[Salon] Netanyahu Says he’s making Israel a “Sparta:” He means a global Pariah State




9/23/25

Netanyahu Says he’s making Israel a “Sparta:” He means a global Pariah State



Oakland, Ca. (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to position Israel as the modern day Sparta, and to sell this concept to a war-weary Israeli populace. Does this means every male born in Israel is now being raised to be a Special Forces warrior? And women too, since it’s Israel? That, is everybody would be drafted into the equivalent of the Navy Seals except for the Yeshiva and rabbinic students, who enjoy still de facto economy-sucking exemption from a military commitment.

What Netanyahu, who unlike his father is no historian, ignores is that being a Spartan was sometimes the equivalent of being a soldier at Custer’s Last Stand. The 480 BCE Battle of Thermopylae between the Spartans and the Achaemenid army of Iran resulted in the massacre of the Spartan rear guard. Being a Spartan was sometimes not that different from being an ancient Jewish rebel of the sort who engaged in a suicide mission at the 72 CE Roman siege of Masada. Netanyahu and his far-right extremist cronies have taken Israel on a sure path to political and economic suicide. He is displaying an imperial envy of the Agiad King Leonidas I — the Spartan monarch who led the Greeks at Thermopylae against the troops of Xerxes I. But I don’t know that Bibi has read that far back, or thinks that deeply. In that battle, the Greeks, massively outnumbered, beat a retreat except for 300 last-ditch defenders of the pass, who were slaughtered by the crack Iranian troops. Netanyahu is clearly willing to sacrifice more than the 300 lost at Thermopylae, and the Israeli hostages in Gaza as well. All of his atrocities are motivated by his vainglorious ambition to remain in office. It’s as though he romanticizes the Spartans as a college sports team, not a grave history lesson.

Rather than recognize the losing hand he is playing, Netanyahu continues to double down on the notion that Israel must accept its global pariah status, and to position the Jewish state as a modern day “Super Sparta.” In a September 15 speech at the Account General’s Conference in Jerusalem, Netanyahu argued that Israel should accept its embattled state as a permanent condition, prepare for endless wars, and bankrupt Israel’s economy to pay for them. Bibi’s fantasy is to accept global economic isolation, and to fall back on an “autarkic,” closed, self-reliant economy. But that North Korean-style fantasy conflicts with his proclaimed “free market commitments;” and, ironically, this vision of Israeli autonomy is reliant on continued American welfare payments to finance Netanyahu’s endless war dreams. This state of constant war and isolation is what the US will be enabling if it continues to provide unconditional, unlimited financial support for the Israeli genocide machine. Netanyahu made his “Sparta” argument in a debate with the Finance Ministry over his demand to divert more money away from infrastructure needs, toward the Israeli military.

In a candid moment of self-fulfilling prophecy, the prime minister embraced Israel’s global diplomatic and trade alienation saying, “There’s no choice; in the coming years, at least, we will have to deal with these attempts to isolate us,” — as if he had not already led Israel to an unprecedented level of global isolation. The Israeli Defense and Finance Ministries are having a contentious debate about the ever-escalating war-time spending, and Bibi’s request to divert more money from infrastructure toward war. He characterized this choice as inexorable destiny, as if Israel’s pariah status is not of his own making. Netanyahu attributes the European anti-Israel consensus to the burgeoning Muslim populations on those countries, rather than the world’s growing objection to Israel’s genocide, orchestrated displacement and calculated mass starvation of Gazans.

Tone deaf and cocooned with the far, far Right, Netanyahu is also misreading the Israeli public’s own mood, ignoring its distaste for endless war. His concept of a Super Sparta is gravely offensive to families of the hostages, fallen soldiers and those maimed in military actions. Yaacov Katz, the former editor of the Jerusalem Post, said in that newspaper, “Israelis yearn for healing and a return to stability, while their leaders speak instead of isolation, annexation, and perpetual struggle. A super-Sparta from Netanyahu . . . (portends) a future not of reconciliation but of continued conflict.” Trump and Finance Minister Belezel Smotrich see Gaza as a real estate boom waiting to happen, not a killing field of starvation and genocide. Israelis paying the price are tired of it.

For right-wing Israelis and American Republican Jews, it seems counter-intuitive that Donald Trump’s enabling and fulfillment of Netanyahu’s wish list has been destructive for Israel. Whereas, Presidents Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama acted as true friends of the Israeli people, by restraining or saying “NO” to Netanyahu and his Likud Party’s worst instincts. Trump’s first term appointments of David Friedman as Ambassador and son-in-law Jared Kushner as special Middle East envoy were disastrous, and his second term is if anything worse. Republican Jews fail to recognize that Donald Trump is not good for the Jews or Israel, and uses anti-Semitism as a false flag for his Fascist attacks on academic freedom. Trump employs a few “useful Jews,” and pays them well as props to further the illusion that he cares about Jews or Israel. His only interest is Gaza beachfront property to develop more resorts.“Sparta worships Ares,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3, 2025. 

Should Israel perish under the hubris and arrogance of PM Benjamin Netanyahu, the ethical religion of Judaism will endure. I rely on what William Faulkner said in his 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech: “I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.” That spirit of compassion is central to Judaism. The Hebrew Bible commands 36 times, and perhaps as many as 46 times, to care for strangers and not oppress them. It is not the ethics of Sparta, a pagan power that sacrificed to false gods and whored after the power to oppress. It is the ethics of Judaism, which will survive Israel.



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