(C) Common Dreams
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Israel is on track to full pariah status after falling into the Hamas trap [1]
['Natale Labia']
Date: 2024-03-19
Natale Labia writes on the economy and finance. Partner and chief economist of a global investment firm, he writes in his personal capacity. MBA from Università Bocconi. Supports Juventus.
The speech on Israel last week by Chuck Schumer, the most senior Democrat in the Senate, was a clear sign of exactly how far the country has fallen in the eyes of the world since it began its retaliation for the attacks of 7 October 2023.
As well as being the most senior Jewish politician in the US, Schumer has been the longest-standing supporter of Israel in the Democratic Party. He voted against the Iran deal, siding with Benjamin Netanyahu over Barack Obama.
Last week, however, he called for Netanyahu’s hardline government to be replaced, accusing him of weakening his country’s “political and moral fabric” and being an “obstacle to peace”.
Netanyahu had been “too willing to tolerate the civilian toll” in Gaza and was “pushing support for Israel worldwide to historic lows”, the Senate majority leader said.
“Israel cannot survive if it becomes a pariah,” he said.
This is, of course, just the latest criticism from an increasingly tired and frustrated Washington.
Last week, President Joe Biden accused Netanyahu of doing more to harm than help his own country, describing the Israeli government’s plan to attack Rafah — currently home to as many as a million refugees from the war — as a “red line” that must not be crossed.
There was a time when the term “red line” in Washington was reserved for murderous autocrats like Bashar al-Assad.
Read more in Daily Maverick: Israel-Palestine War
There are three serious consequences of this.
First, the damage to Israel’s reputation is geopolitically disastrous for the Jewish state – potentially existentially so.
Its actions over the past six months have cost the lives of more than 31,300 people, according to Palestinian officials, displaced more than 1.7 million of the 2.3 million inhabitants of Gaza and caused a humanitarian crisis that has left many in the enclave on the brink of starvation.
It is clear that there can be no return to the status quo ante 7 October, ever.
Now, outside of the lunacy of Trump’s GOP, Viktor Orbán’s Hungarian illiberal democracy and Holocaust-guilt-ridden Germany, it is hard to find any Western country openly willing to defend Israel’s actions.
Even a Tory foreign secretary of the UK, David Cameron, has been harshly critical of Netanyahu’s actions in Gaza.
More than 80% of people in Arab countries across the Middle East have experienced “great psychological distress” over the war in Gaza, according to surveys by the Doha Institute.
The Abraham Accords, the much-mooted pact between Israel and Saudi Arabia, are now unthinkable without a two-state solution.
Needless to say, in the Global South – particularly in Latin America and Africa – it has become commonplace to accuse Israel of genocide. The mass pro-Palestine marches which continue to be seen all over the world are a clear sign of the scale of the shift in global opinion.
Perhaps the most long-standing impact of the war will be to shatter the narrative – so well propagated in the US and beyond by the pro-Israel lobby and by John Mearsheimer in his book “The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy” – that criticism of the state of Israel is equivalent to anti-Zionism and, by implication, anti-Semitism. Now, in many parts of the world, defending Israel is an anathema.
Second, the economic impact has been brutal.
Israel’s economy has suffered one of its worst-ever slumps as the war has paralysed businesses, forced people to evacuate their homes and caused the military to call up hundreds of thousands of reservists.
GDP shrank an annualised 19.4% in the final three months of last year, in seasonally adjusted terms, according to preliminary figures released last month. That was worse than every estimate in a Bloomberg survey of analysts, whose median forecast was for a decline of 10.5%.
Israel’s government was downgraded for the first time by Moody’s last month as it plans to ramp up bond issuance to fund the conflict.
While economic activity is expected to stabilise, the long-term impact on the foreign direct investment-dependent tech sector, formerly the driving force of the Israeli economy, could be permanent.
Already damaged by the judicial reform protests of 2023 and a general slowdown in tech investment given higher interest rates, tech FDI was down 29% in the final quarter of 2023 compared with 2022, according to the Bank of Israel.
“There will be a long-term impact of the ongoing war in Israel which we anticipate will last at least five years,” says prominent Israeli tech investor Entrée Capital.
“Israel is thus facing double the challenges of other global tech hubs.”
Finally, there are the broader-based effects of the war on all Israelis and indeed Jews.
Anti-Semitic incidents in the US hit an unprecedented record in the two months after Hamas’ shock attack on 7 October, according to the Anti-Defamation League. The organisation said it recorded 2,031 incidents between 7 October and 7 December, the highest two-month number ever and a 337% increase over the same period in 2022.
The scale of the surge in anti-Semitism in the UK since Hamas’ attack on Israel on 7 October has been even greater, with data showing a 589% increase in the number of incidents between October and February compared with the same period in 2022.
The Community Security Trust, which monitors anti-Jewish abuse, said the unprecedented increase was a “watershed moment for anti-Semitism in the UK”.
Netanyahu and his government believed that the appropriate response to 7 October would be to obliterate Palestinian resistance through unprecedented military aggression and civilian harm.
This strategy has proved to be not only morally wrong but delusional.
Its effects have been precisely counterproductive to its stated aim – to make Israelis safer.
Similar to 9/11 and the response of the US, many warned last October that the end effect of the Hamas attacks would be to trap Israel into damaging itself more profoundly than Hamas itself ever could.
Now, with Israel more isolated than at any point in its history, it is clear, at least in that sense, that Hamas has achieved exactly what it set out to do. DM
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[1] Url:
https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2024-03-19-israel-is-heading-for-full-pariah-status-after-falling-into-the-hamas-trap/
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