With Its Megalomaniacal Arrogance, Israel Is Turning Into Ancient Athens
Thousands of years after its collapse, Sparta is back in the headlines. Whether as an object of emulation or abhorrence, the ancient Greek city has become a type of model of comparison for Israel 2024, featuring militarism and the glorification of blood and soil at any price. And above all, because of a shared and total identification of national cohesion and power with anti-humanism, whose sublime realization is endless war.
Besides the fact that this model is simplistic, and blind to nuances, as historian Rachel Zelnick-Abramovitz has already noted in these pages ("After the Horrors of October 7, Should Israel Be Athens or Sparta?"; Aug. 27), the model is simply incorrect in historical terms.
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Its rampant militarism notwithstanding, Sparta did not want never-ending war – that notion conflicted with its self-perception, and even more with its order of priorities. If there's anything that was totally alien to the Spartan identity, at least until the end of the war with Athens, it was imperialism.
What Sparta wanted above all was external quiet, to enable it to cope with internal unrest, in the form of incessant rebellions by the Helots, the members of the lower class, who from the rulers' perspective were destined to be serfs.
In contrast, it was Athens that sought imperial status, and also openly declared that aspiration. Athens' ambition was to subjugate all of Greece, including Sparta, and from there to proceed to Sicily and southern Italy. It follows that if we want to compare present-day Israel to Greece of the 5th century B.C.E., we should look to Athens, which, as we shall see immediately, was very much like us.
The historian who chronicled the war of Sparta and its allies against Athens and its allies – it was a trans-Greece conflict – was Thucydides of Athens, who was one of the ranking commanders when the hostilities erupted (until his city exiled him as punishment for failing in a certain military operation).
One of the principal reasons for writing history, Thucydides states, is that it's likely that what was happening in his time would recur in the future, in one form or another. In that case, he maintained, his writings would be of assistance to those who wished to examine their own era in light of its similarity to the events in Athens in his time. And what happened there, and at that time, is indeed happening here and in our time.
One striking characteristic of Athens during its wartime period was a leadership crisis. The place of Pericles, the Athenian leader who operated on the basis of a defined political vision and who distinguished between his personal good from the good of the state, was usurped by demagogues.
The latter, in turn, transformed the private vision of their own personal success into a vision – if "vision" is the appropriate word here – for the state as a whole. They did not, in essence, declare "L'État, c'est moi" – I am the state – because their state was based on democracy and not absolute rule, but they definitely acted by the lights of that guiding principle.
Paramount among the demagogues was Alcibiades, who in the eyes of some shares many traits with Benjamin Netanyahu, as Guy Rolnik wrote here ("Netanyahu is Reading on the Fall of Ancient Greece. How Much Should We Read Into It?"; June 17).
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visits the Hermon, alongside IDF Chief of Staff Herzl Halevy on Tuesday.Credit: Maayan Toaf / GPO
Still, there is one major difference between the two: Alcibiades was, apparently, one of the most talented leaders and military commanders of his time, which can hardly be said of Netanyahu, who for years cultivated Hamas, leading to the horror of October 7.
Although, like Alcibiades, Netanyahu has charisma, unlike the ancient Athenian, his charisma is not based on any substantive content. It's a narcissistic, hollow charisma, with only a void behind it – no belief in peace, no security and no economy either. Nothing. All there is, is Netanyahu himself. His ability to sell that nothing as something of significance is proof of his extraordinary charisma, but the absence of any real substance renders it hollow. Netanyahu has often been termed a "magician." And he is one. But let's be precise: He actually reminds us of the Wizard of Oz, a pseudo-magician, who very successfully markets and sells himself as a magician. But he's like a headline that sells a tabloid, with nothing behind it.
The second point of comparison between us and Athens is imperialism that rests on megalomaniacal arrogance. At the start of the war, Pericles warned the Athenians not to go beyond their borders – to wage rigorous battles solely to preserve the empire they had created with such great toil. But following his death, not long afterward, political wisdom also died.
It was Alcibiades who pushed Athens, in the midst of the war with Sparta, to open an additional front outside Greece – in Sicily – and from there to keep going, with the entire world constituting the borders of the future empire.
The result was the formation of an unusual union between city-states in Sicily, which successfully persuaded Sparta to join them against the common enemy. The campaign in Sicily ended in a catastrophe for Athens: its subsequent defeat in the war in general and the loss of the empire it once possessed.
One striking characteristic of Athens during its wartime period was a leadership crisis. The place of Pericles was usurped by demagogues. Those statesmen transformed the private vision of their own personal success into a vision.
And there's also a third similarity relating to our predicament today. Before the war that swept up the whole Peloponnese region, Athens was considered, and not only by itself, to be the liberator of all of Greece from the Persian threat.
Athens was seen as embodying all the values that the whole of Greece espoused – liberty, above all – in contrast to Persian tyranny, which sought to subjugate all of Greece. Indeed, that was among the main rationales presented by Athens to justify its bestial and rampant imperialism: After all, because Athens had spared Greece from subjugation to Persia, it rightly deserved to rule it.
However, as the war progressed, Athens, previously a paragon of liberty, began to be perceived as an agent of tyranny aiming to bring all of Greece under its heel. Gradually, Sparta actually began to assume the role of the representative of liberty – of the future liberator of Greece from the yoke of Athens, which had become the new Persia.
Nevertheless, despite certain parallels between that situation and Israel's today, there is also one major difference. The 5th century B.C.E. was the century of the Sophists, who were experts in rhetoric – the art of persuasion. One of their central principles was "reasonability": In order to win in court or to persuade the public assembly, which was in charge of making political decisions, in making one's case, rational arguments had to be put forward, based on a realistic situation appraisal.
When Alcibiades initially persuaded the Athenians to go to war against Sicily, he cited rational arguments, based on facts, an actual course of events. Today's Israel, under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is being led not by facts but by lies, the central, underlying guideline being messianic – hence irrational – considerations.
It's important to distinguish between irrationality and rationale. Messianism has a rationale, a logic, of its own, but it's a logic that is entirely non-rational. It is the rationale of a lunatic. Accordingly, Athenian history will not avail us here.
“Destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem,” Francesco Hayez (1867).
So we need to turn to the history of Jewish nationalism, to the Second Temple period and the Great Revolt against the Romans – which brought about the destruction ofJerusalem and of the Temple, and above all many deaths – and later to the Bar Kochba revolt (the 133-135 C.E. uprising whose leader, Bar Kochba, was declared by Rabbi Akiva to be the "messiah"), which led, in turn, to greater destruction and more death.
As attested to by Flavius Josephus, the historian who documented it, many of Jerusalem's inhabitants described the Great Revolt as utter madness. They pleaded with the rebels not to embark on the deranged path of destruction to which they were leading the entire populace.
But it was to no avail, and the end was horrific. Nor could it have been anything but horrific, because that's the only place irrational logic leads to. One of its defining characteristics is "all or nothing" – when it's impossible to obtain everything, nothingness becomes a supreme and absolute value.
This is a way of thinking based on absolute terms, on to be or not to be, when the justification for being and the justification for not being are identical: that is, if I cannot exist, day by day and hour by hour, under messianic conditions, the only possibility, the sole moral option I am left with, is to cease to exist.
What, exactly, might this "nonbeing" look like? If, as Thucydides predicted, history repeats itself, the fate of Athens and the fate of Greece herald what will befall Israel and the whole region. The end of the war all those centuries ago led to the end of democracy in Athens, and to the onset of a rule of tyranny that entailed the slaughter of many of Athens' democratic citizens, and swept as many as possible into committing criminal acts.
The civil war that put paid to that rule did indeed restore democracy to Athens, but not its greatness, nor, ultimately, its liberty. The regional war weakened all of Greece, and in many senses destroyed it altogether, turning the entire Peloponnesus into fertile ground for a takeover by the enemy from the north, Macedon – first by the father, Philip, and afterward by his son, Alexander "the Great," most of whose greatness lies in the scale of the destruction he wrought on the places he conquered.
At that stage, the question of who won and who lost in the war of antiquity became unimportant. Thebes, an ally of victorious Sparta, was wiped off the face of the earth after rebelling against Macedon.
The same could definitely happen to us, if we insist on replicating history instead of learning from it.
Prof. Yoav Rinon is head of the department of comparative literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.