Eric Walberg
Eric Walberg(In this three part series, Canadian author and journalist Eric Walberg reviews Dan Steinbock’s book, The Fall of Israel: The Degradation of Israel’s Politics, Economy & Military, 2025. All three parts are published in this issue to provide continuity.)
But compassion does not pay the bills. The stakes keep mounting, along with high tech death toys, and it’s very hard to imagine Israel on the verge of collapse. It, and world Jewry, have never been so rich, so powerful in all history.
The major world powers – the ‘collective west’ plus China, India and Russia – provide it with most of the death toys and the fuel to run them. None of these hard-nosed political schemers want to see Israel collapse, nor do any of them lose much sleep over the plight of the Palestinians.
I, like many others today, am devoting my life to help free Palestine and really, really don’t want to be disappointed, so I’ll temper my enthusiasm, hold off on celebrating the end of the monstrosity. I am not counting any chickens yet. It’s a long way till the final act when the fat lady belts out her last hava nagila.
Steinbock is a leading international economic expert who has put his chips on the side of BRICS and multipolarism. That’s where the future is and the ‘collective west’ better wake up soon as it is being left behind.
And that includes Israel, as the west’s swan song to 19th century imperial glory. He is CEO and founder of Difference Group (Paul Krugman is a member of the board), its purpose: In the past, the West drove the global economic prospects. Today, that role belongs to the Global South. We help governments, institutions, businesses, and NGOs navigate in the new and complex, multipolar environment.
The thesis of The Fall is simple: Aiming to turn a secular democracy into a Jewish autocracy/ theocracy, the most far-right regime in the history of Israel has continued to push this judicial coup amid the fog of war. These cleavages in the Israeli society figure large in its political disintegration.
Most analysis of the dilemmas Israel faces looks to the occupation of the Palestinian territories in the 1967 War and the subsequent expansion of Jewish settlements as the chief problem. They are its proximate effect; following directly on the ethnic expulsions of the Palestinian Arabs in 1948.
Steinbock makes it clear the Israelis never had any interest in anything but one Jews-only state, which was sort of achieved in the 1950s. Everything thereafter is footnotes (Steinbock, p.362).i A pro-forma future two-state solution with present de facto one-state realities.ii (ii Israel has been in complete control of all lands since 1948. Palestinians who stayed were to be ethnically cleansed, killed or deported over time.)
The US is both the problem, having encouraged Israel in its expansion from 1948 on, feeding it with lethal weapons, financing settlements condoning ethnic cleansing and murder on a daily basis, and the solution, as the current genocidal monster Israel would indeed ‘fall’ at the ‘twinkling of an eye’ if the US closed the spigot.
The last US president to try that was George H. W. Bush (aka Bush I), whose feeble attempt to stop the settlement expansion led to his humiliating defeat from a vengeful Israel lobby a few months later in 1992. The penultimate protest, JFK’s stand against Israel acquiring nukes, led to his assassination and replacement by Israel sycophant Lyndon B Johnson.
With both Republican and Democratic parties in lockstep today, supporting Israel’s textbook genocide, the only hope is public opinion, anti-apartheid activism, which is increasingly criminalized in the ‘collective west’.
Steinbock points to the mid-50s as the moment of truth, though we can go back to Jabotinsky in the 1920s, or Ben Gurion in the fateful 1948, when the slaughter began in earnest and was clear, certainly to the Palestinians, if not to a still naive collective west. The ‘bilateral’ ties with Washington and massive US military aid kicked in then and have reached staggering proportions now, a virtual blank cheque to wreak havoc, no end in sight.
These ties led to such new-old doctrines as the Dahiya (suburb of Beirut) doctrine of carpet-bombing civilians, the Hannibal directive to murder Israelis stupid enough to be taken captive, and mass assassination factories, backed by pioneering artificial intelligence.
The socialism of labor zionism was replaced by the hard-right coalitions driven by revisionist zionism, thanks to US neoliberal economic policies, assertive neoconservatism and Jewish-American donors. It also explains the rise of the Messianic far-right, centrist parties, and the failure of the Left.
The Fall of Israel covers the country’s political and ethnic divides, economic polarization, social and military changes, the shifts in the Palestinian struggle for sovereignty, the apartheid regime in the occupied territories, the genocidal atrocities, the regional and global reverberations, and the ensuing human and economic costs, both prior and subsequent to Israel’s fatal war on Gaza. Not to mention the domestic hell – the economic polarization, the collapse of innovative, hi-tech start-ups, the talent brain-drain, the undermined welfare state, rising poverty and the subsidized religious sector.
Steinbock documents the three waves of settlers from 1948, the last following the 1993 Oslo Accords, which should have ended the settlements, but was so flawed that it allowed their acceleration, now under policing by the Palestinian Authority, even as Hamas was elected in Gaza, and the PA totally discredited, but still the de facto ‘authority’, now just a fig leaf for creeping genocide.
Israeli attacks on Palestinians increased, killing Palestinians on a daily basis, with occasional massive bombings of Gaza (2008, 2009, 2014, 2023) killing thousands each time.
Steinbock documents the atrocities and US complicity. His many charts show the massive increase in West Bank land seizures in 2023, clearly part of a push to fully steal all the West Bank, even as there is no ‘exit strategy’ for the millions of Palestinians still alive.
We know what Netanyahu would like to do to each and every one of those vermin, and at this point US politicians are more or less united on letting him ‘finish the job’.
Steinbock (and all of us) pin our hopes on world mass opinion. None of the world leaders, apart from the Axis of Resistance can be counted on. Arab leaders loathe the pesky Palestinians almost as much as US-Israel does. It is only the revolting masses that stand between them and the Palestinians.
(Continued in Part II and III)
Canadian Eric Walberg is known worldwide as a journalist specializing in the Middle East, Central Asia and Russia. A graduate of the University of Toronto and Cambridge University in Economics, he has been writing on East-West relations since the 1980s.
He has lived in both the Soviet Union and Russia, and then Uzbekistan, as a UN adviser, writer, translator and lecturer. Presently a writer for the Cairo newspaper, Al Ahram, he is also a regular contributor to Counterpunch, Dissident Voice, Global Research, Al-Jazeera and Turkish Weekly, and is a commentator on Voice of the Cape radio.
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