On Monday afternoon, a few hours before the first ferocious attacks of Israel’s ground offensive in Gaza City made buildings tremble as far away as Tel Aviv, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in Jerusalem for an economics conference. With his far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, sitting in the front row, Netanyahu took the stage, looking a little peeved, and berated the event’s organizers for muddling his slide show. Then he turned to the audience: a group of officials from the treasury, whom he needed to persuade to expand the national deficit in order to finance the next phase of the war.
Israel is “facing a new world,” he said—and the reason isn’t the war in Gaza. Rather, he cited two other factors that imposed “limitations” on the country’s prospects. The first, he said, is “limitless migration” of Muslims to Western Europe, where they have become a “significant minority—very vocal, very, very belligerent.” The second is a digital revolution that has led Qatar, China, and other countries to invest in social-media platforms that promote an “anti-Israel agenda.” The result was “a sort of isolation,” he said, sounding more like a pundit than like the leader of a country that a United Nations commission has just concluded is committing genocide.
Since the war in Gaza began, sparked by the Hamas-led attacks of October 7th, 2023, Israeli officials have experienced growing international isolation. In a sharp blow to Israel’s diplomatic efforts, many countries—including its longtime allies, such as Britain, France, and Canada—have declared that they will recognize a Palestinian state at the United Nations General Assembly next week. Some of these countries have restricted the sale of arms to Israel; a number of others have banned selling weapons to the country entirely. But this ostracism has also been felt more widely across Israeli society, including among the large numbers of Israelis who oppose the war. Cultural events, festivals, research grants, and academic conferences have increasingly excluded Israelis simply because of their nationality. Israeli tourists have been singled out for abuse overseas, and violent attacks on non-Israeli Jews are on the rise.
After the International Criminal Court sought to issue an arrest warrant for Netanyahu over war crimes, in May of 2024, he lashed out against its top prosecutor, calling him one of the “great antisemites in modern times.” Drawing again on a sense of grievance, Netanyahu warned in his speech on Monday, “We will increasingly need to adapt to an economy with autarkic characteristics.” This technical term, referring to a closed-off and self-reliant economy, is “the word I most hate,” he went on. “I am a believer in the free market, but we may find ourselves in a situation where our arms industries are blocked.” In a scenario of “Athens and Sparta,” he said, Israel will “have to become Athens and super-Sparta. There’s no choice. In the coming years, at least, we will have to deal with these attempts to isolate us. What’s worked until now will not work from now on.”
The Tel Aviv stock exchange dipped, and a public uproar began. The opposition leader Yair Lapid called Netanyahu’s speech “crazy.” The Israel Business Forum, which represents two hundred of the country’s largest companies, issued a stern warning: “We are not Sparta.” The real problem, it suggested, was that government policies were leading Israel “toward a political, economic, and social abyss.” Yossi Verter, of the liberal newspaper Haaretz, wrote a column titled “Netanyahu Turns Start-Up Nation Into Sparta Nation—and Indicts Himself Along the Way.” He suggested that Netanyahu’s speech was a misguided attempt to replicate Winston Churchill’s famous evocation of “blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” But, he added, this rhetorical failure was still revelatory: for the first time, Netanyahu had given a “realistic” depiction of Israel’s standing in the world.
Others focussed on Netanyahu’s odd choice of metaphor. Nadav Eyal, a columnist for the centrist broadsheet Yediot Ahronot, posted a tart historical reminder: “By the way, Sparta lost.” Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli diplomat, told me, “You would think that a guy who boasts about his understanding of the patterns of history would know what the fuck he’s talking about.” During the past century, Pinkas said, four countries have behaved like an autarkic Sparta: Nazi Germany, apartheid-era South Africa, Albania under its Communist regime, and, most recently, North Korea. “This is the club you want to join?” Pinkas asked.
By the following day, even Netanyahu’s allies were conscious of the fallout. Channel 12, Israel’s dominant television network, reported that Smotrich had privately told the Prime Minister, “You did damage. Now you’re the one to fix it.” Netanyahu hastily convened a press conference, where he alternated between Hebrew and English. “There has been a misunderstanding,” he said, arguing feebly that the only area in which Israel risked isolation was in arms manufacturing. He reiterated that he had “full confidence” in the country’s economy, and he hailed foreign investments. He didn’t mention that per-capita growth rates in Israel have been negative for two years running.
Supporters of the government suggested that Netanyahu’s error was merely one of framing—and that he needed tough language in order to persuade treasury bureaucrats to bankroll his expanded military operation. Indeed, throughout his speech to the treasury officials, Netanyahu kept imploring his audience, in English, to “cut down the bureaucracy!” A column in the Jerusalem Post, a right-leaning English-language newspaper, argued that the speech was “a sales pitch, not his aspirational philosophy.”
But Netanyahu’s rhetoric, if impolitic, was resonant: the image of Israel as a militarized city-state will be hard to dispel. While analysts argued about the Prime Minister’s wording, tanks rolled into central Gaza, and tens of thousands of Palestinians fled on foot, heading to southern areas of the enclave where there is no infrastructure to accommodate them. Hundreds of thousands more remained in Gaza City, either unable or too exhausted to escape. Mohammed Abu Salmiya, the director of Gaza City’s Al-Shifa Hospital, posted an image of six premature babies crammed inside a single incubator, and warned of imminent danger to their lives. Haaretz reported that roughly a hundred Palestinians were killed in less than twenty-four hours.