Q&A: Israel under Netanyahu's extremist agenda will implode at some point

Omer Bartov was born and raised in Israel and served in the country’s military for four years, including during the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

As a leading historian and professor of genocide studies at Brown University in Rhode Island, US, 70-year-old Bartov is now a vocal critic of the Netanyahu government and its unbridled aggression across the Middle East.

Amid Israel’s brutal war on Gaza and other Palestinian territories, Bartov sees real worrying signs for the future of the Jewish state, which is facing unprecedented global condemnation for heaping untold misery on millions of Palestinians.

The Netanyahu government’s Gaza war is “nothing less than a genocidal campaign”, says the distinguished professor, adding that the current Israeli “thinking of war as an end unto itself” carries many dangers for not only Israel but also the region.

Bartov is of the opinion that those who fight wars without any clear political objectives always lose. “If a war is not the extension of politics by other means, as Carl von Clausewitz [a top war strategist] said, then it's just an eternal war and nobody wins in these kinds of absolute wars,” he tells TRT World in an exclusive interview.

Edited excerpts:

TRT World: In your long-read article, you found similarities between the Netanyahu government’s current actions in Gaza and the Biblical Jewish hero Samson’s choice “to die with Philistines” in the Gaza temple of ancient people. Like the Samson story, will the Netanyahu government bring a kind of self-annihilation to Israel?

Omer Bartov: There is a prevailing sentiment in many circles in Israel, which is a bit like that, which is suicidal. It sort of takes you back…to this idea of Samson saying, “May I die with the Philistines?” or to the Zealots who rebelled against the Roman Empire and committed collective suicide in Masada. There are elements in Israel that really think that way because these are the fanatics, the zealots…they believe that God is on their side. They don't think rationally at all. But it has also spread to larger parts of the population.

This [fanatical belief] has much deeper roots in Israeli and Zionist thinking, which has now been weaponised. There is this notion that the whole world is against us, that if we don't fight for our existence, no one will come to our rescue. That we have to do everything it takes to survive, that any threat on us is a threat of another Holocaust. And the Hamas attack was so shocking to Israelis, not only because of the hundreds of civilians that were massacred, but also because no one expected Hamas or any Palestinians to be able to accomplish something like that…(also) the army didn't show up because the government was incompetent. It creates a sense of insecurity that can be then weaponised as, ‘we just have to fight it to the end’. And that kind of thinking, as I understand, is one of thinking of war as an end unto itself.

Israel acts just like you describe, as an uncontrolled force across the Middle East, fighting numerous wars and destroying civilian structures in Gaza and Lebanon. A Netanyahu government minister talks about establishing Greater Israel as the country faces increasing international isolation, growing economic crisis and prospects of being a pariah state. Do you think Israel is doomed to fail?

OB: It's a big question. I'd say the formation of the Netanyahu government in late 2022 was already a very bad sign because he formed a coalition government after many previous elections that were inconclusive, and it is packed with the most extreme right-wing elements in Israel, [including] settlers and fascists. He cannot afford to allow this coalition to fail because then, his corruption trial might resume, and he could end up in jail. That was in late 2022. Over the following months, that government was trying to carry out a judicial coup to weaken the Supreme Court and, therefore, turn Israel into a more authoritarian state that would much more easily be able to annex parts of the occupied West Bank, which is what the extreme right elements in his cabinet want.

Then came October 7 and the Hamas attack, which in many ways legitimised in the eyes of many Israelis an extremely violent campaign, first against Gaza. Now, we are seeing it in the occupied West Bank and, of course, in response to Hezbollah, also in Lebanon. Within two or three months of the campaign in Gaza, it would have been possible to call a ceasefire and find a way of possibly removing Hamas leadership from Gaza and exchanging prisoners. That would have also put an end to the violence in the North. De-escalating tensions could have led to a rethinking of the entire political paradigm of the Israeli government, leading to the realisation that marginalising the Palestinian issue to keep it under the rug was no longer feasible.

One had to find a political formula to share the space between the river and the sea. There are seven million Palestinians and seven million Jews living there, but that did not happen. There was no impetus to do that from within because for Netanyahu to call for a ceasefire would mean that he would lose his coalition. It would also have meant a commission of inquiry to look into the fiasco of October 7, which was a tremendous fiasco by the Israeli government and the Israeli army because they had all the information, but they didn't do anything about it. The only way to end the war in late 2023 would have been by massive pressure from the US. Israel cannot continue its military operations for more than three weeks without a constant supply of munitions from the US and diplomatic cover in the Security Council. But the US administration did not do that.

So gradually, this became even worse…you could call this nothing less than a genocidal campaign in Gaza, which is getting worse right now as we see the operations north of the Netzarim Corridor in Jabalia, which is a concerted attempt by the Israeli army to empty the entire northern part of Gaza of its population through military pressure and deprivation of food and water or famine.

Where is this going?

OB: As long as the US provides support and Europe, by and large, follows in the footsteps of the US, Israel will continue doing that. My estimate is that gradually, the violence can spread…it can become a regional conflict. No one has an interest in that. I don't think Iran wants it. I don't think Lebanon wants it.

The only elements that may want it are radical elements within Israel itself. Possibly, they'll be reined in by the Americans to the extent of not having a full-scale war with Iran…in many ways, Netanyahu wants to drag the US into it. If that doesn't happen, this conflict can continue at a lower level. Netanyahu has no interest in stopping the violence completely, again for the same reason that he wants to survive politically. But also because he and the right-wing ministers in his coalition want to make it possible for Israel to increasingly take over territory in the occupied West Bank and to do the same in Gaza. They're now employing tactics that they use in Gaza, also in the West Bank and, of course, in Southern Lebanon.

If all of that happens, Israel will become an apartheid state, a full-blown apartheid state where seven million Palestinians will live under different laws, at least five million of them (two million Palestinians are Israeli citizens). This apartheid rule will seep into Israel itself, and in the long run, we'll become a pariah state. It will become impoverished, it will become increasingly isolated. Not only Israel’s allies will gradually turn away from it, but even Jewish communities in the US and Europe will become increasingly embarrassed by the kind of regime that will be there. It will no longer be able to sell itself as the only democracy in the Middle East. That could last for two or three decades in the long run. I don't think it's viable. I think the country will implode, but it will take a long time. So, the only way to avoid this is by major pressure from the outside (since there is no such internal pressure in Israel). Among Palestinians, there's no alternative leadership and no ideas as to how to come out of it [the Israel-Palestine deadlock], no momentum…It has to come from the outside. If it doesn't, then that's the kind of future we can anticipate.

If the US and its Western allies do not interfere to stop Israeli violence, then will the country collapse eventually?

OB: Countries don't collapse so quickly. So, I don't think Israel will collapse… But it will lose whatever is left of its democratic liberal characteristics. It'll become weaker and more fragile. More liberal and better-educated people may leave it. [But] most of the people will stay.

Something will have to happen at one point, and it might look, maybe, a little bit like what happened in South Africa. This kind of apartheid nation will not be able to sustain itself in the long run; it'll have to transform into a society where, eventually, there will be equality and justice for all its citizens. I don't expect to experience that in my lifetime.

Why is the US enabling Israel to continue to commit war crimes in Gaza and other areas? Is the US using Israel to push back at its enemies, Iran and its allies, in the Middle East?

OB: The US is making a series of political and strategic mistakes, and serious errors of judgement. Just before October 7, you may remember, there was an initiative pushed by the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia to find some kind of peace between Israel, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states and to open roads of commerce between them, as well as all the way to India. All three parties were interested in that. The US was interested in that mostly because US policy has now for years been trying to move away from the Middle East and focus on the Far East to focus on China. So that would kind of settle the problem with the Middle East and the US could focus on China. Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states were interested in that because Sunni Muslim states worry about Iran. But also, that would have buried the Palestinian cause.

That's the reason that Hamas attacked when they did, it was just a few days after Netanyahu visited the US. Because they [Palestinians] thought if this goes through, then we are finished, then our issue will never come up anymore. But all of that changed with October 7.

Why is the US enabling Israel to do what it's doing, enabling Netanyahu to act in this way? The miscalculation was that the US could control Netanyahu through this kind of bearhug, saying that we're on your side, but you have to behave yourself. But Netanyahu, being who he is, did what he wanted to do, and he's still doing what he wants to do again in the long run [implementing an extremist agenda].

But the general sentiment in the US is shifting increasingly and rapidly away from Israel. So the Biden administration has behaved in a way that has only exacerbated public attitudes toward Israel, which has never been as unpopular in the US as it is today, especially among the younger generation. In elite institutions from which the future leadership of the US is coming – political, economic and financial – those younger people are totally appalled by the way Israel is behaving.

So again, if you think about it in slightly longer terms, this decision by the administration to facilitate and allow Israel to get away with this is working against Israeli interests. And that's quite apart from the fact that the impunity that Israel has received from the US, in particular, is destroying the entire edifice of international law that was put into place after WWII. The Nuremberg Tribunal, the notion of crimes against humanity, of war crimes and of genocide, the international courts, all of this is being completely ignored and nobody's enforcing those laws, those judicial instances to stop Israel from behaving the way it is. That, too, is undermining American influence in the world. There are many people in the US who are aware of that. So, there will be a backlash, but it takes time.