Essay in Expressen Kultur, April 2024. Also in Information, Denmark, and Klassekampen, Norway.

Bradley Burston
The End of Israel. Dispatches from a Path to Catastrophe, Fryman Press, 2023.
Theodor Herzl
Altneuland, Swedish translation Per G Jonsson, Faethon Publishing, 2024.

Israel at Road’s End?

Many years ago (1996) I wrote a book called The Lost Land (In Swedish Det förlorade landet, published in German as Das Verlorene Land and in French as L’utopie perdue) in which I set out to explore and understand the ideas and forces that had created the State of Israel. I also wanted to tell a personal story about the role of Israel in my own life. For a few teenage years in the early 1960s, I lived in Israel, rooted myself in Israel, devoured its dreams and promises, and when just over two years later, at the age of fifteen, I had to return to Sweden, I was determined to reclaim my pioneering role in the building of the Jewish state as soon as possible.

What happened next is, as they say, a long story. It is also a sometimes painful tale of difficult reassessments, shattered illusions and a deepening alienation from the country I had just thought of as mine. In the book, I wrote: "Close, close beneath the land I had once rooted in and loved, lay a land of violence, injustice and hatred. And in between, a growing layer of lies, falsified history, and buried foundations."

But the land that had been lost, at least to me, was not the land of Israel per se, only the land that Israel had become, which was a different land from the land that as a young pioneer I had been brought up to see. Or, as I put it in The Lost Land: "Once I had hiked across Israel without noticing the overgrown stone foundations, the ruined tombstones that sometimes jutted out from the edges of the fields, the scattered remains of house facades and stone walls. Now I noticed the stones everywhere. And turned every single one of them over. I became obsessed with tracing the names of the villages now buried under the houses and stones and groves and fields of the kibbutzim and moshavim of the new Israel."

Yet this was written at a time when, for a while, it seemed possible to imagine another Israel than the Israel I had lost, an Israel bent on a policy for peace and reconciliation with the people on whose land the new state had largely been built.

One of those dates in history deeply etched in my memory (that kind of date when you remember exactly where you were and what you were doing) is September 13, 1993. I was on a plane to Tel Aviv (to work on my book) when the pilot announced that Israeli Prime Minister Itzhak Rabin had shaken hands with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat outside the White House in Washington. As we landed, I still had to ask someone on the ground: Did they really shake hands?

The handshake did not last long; peace and reconciliation became continued occupation and colonization, and the hope for a new future for two closely knit peoples on a narrow strip of land between the river and the sea became a rolling disaster fueled by hubris, fanaticism and hopelessness. For a long time, Israel convinced itself that millions of Palestinians could be forever occupied, oppressed, and physically separated, and eventually somehow disappear from the eyes of the Israelis and the world.

I myself saw it as a path to political suicide, convinced that a state built on the occupation and oppression of another people would sooner or later undermine the conditions of its own existence. And that the state of Israel would increasingly resemble Masada, the steep mountain fortress in the Judean desert where in the year 73 some thousand Jewish men, women and children decided to commit collective suicide rather than surrender to their Roman besiegers. The association between Israel and Masada had become explicit ever since the Israeli army in the 1950s began gathering its graduating elite units on its top to pledge in a solemn ceremony to “never let Masada fall again”.

With the choice of Masada as a symbol of the new state, the notion of Israel as a perpetual fortress under perpetual siege was also consolidated. In a newspaper column almost exactly twenty years ago (Dagens Nyheter, 29.4.04) I wrote:

"In recent years, it has become increasingly clear that the strategy adopted by the present-day leaders of Masada is the same strategy that led to defeat and destruction almost two thousand years ago. Israel's ruling extremists [at that time a right-wing coalition under Ariel Sharon] may plan to drive out as many Palestinians as possible and lock up the rest in walled, Bantustan-like areas, but the society they create in the process will increasingly resemble an isolated fortress in the desert, held together by fear, surrounded by walls and ruled by fanatics."

Events after October 7, 2023, have made it possible, if not before, to imagine Israel as a lost land in the literal sense of the word. Maybe not militarily, at least not yet, but politically and psychologically the injuries may already be fatal. The once impregnable fortification of Masada has been breached, a hubristic contempt for the world has become a war strategy and a messianic contempt for reality has become national policy. The ideas and ideals that once built Israel and held it together can do so ever less.

So today, a former longtime columnist for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz can publish a book entitled The End of Israel without being dismissed as a hysteric. Perhaps as a traitor or antisemite, but that’s something else. Bradley Burston has long warned that Israel is headed for disaster, for many years as a lone Cassandra voice in an increasingly overbearing Israel (perpetual occupation, etc.), but since October 7th new voices have been added to the choir of warning prophets.

Burston directs much of his anger and despair at Benjamin Netanyahu personally, but in the book's selection of columns, all dated in relation to the outbreak of the ongoing disaster, he returns time and again to the element of self-deception and self-destruction in Israeli society.

On February 3, 2010 ("thirteen years before the war"), in the context of protests against the expulsion of the Palestinian residents of Sheikh Jarrah, a neighborhood in East Jerusalem, he writes: "The settlers' policy of extortion has contorted Israel into a body that does not dare to take the risks necessary to cure the disease, the occupation, and will therefore eventually be killed by it."

And in the book's preface, written after October 7: "These columns are a study in loss. They depict the decline and fall of a nation that, even before the terrible war now underway, might have wondered if this year's Independence Day would be its last."

So what does the end of Israel mean?

First and foremost, I believe, the end of Israel as a state governed by the rule of law. Certainly the laws of Israel have long allowed for discriminatory institutions and practices, and a state built on occupation, colonization and ethnic separation cannot claim to be fully governed by the rule of law. But even before the war, the issue had come to a head when the Netanyahu government sought to remove the last legal barriers (vested with the Israeli Supreme Court) to unhinged majority rule in the hands of messianic settlers and authoritarian nationalists. Only a radical shift in power and mentality in Israel in favor of a historic settlement with the Palestinians could, in my view, put brakes on this development. To those who say that a historic settlement with the Palestinians is impossible, especially after October 7, I would point to the historical alternative: Masada.

The end for Israel could certainly also be a devastating major war in the region. Messianic and apocalyptic fanatics, both Jewish and Christian, even hope for this to happen (Armageddon and all that), and Israel's increasingly world-provoking war in Gaza is playing right into their hands.

 Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), the emblematic founder of Zionism, the movement that built Israel, would almost certainly have been horrified by what Israel has become today. The utopian novel he wrote a year before his death, Altneuland, now published for the first time in Swedish translation, depicts the “old-new” society of Palestine as an oasis of social justice, enlightened progress and multicultural coexistence. The most frightening figure in Altneuland is not an Arab terrorist but a Jewish rabbi, Dr. Geyer, who in an ongoing election campaign advocates that Palestine should be reserved for Jews only.
In Herzl's Altneuland, Rabbi Geyer is soundly defeated.
Not so his late successors in Netanyahu's Israel.
'If you wish, this is not a fairy tale', is Herzl's famous epigraph to Altneuland.
He could have added that not even a fairy tale does always have a happy ending.