Naked Capitalism
Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is an extremely wily politician. So what is one to make of what looked like a major admission against interest in a speech Monday at the Finance Ministry’s accountant general, that Israel is being cornered economically and has no ready way out? As we’ll discuss, Netanyahu attempted to walk his remarks back the next day after the Israel stock market had a wee sad and business leaders and politicians pushed back.
But what Netanyahu said cannot be unsaid, particularly in light of evidence that the Israeli economy has taken serious damage below the water line. And anyone with an operating brain cell knows Israel cannot become an autarky, or even an autarky as in terms of its own weapons supply. Larry Wilkerson, who both regularly reads Israel press and has many contact, has repeatedly said Israel has taken such serious economic and societal damage that he predicts it will no longer exist in ten years.
So what might have led him Netanyahu to admit serious weakness while packaging it in prototypical “Israel is the David who will prevail against odds”? Is Wilkerson’s that trajectory now starting to become painfully evident even at top level is Israel? Or might Netanyahu be trying to create the justification for even more radical action?
Perhaps Netanyahyu can no longer deny that Israel’s extermination of Palestinians and belligerence in the region, which is overextending its military, is putting Israel in a long-term untenable position. The fact that the next day, a UN commission of inquiry released a report finding that Israel has engaged in four of five genocidal activities as defined by relevant law puts even more pressure on the ethnosupremacist state. The UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide places strong obligations on member states to act to stop genocide.1 Nevertheless, this finding makes it harder for governments facing calls from citizens to Do Something about the genocide to shy from taking action against Israel.
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Reader comment:
Netenyahu is always grasping for another crisis to keep him in power and out of court. Permenant open war is not sustainable, but a permenant cold war or state of economic emergency could serve as a vehicle for his permenant crisis-ocracy. Turning Israel into a North Korea-lite and the required radical economic restructurings allow him to hold power while seeking new patronage and power structures within that new economy as his previous high tech Askenazi model economy evaporates.
The energy for all of this will be ongoing transfers of capital and financing from the US and Europe. So long as this continues, re-tooling Israel from a software to a hardware shop is simply a question of time. Another Trump promise, reindustrialization, again promised to Israel instead.