On Sparta one more time – Ruth Margalit in The New Yorker:

‘Drawing again on a sense of grievance, Netanyahu warned in his speech on Monday, “We will increasingly need to adapt to an economy with autarkic characteristics.” This technical term, referring to a closed-off and self-reliant economy, is “the word I most hate,” he went on. “I am a believer in the free market, but we may find ourselves in a situation where our arms industries are blocked.” In a scenario of “Athens and Sparta,” he said, Israel will “have to become Athens and super-Sparta. There’s no choice. In the coming years, at least, we will have to deal with these attempts to isolate us. What’s worked until now will not work from now on.”’

(…)

‘Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli diplomat, told me, “You would think that a guy who boasts about his understanding of the patterns of history would know what the fuck he’s talking about.” During the past century, Pinkas said, four countries have behaved like an autarkic Sparta: Nazi Germany, apartheid-era South Africa, Albania under its Communist regime, and, most recently, North Korea. “This is the club you want to join?” Pinkas asked.’

(…)

‘The plan to conquer central Gaza has drawn international condemnation from the moment it was first announced, last month. Inside Israel, the security establishment and the military’s top commander, Eyal Zamir, also criticized the initiative. In a poll released earlier this month, forty-one per cent of Israelis said that they opposed the military occupation, and only twenty-eight per cent said that they supported it. (Close to a third of respondents were undecided.) The sense inside Israel is of a country “hijacked” by its leader, as the Israeli journalist Roni Dori has put it—expanding a war that most of the public has long wanted to see end in a deal that will secure the return of the hostages.’

(…)

‘The only thing that can reverse the government’s decision at this point is sustained pressure from the U.S., of the kind that President Donald Trump, working with the outgoing Biden Administration, applied over the winter, when he forced on Israel and Hamas a temporary ceasefire and hostage release. Yet the public statements coming from the U.S. appear much weaker this time around. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said this week that Trump wants the war “to be over quickly.” But Netanyahu did not commit to a timeline of retreat. Someday Trump “will presumably understand that this is a bluff,” Chaim Levinson wrote in Haaretz, on Thursday. By then, it may be too late. In both Israel and Gaza, the fear is that this will be a protracted operation—that once Israel seizes territory in the central enclave its government will refuse to give it up. Smotrich declared on Wednesday that Gaza will be a “real-estate bonanza,” adding, “The demolition, the first stage in the city’s renewal, we have already done. Now we just need to build.” The risk of further isolation—of economic sanctions, of boycotts of Israeli universities, of the withdrawal of foreign investments—looms large.
One part of Netanyahu’s speech received little attention. “We’ll have to decide if the law is more important than life,” he said. “I always thought that the law should serve life.” In pitting the law against “life”—a category vague enough as to encompass seemingly anything—Netanyahu appeared to pave the way not only for an “autarkic” future but an autocratic one.’

Read the article here.

North-Korea, Albania under Hoxha, well if this is what you aspire to.

The law should not sum so much serve life, it should serve Bibi’s life.