Eric Margolis referred last year to the long-ago observation by Arthur Koestler that Israel risked becoming a nasty Sparta-style warlike regime, hated, hyper aggressive, ruleless and souless.
Koestler was born poor in 1905, 120 years ago this month. A Hungarian Jew and a writer, he bounced around for a while, living for a short time in Palestine (the British Mandate) in 1926, and then working in Berlin for the infamous Russian Zionist Vladimir (later called Ze’ev) Jabotinsky.
I only know about Jabotinsky because I worked in the Pentagon 25 years ago, and all my bosses knew about him, and some idolized him. He is specifically known for “Revisionist Zionism,” something I never heard of, because frankly, in the United States, there should be no need to be experts on the historical evolution of other people’s founding ideologies.
Revisionist Zionism exchanges the ideas of Ben Gurion, of European and Russian Jews settling in the land of Palestine as individuals, for a more expansionist variation. Jabotinsky’s Zionism came with the assumption of Jewish sovereignty over the entire region, not only the River to the Sea, but covering both sides of the Jordan River, and far beyond.
Bibi has the map, and we think about it, if we think about Israel at all, as Greater Israel. It’s pretty big for 9 million Jews to manage, but like Sparta, there are millions of helots to help. We’ll come back to this technicality in a second.
Arthur Koestler himself had a bold and productive life, which included living in the Soviet Union and becoming a communist, being imprisoned in Spain by Franco, imprisoned again in France, joining the French Foreign Legion, rejecting communism, all while recording his intellectual evolution and writing incredible books, befriending many intellectuals of the 20th century, including George Orwell. In 1944, he met with Menachem Begin of Irgun in Palestine in 1944, and soundly failed to convince him to abandon militant attacks and accept a two-state solution. In his memoirs, he realized he had been naive to think his suggestions might be considered where militancy and rabid urgency was the order of the day.
Revisionist Zionism, used by the greater Israel crowd, the militant genocidaires, and more moderate Zionists, is being rehabilitated for western consumption, as this 2006 Jerusalem Post opinion piece explains. Rehabilitating Jabotinsky was hasbara for the early 2000’s as Americans were understanding, what Charlie Kirk began to understand two years ago, that the US government has and continues to be lied into a series of Middle Eastern wars for the flawed and covetous myth of Greater Israel.
Two decades and seven or more countries destroyed, destabilized and decapitated later, we come to the present day, and as Americans, we need to think about what happens when your friends need help but just want more of the same. Western society – concurring and in concordance with the rise of the central state – has traded rugged and tough with broken and in need of counseling, so counseling it is.
America, your friend Israel is in bad shape. They are in constant conflict, and a danger, spiritually and physically, to everyone around them. Israel celebrates its assassin creed; it views its neighbors as a wild dog considers a flock in a coop – kill them all with bloody abandon and leave them to rot.
It has become a nasty little Sparta, in a political world that is soft, conciliatory, compromised, and corrupt. The world of national leaders fully recognize the murderer at their table, and we know this from their sideways glances, raised eyebrows and hushed murmurs in hallways.
As the drumbeat of the populations they rule over is becoming undeniable, the planets’ politicians have to do something. What can be done with a nasty Spartan regime? Well, in a normal world, we would not trade or assist their genocide, cover for the endless attacks and assassinations, or the support the expansionary racism of the State of Israel. Much as a global response to a natural disaster, we would come together to constrain bad state behavior and save people, but this natural disaster has been going on since 1948, nonstop; perhaps we are inured to it.
Helot-like, we serve Israel’s aggression, politics and economy because that’s what our parents did, and our grandparents. We don’t ask why, even if we grumble at times.
Greater Israel is possible today, and may be achieved, because the world is full of her helots, and DC in particular is an outpost of Sparta, filled with congressional and presidential slaves, dependent labor that allows the masters to be full-time warriors.
In fact, these full-time warriors have many wars, not just currently, but planned for the future, as with the case to liberate northern Cyprus from the Turks. This, and other wars, will be pursued after the elimination through destruction, murder, starvation and disease of 90% of the Gazan population, and the development of Gazan real estate, and most importantly, Gazan gas fields. These fields are bordered to an extent by Cyprus, so creating a Cypriotic helotry is important to the Israeli warriors.
Americans don’t like to believe they are little more than helots, because being serf or slave to a foreign power is obviously contrary to our own founding mythology.
So maybe the question is not what to do when your best friend is a nasty Spartan, but what do you do when you realize he views you, your family and country, and your political and military infrastructure as part of their serviceable, if not particularly bright, helotry?
This kind of counseling takes a different path, more along the lines of “It’s not you, it’s me” or a typical aircraft safety briefing where you must affix your oxygen mask securely before assisting others with theirs.
The world may, or may not, be able to help Gaza two years into the latest iteration of frenzied Zionist slaughter and genocide to create a real estate bonanza, as Bezalel Smotrich put it, himself born in an illegal settlement in occupied Syria 45 years ago. I would not underestimate the power of 8 billion creative minds to come up with something. There is always karma, and the way things shift over time.
The city of Sparta ended as a result of a loss of population (check), economic decline (check), and inability to support a large army by itself (check). Sparta’s allies became resentful of its dominance, and rebelled against its rule. Sparta was invaded and subordinated. Spartans, a minority in their own land, had always feared a helot uprising, or revolt, and eventually this happened. Today, we are not Gaza, even as the majority in the US and the world support Palestinians and wish to see them freed, fed, restored to their land. If anything, we are more like the Shia Druze, who have been made citizens of Israel, and fight for it. But it looks like the western helots of Israel are in revolt, and the collapse of Israel as a warrior state is coming. Historians will wonder if the Zionist spasm of the 20th century was worth it, and Jews everywhere will rediscover their religion and say Never Again.
