‘Next Year In Sparta!’ What is Israel’s endgame in the Middle East?

‘Go tell the Spartans, thou who passest by,
That here, obedient to their laws, we lie’

One of the things I did when I visited Greece was visit Thermopylae, site of the eponymous battle, where King Leonidas and his three hundred fellow Spartans fell delaying the advancing Persians and entered legend. The passage I quoted at the start is inscribed on a plaque installed at the top of a low hill in memory of their sacrifice. The plaque is not from antiquity of course, but the words apparently are, sourced from an original monument on the same spot that was built over two thousand years ago. It encapsulates the famous martial spirit of the Spartans, a population who were warned before battle to either return with their shield (and thus in victory) or upon it (and thus having died in glory). It’s a profound place, particularly if you recognise the debt that Western civilization owes the Spartans for their heroic defence for by slowing the Persians down, they bought the rest of Greece the crucial days they required to save themselves.

Having said that, it is very important to NOT over-romanticise the Spartans as many people have been prone to do. One of those people should be Israeli Prime Minister and indicted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu. A few weeks ago, before the current ceasefire took effect, he advocated that Israel should become a ‘super-Sparta’ in response to the growing levels of public disgust in western nations at the behaviour of the country he leads…

“In his speech on Monday, Netanyahu blamed foreigners for Israel’s increasing isolation, which he referred to as “a siege that is organised by a few states”.

“One is China, and the other is Qatar. And they are organising an attack on Israel, legitimacy, in the social media of the western world and the United States,” he said. To the west, he added, the threat was different but equally pernicious.

“Western Europe has large Islamist minorities. They’re vocal. Many of them are politically motivated. They align with Hamas, they align with Iran,” Netanyahu declared.

“They pressure the governments of western Europe, many of whom are kindly disposed to Israel, but they see that they are being overtaken, really, by campaigns of violent protest and constant intimidation.”

Sparta, ultimately, is the dark side of Western civilization, the lionisation of perceived hyper-masculinity, dictatorial autocracy and militarism in counterpoint to Athenian diplomacy, democracy and reason. Whilst neither city-state fit that neatly into how they are perceived by posterity, the self-chosen parallel with Sparta that Netanyahu employed is damning and indicates a lack of familiarity with how Sparta actually operated.

The Spartans oppressed a whole other Greek people, the helots, a slave caste who laboured so that the Spartans could play at war. Whilst numerically superior to the Spartans they were kept in a state of terror by the Spartans who declared war on them annually to legitimise killing them. The threat of a helot uprising was what preoccupied Spartan leaders night and day. They had the audacity to be scared of the very people they were brutalising.

If any of this sounds familiar, then the parallels to the modern Israeli-Palestinian conflict are clearly visible (and make Netanyahu’s use of Sparta in his rhetoric all the more head-scratching given how on the nose it is). Netanyahu is advocating that his people embrace both autarky and isolationism in the face of the condemnation of the majority of the rest of the planet.

Which increasingly begs the question, what is the endgame here? What is the long-term strategic plan? For surely this cannot last forever. Not just the war in Gaza, but the endless, grinding conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

Some Israeli far right fantasists talk of ‘Eretz Israel’ or ‘Greater Israel’, a land cleansed of Palestinians between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean and reserved solely for the use of Israeli Jews. Some of those fantasists are in government, such as Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, people who have openly called for the expulsion of Palestinians from their ancestral lands and the incorporation of those territories into Israel proper. Yet even Donald Trump has hesitated to back these steps, in spite of the fact that he has been lauded by Benjamin Netanyahu as ‘the greatest friend Israel has ever had in the White House’.

So, if the doomsday scenario of Palestinians dispossession and expulsion can’t be countenanced, not even by Donald Trump, then what is Netanyahu aiming for?

Is it possibly that it is what is there now, forever? An Israeli boot on a Palestinian throat as the Israelis try to drown out the tide of condemnation rising around them with periodic orgies of bloodletting? Is this the fate they envisage for their country in ten years? In twenty? In fifty? In a hundred? Do they really expect they can keep the Palestinians penned up forever? Does Netanyahu think that is a likely outcome? He’s an old man and unlikely to live more than another decade or two himself, what comes after him? Will his immediate successor say to the Palestinians ‘thus far shalt thou go and no further’ as he has?

Likely.

But what of their successor? And their successor? And their successor? Do they truly believe that they can bequeath to their children and grandchildren the horror of such a duty? Will their children and grandchildren even want to do it?

The rest of the world is unlikely to wait that long. Whilst the feebleness of all other nation’s governments has been exposed by the rapidity with which they have acquiesced to Israel’s American patron, the people of those states are displaying their outrage day by day. From boycotting Israeli goods to attempting to throw them out of Eurovision to banning supporters of Israeli football teams from attending an away game there is a growing movement to isolate Israel in the West. Whilst it is easy to mock such actions, which seem comically feeble when protesting one of the world’s most powerful militaries, such isolation is required and by necessity long lasting to effect a change in behaviour. Some will decry this process as a reward for terror and those who support it as useful idiots. In this ‘Newsletter’ article Ben Lowry argues the following

“Twenty-one years ago, in the autumn of 2004, I travelled all round Israel, to Tel Aviv, to Jerusalem, to an Israeli settlement in in the West Bank and also into the Palestinian-governed Nablus. I travelled north to Nazareth and the Sea of Galilee and south to the Dead Sea and on through the desert to Eilat, the resort on the Red Sea, on the southern border. I crossed that frontier into Egypt, and it was a vivid illustration of how radically more advanced Israel is than its shambolic neighbours. The Israeli border controls were hyper organised. The Egyptian side third world incompetence and chaos, with trumped-up officials who enjoy making you wait. Then you went outside to a more backward society, with people on donkeys and poorly surfaced roads and footpaths…The reaction of many British people to the Manchester massacre was the same as that of many people to October 7: protesting in ways that will boost the murderous, brutally repressive, would-be genocide merchants of Hamas, who are the antithesis of western liberals. The latter are often fools who give Hamas succour without realising it.”

You’ll see variations of this argument abound. That we should uncritically support Israel because Israel is part of our western cultural sphere against an oppressive, alien (and of course hopelessly, laughably incompetent) THEM.

Lowry of course misses the point. I would wager the vast majority of people hungry to hold Israel to account are under no illusion as to what kind of state the Palestinians are likely to build should they achieve one. Nor are the vast majority of people under any delusions as to what the monstrous Hamas actually is, the October 7th attacks were a ghastly atrocity and the suffering inflicted on the families of victims. whether killed that day, killed later or held hostage for up to years, is inexcusable. But so too is using that horror to justify genocide, as Israel has done. But people know wrong when they see it, they know oppression when they see it and they know mass murder when they see it and what Israel has done in Gaza, has done across all the occupied territories in fact, is all three. The Palestinians deserve freedom and the dignity of making their own choices as a sovereign people, not at the mercy of Israeli paranoia and greed. Any mistakes will be theirs to make and theirs to correct.

The war in Gaza has super-charged sentiments long stifled and if Israel hopes of a return to the status quo ante wherein the occupation and its horrors are tolerated by the wider world with only token protests, then they maybe disappointed. Only the end of the occupation and the establishment of a Palestinian state with Palestinians being able to live their lives in dignity, peacefully alongside Israel, will accomplish a lasting peace. Not a one state solution as promoted by some idealists who think equality before the law is all that is required, nor the fantasy of a Greater Israel peddled by crazies. The two state solution, as unlikely as it is, as wounded as it is, as crushed as it is, is the only plan that stands a chance of working without causing immense suffering.

Netanyahu has done everything in his power to thwart that. He has the stomach to try and tough it out with the example of Sparta to guide him but he cannot bind posterity as much as he would like and he might also want to familiarise himself with what happened to Sparta rather than the pop-culture perception most are familiar with of nearly unbeatable, heroic warriors.

You see, at the time, many of the other Greek city-states were disgusted by Sparta’s treatment of those helots who were after all fellow Greeks, but none were willing to do anything about it until an ascendant Thebes went to war with Sparta. That conflict ended when Thebes liberated the helots and deprived Sparta of the slaves required to sustain their economic model. Sparta collapsed and never rose again. Historically, they were a dead end, as much as their legacy has haunted history for both good and ill.

There is no modern Thebes today of course, no nation state willing to intervene directly on Palestine’s behalf. None can. But today is not going to be the same as tomorrow. Time changes, circumstances change, people change and nothing holds. The Palestinians will one day be free because it is unconscionable to mankind that they be left to endure in bondage forever. Netanyahu’s vision would be that will never happen, but his horizon of vision is merely until he loses power and one day he won’t be there anymore. His vision of the super Sparta is fated to end as the real Sparta’s did because no people can be held in bondage forever. I hope future Israeli governments after his find the courage to be a part of that process, rather than having it forced upon them and that they reject the doomed Spartan path that Netanyahu advocates.