All nations have the right to self-determination. All nations should be aware that if you choose to establish yourself as in important/coercive ways a religious state, you’re eventually going to look like shit. Think Pakistan; or worse. Iran.
Bill’s coming due for Israel, as we’ve all noticed. The process is well underway there in the established forms: The destruction of an independent judiciary. The surrender of the state to corrupt, bigoted, violent, and reactionary fanatics. The dismantling of national education standards. The degradation/disappearance of women. And now, out goes the money.
“From my clients I’m hearing concrete instructions to mobilize money out of Israel, to Switzerland or London,” said Eran Goren, a co-founder of Fidelis Family Office, which manages the money of wealthy Israelis. “We work closely with private banking departments of big banks, and they say it’s from every direction — people are just pulling money out.”
A withering tech industry would make Israel poorer, weaker and more religious, [another observer] said. That ought to worry anyone concerned about the stability of the Middle East, he added.
“Weaker states tend to be more aggressive, and a weaker Israel will be a more aggressive Israel.”
But emergent Israel wants the money to go. A rich educated nation will always erode the poverty and ignorance at the core of fundamentalist Judaism. Education evolves people away from the bellicose certainty that their sect comprises God’s unique anointed world-redeemers.
If backwards is what the Israelis want, backwards is what they get. If you take a long historical perspective on the thing, the core of Israel’s collapse was inherent in its willingness from the outset to cave to fundamentalism. And it was willing to do that because, as it affirmed in 2018:
[T]he Knesset passed legislation reaffirming Israel’s identity as the “nation-state of the Jewish people,” which means that the country belongs to Jews like me [the author is Peter Beinart] who don’t live there, but not to the Palestinians who live under its control, even the lucky few who hold Israeli citizenship... Ultimately, a movement premised on ethnocracy cannot successfully defend the rule of law. Only a movement for equality can.