Description
The path to the obliteration of Gaza was paved by the confluence of a set of longstanding forces. This great conjuncture has transformed Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories while driving the region to the edge. In The Fall of Israel, Dr Dan Steinbock connects the dots among these lethal headwinds.
What makes the book unique is its comprehensive scope. It outlines the central drivers of this simmering tinderbox: the serial expulsions of Palestinians, the aggressive expansion of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, a half century of failed U.S. diplomacy in the Middle East and Israel’s parallel militarization. Enabled by the symbiotic bilateral ties with massive U.S., military aid and illicit private settlement funding, these ties contributed to the Gaza War, fostering paradigms of devastation, such as the Dahiya doctrine and the Hannibal directive, and mass assassination factories, backed by pioneering artificial intelligence. Indeed, the settlements have contributed to the destabilization of the broader Middle East since the early 1970s, and are now compounding its economic and geopolitical crises.
The Fall of Israel addresses the efforts to institute a Jewish rather than a secular state. It shows how Israel’s postwar labor alignments were replaced by hard-right coalitions, thanks to U.S. neoliberal economic policies, assertive neoconservatism and generous Jewish-American donors. It explains the causes behind the rise of the Messianic far-right, centrist parties, and the failure of the Left. Well before the destruction of Gaza, the corrosion of Israeli society and politics was reflected in and driven by an economy constrained by adverse erosion, as mirrored by the liabilities of the high-tech sector, the talent “brain drain,” the undermined welfare state and the uber-subsidized religious populace. The huge economic costs of the Greater Israel dreams and the ensuing unwarranted wars have set the stage for extraordinary uncertainty. Without a major course revision, Israel is heading toward an economic edge.
The Fall of Israel covers the shifts in the Palestinian struggle for sovereignty, the degradation of Israel’s occupation into an apartheid regime, the attendant genocidal atrocities, the regional repercussions in neighboring states, such as Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Egypt, and the broader region from Iran and Saudi Arabia to Yemen, as well as the global reverberations from Brussels and Washington to Beijing. Through this nightmarish, historical and topical panorama, the author stresses the massive human and economic costs of century-long conflicts, especially subsequent to Israel’s fatal war in Gaza in the name of Hamas, settler pogroms in the West Bank and the devastation in southern Lebanon blamed on Hezbollah. These brutalities have led to the engagement of the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, unleashing huge international boycotts and protests.
The dark future of the region, the author contends, has been formed since the 1940s and 1950s, as the two-state aspirations have been systematically buried by one-state realities.
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.
Only logged in customers who have purchased this product may leave a review.