Eric Walberg
Eric Walberg(Part III of Steinbock’s book review: The Fall of Israel: The Degradation of Israel’s Politics, Economy & Military, 2025.)
It is a mistake to be too hopeful. Russia and China have highly developed economic relations with Israel. Russia provides it with the oil to use to bomb Palestinians; China is Israel’s largest trade partner: 18% of trade vs 10% for US and 2.5% for Russia.
Chinese investment is more than US$15 billion, spawning seed capital in Israeli startup companies, as well as the acquisition of Israeli companies by major Chinese corporations that incorporate Israel’s know-how to help invigorate the development of the modern Chinese economy more efficiently.
China ranked second in 2015 after the US on collaboration with Israeli high-tech firms that are backed by Israel’s Office of the Chief Scientist. Neither Russia nor China want to see Israel collapse. BRICS is not a coherent economic force.
We are stuck with US-Israel, the Axis of Resistance, the Palestinians now scattered around the world, working with a handful of anti-zionist diaspora Jews, until the US itself collapses. That seems to be our strategy.
All countries listen to China, Israel included. It would be lost if China made a serious move to threaten its economic ties. China’s recent two-state proposals prompted Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Jordan, Egypt, and the Palestinian Authority to move forward with plans to present a joint political vision for rehabilitating the Gaza Strip and establishing a Palestinian state after the Israel-Hamas war. To pre-empt such schemes, Netanyahu’s office presented its own vision of ‘Gaza 2035’ in May.
The Israeli proposal labels Gaza as an ‘Iranian outpost’, taunting the quisling Arab rulers as ineffectual, traitors, allies of the hated Israel. So, Gaza can be taken, as it isn’t really part of the Arab world, but an Iranian outpost which must be destroyed. More tactic than strategy and very silly.
Israel would mobilize the emirates and Saudis to divvy out aid to Gazans and hunt down and eliminate Hamas, much like the Oslo Accords got the PA to police Palestinians as settlements proceeded. After 15 years, if things go well, some limited autonomy would be allowed, all the while under Israeli hegemony.
Steinbock puts his eggs in China’s basket in his vision of any future Middle East peace. At each step, China is filling in where the US fears (or is too lazy) to tread. Regarding Egypt, in the absence of Israel’s full withdrawal from the occupied territories, the bilateral trust with Israel has been eroding for decades. Today it is sustained mainly by US aid, which is vital to bottomless-pit Cairo.
Meanwhile China’s multibillion-dollar economic cooperation initiatives are fostering rather than undermining Egyptian development. Ditto Jordan, where China is building a national railway network, an oil pipeline to link Iraq and Jordan, and a new Jordan-China university.
Egypt and Jordan, weak and corrupt, are throwing themselves at China’s feet, much like Iran did over the past decade. China is waging a positive-sum war against/with the world, promising prosperity and Chinese hegemony as a package deal. (At least this is not the subtle Bretton Woods ‘prosperity and US imperialism’.)
China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has reached around the world, despite US attempts to sabotage China with its own rail-ship road from India through the Middle East to Europe, but that assumes Saudi compliance, which is dead-on-arrival now. One can only laugh in disbelief as US hegemony is being KO-ed by the Chinese economic fist – everywhere.
Unlike US-Israel, China has a clear strategy of nonzero sum cooperation with all, promising advantages where past ‘aid’ meant corruption, misuse of funds, more debt.
The US-China economic rivalry is providing lots of brainstorming by potential participants in both hopeful outcomes, but China remains cautious, more or less abiding by US sanctions on Russia. BRICS at least has raised the profile of the South, given them collective clout though still much less than the collective west.
With the Ukraine war unending, Russia is now unofficially joining all anti-US efforts, probably providing Iran and the Houthis with satellite information to keep the Suez Canal out of commission and for accurate bombing, possibly even providing a few missiles and drones.
Why not? The world really is going to Hell in a handbasket, and the ride is rocky but exciting and even hopeful, considering the bad guys seem to be doing everything wrong, pushing Putin into the hands of enemy.
Nuke time?
The ongoing war on multiple fronts from the Axis of Resistance, with 100,000s of Hizbullah bombs ready, could push Israel to use its nukes (p.350). The Begin ‘doctrine’ was ‘formulated’ to justify bombing Iraq’s nuclear facilities and is still in play against Iran. Several nuclear sites were bombed in October, though not the main sites, and were accompanied by a promise to bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities after the election.
Trump has already voiced his approval. But Iran’s success in bombing Israel twice in 2024 shows it has jumped ahead of Israel (and the US) in hypersonic missiles, which can be mobilized to really destroy little sitting-duck Israel.
The zionist entity is still loudly threatening Iran but my gut reaction is to imagine hundreds of hypersonic missiles raining down on Israel. Israelis are uniformly racist monsters now, so the civilian-military distinction is moot. When the whole world feels that way about you, all the king’s horse and all the king’s lackeys won’t be able to put Humpty-Dumpty together again.
In the west, Israel’s peace treaties with Egypt (1979) and Jordan (1994), and the Abraham Accords (2020–2021) with some Gulf states are often portrayed as steps toward a two-state solution. In Israel, they are seen more as bilateral “normalization” deals with individual Arab countries that will over time marginalize or exclude Palestinians from a final peace solution.
The Gaza War has jeopardized the future of such normalization agreements, while severely shuttering the existing deals. The trouble is neither the US nor Israel ever took the negotiations seriously. No one believed then or now that the two-state solution is possible.
Meanwhile even US presidents don’t control things, as congress is completely in thrall to Israel and will not allow any pressure to be put on Tel Aviv to negotiate. The Knesset voted unanimously against a Palestinian state for the nth time (68; 9 Arab Israelis voting for a Palestinian state).
Given Trump’s second term, funded by Mariam Adelson, probably none of this matters at all. Trump’s Project 2025 includes Project Esther, which plans to crush all anti-Israel dissent in the US and Europe and to create a Potemkin villlage of acceptable Palestinians, to be kept in line by Arab sheikhs with Israeli puppet masters. Netanyahu couldn’t have said it better.
Steinbock is hopeful re Russia, with its offer to Iran of S-400 anti-missile defense (a decade after Iran paid for them), showing the US that it is not the only kid on the bloc with nukes. But Steinbock’s only real hope is that world opinion, backed by a Jewish diaspora, will somehow click in and bring the US to its senses.
I would add the Palestinian diaspora, which is already larger (in 2003, 9.6 million) than the Jewish one (8.5million), working together, will be the driving force of change. And Islam. It is the fastest growing religion (always has been) and the Middle East is now multiple-birthing Ziophobia and Islamophilia.
It’s never been a better time to be a Muslim. We have a huge diaspora in the House of War. And we have Boycott Divest Sanction (BDS) as the secular version of jihad. When Jews, Christians* and Muslims can join forces, we can do anything.
The first real sign that South African apartheid would be dismantled was when (Jewish) MP Harry Schwarz met with ANC’s Mangosuthu Buthelezi to sign the Mahlabatini Declaration of Faith in 1974, enshrined the principles of peaceful transition of power and equality for all, the first such agreement by black and white political leaders in South Africa.
But it took another two decades of struggle until de Klerk opened bilateral discussions with Nelson Mandela in 1993 for a transition of policies and government.
It seems we have reached that first stage today. Ehud Olmert, who served as Israel’s prime minister from 2006 to 2009, and Nasser al-Kidwa, the Palestinian foreign minister from 2005 to 2006, met Pope Francis on October 17, 2024, to promote a peace plan that would see a Palestinian state existing alongside the state of Israel ‘on the basis of 1967 borders’ with a few territorial adjustments.
Their plan calls for the city of Jerusalem to be the capital of both Israel and Palestine, with the Old City being ‘administered by a trusteeship of five states of which Israel and Palestine are part.’
*I have given Christianity short shrift here, but ‘that’s life.’ The Palestinian Christians have been decimated already, hanging on only due to their Muslim friends.
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