish ideology to form a so-called 'Greater Israel' across the Middle East, the Netanyahu government has engaged in such excessive and indiscriminate violence from Gaza to Beirut. “Its behavior was widely perceived as a transparent instance of genocide committed in real time,” Falk says.

Israel’s expansion of war objectives can turn the Middle East “a battleground in the Clash of Civilizations within the region and parallels the Second Cold War with China and Russia,” argues the professor.