Yeah. I have wondered the same about Israel my whole life. It is analogous to apartheid in South Africa, but conditions and privileged class size are dramatically different, so it didn’t seem like a “critical mass” of native peoples would be able to topple it unless every Palestinian refugee from Gaza, the West Bank, and surrounding countries that were displaced by the Nakba suddenly encroached peacefully back to their homeland. Obviously unlikely to happen.

After October 7, I think the actual strategy finally started making sense to me when we started seeing mass exodus of settlers to nations they hold dual citizenship. You do not necessarily need to defeat the Israeli military to beat Israel, you simply need the state to become unsustainable. It is already spread so thin that hemorrhaging settler population is something it simply can’t afford to do. All of its institutions rely on steady influx of settlers as well as a relatively high domestic birth rate. This is only sustained because of the Nazi-esque pseudoscience and mythology that Israel’s privileged class is safe because of their superiority to their neighbors AS A PEOPLE, and if you are Jewish YOU TOO are one of those superior people and you should move to Israel.

The most sad part about it is that there are actually Jews native to Palestine, before Zionism, with a real culture and history and connection to the land who have been the victimized by Israeli settler-colonialism. Like all settler colonies, the beliefs and history of the native people could not coexist alongside that of the settlers. Their native beliefs and culture and lifestyle have been systematically twisted and thus erased by a fascist project with no actual interest in protecting the storied history of Jews native to Palestine, or anywhere for that matter. The Zionist entity’s only goal, as a fascist settler-colonial project, was to create a new, “superior” Jewish identity to those of old; one that strategically dismantles, co-opts, tosses away, or corrupts the REAL incredible stories, history, and unique cultures of Jewish diaspora as a truly globe-spanning people. The fascist Zionist project crushes all of that down and spins it into the same, tired, all encompassing lie that every fascist state tells its people.

We all know the mythology that built Israel up: their supposedly heroic and invincible armies against the Arab coalitions, their “turning the desert green” myth, their “all Jews are diaspora from this land” myth, its “best cuisine in the world and totally not co-opted actual cultural dishes” myth, its “only democracy in the Middle East” myth, its being an integral part of “an ancient western belief” in Judeo-Christian values, and so on and so on. The millisecond that bubble of superiority is popped, Israel loses everything because it never actually had anything. When there is no sense of superiority to believe in, there genuinely is no Israel.

I’ve been wondering in a similar vein does Israel even have an internal deescalation ability? Once the US supported them full force they adopted a policy of being as heinous as possible until the US would pull on their leash finally, but they’ve been given proof over the past two years that the US isn’t going to do that anymore. It’s enough time for an entire generation of politicians to have no institutional power to rein in the genocideers if they even realize they need to pump the brakes. If that’s the case then a coup might be the only way to keep the state together but would be instantly subject to a backstabber conspiracy