The empire that disregards history: Why Israel and the US are losing the future
As settler power frays in Washington and Tel Aviv, the world does not merely witness geopolitical decline, it witnesses a moral and civilisational reckoning. The future is slipping away not because enemies are strong, but because empire has forgotten the human truth at the heart of justice.
Empires rarely fall with a single blow. They wither, slowly at first — then suddenly. The United States and Israel, long accustomed to exercising power with impunity, are discovering this truth in real time. Their decline is not merely military or diplomatic; it is moral, demographic, philosophical and civilisational. A project built on domination can win battles and still lose history. Today, the world witnesses two states clinging to supremacy by force and propaganda, yet bleeding legitimacy, people, and confidence. They are cheating to win, and in the process, losing everything that once made their power formidable.
Recent Israeli migration data tells a story deeper than numbers. Over 168,000 Israelis have left the country in three years, far outpacing returnees. Requests to cancel residency have more than tripled. Those who once emigrated for opportunity now flee insecurity, political breakdown, and the sense that the Zionist promise is collapsing from within. Even the celebrated uptick in “aliyah” after 7 October cannot conceal the nervous exodus of those with Western passports and alternative futures. They are voting with their feet, and the vote says: the Zionist project is no longer safe, stable, or certain. These are not mere numbers. They convey the hard truth about the country’s largest-ever loss of human capital in such a short period. And this becomes ever so crucial considering it was a report presented to the Knesset’s Immigration and Absorption Committee.
Independent demographic and political-risk assessments signal a quiet but irreversible exodus. The Economist Intelligence Unit notes a sharp rise in outward movement driven by insecurity, global censure, and collapsing political credibility. Gallup polling records historic lows in Israeli confidence in the future and significant expressed desire to relocate. The OECD warns of intensifying skilled out-migration pressures, while European Jewish demography studies show growing Israeli-born populations settling in Europe and North America. The United Nations migration lens describes this as a “de-Zionisation of diaspora movement patterns” – a historic reversal in which more leave than return, not as temporary evacuees but as emigrants in search of a different moral, political, and human future. According to Gideon Levy, an award-winning Israeli journalist and author, the current situation in Israel is unsustainable, and the state, in its current form, faces eventual demise if it continues its reliance on military force, occupation, and denial of equal rights to Palestinians. Levy argues for a radical change in attitude and policies, including the creation of a single democratic state where Jews and Arabs have equal rights, as the two-state solution is no longer viable.
The United States, meanwhile, convulses in a different storm. A country that once prided itself on absorbing the world’s talent now turns migrants into enemies. A society built by immigrants now campaigns to wall itself off from them. The irony is historic: the country that became a superpower because it welcomed the world is collapsing into paranoia, exclusion, and white-nationalist nostalgia. The election of a Muslim progressive like Mamdani in this imagined political moment would once have signified American self-confidence — a nation bold enough to embrace pluralism and dissent. Instead, it provokes threats, fear-mongering, and presidential hostility to public support, revealing a polity so fragile it cannot tolerate the democracy it preaches.
This is not only Islamophobia; it is civilisational panic. When a country loses its ability to imagine a future shared across difference, its power is already gone in essence, even if the military remains intact.
The crisis engulfing Washington and Tel Aviv is not sudden. It is the logical culmination of settler-colonial projects confronted by the limits of coercion. Modern history is cruelly consistent: states that build themselves through ethnic supremacy ultimately collapse under the weight of the humanity they try to erase. From Spain’s expulsion of Jews and Muslims to South Africa’s apartheid, exclusion produces brittle power. It generates resistance without end. It breeds internal decay: corruption, militarism, surveillance, extremism, and a politics of fear. Settler projects can survive long cycles — but eventually they confront a reckoning when global moral consciousness shifts and internal contradiction corrode unity.
Israel and the United States are not dying because they are weak; they are dying because they are wrong. The philosopher Frantz Fanon foresaw this fate: colonial power becomes a prison for the coloniser, who must constantly defend the indefensible. Violence weaponised against the other eventually corrodes the self. The oppressor’s soul becomes as occupied as the land they seek to hold.
Today, Israeli society is riven by messianic nationalism and militarised fatalism. The United States spirals into reactionary anti-intellectualism where books are banned before weapons. These are not signs of strength but signs of fear.
From a geopolitical perspective, the weaknesses are visible. Israel has not achieved its strategic aims in Gaza despite overwhelming force. It stands militarily exhausted, politically isolated, and morally disgraced. A state that must continually escalate brutality to maintain control is not secure — it is desperate.
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The United States meanwhile discovers limits to sanctions, proxy wars, and financial coercion. The Global South forms new circuits of sovereignty outside Western tutelage. The American century has ended; the illusion simply persists in Washington’s rhetoric. The world no longer accepts the equation of Western dominance with global order. Palestine is now the ethical barometer of our era — and the verdict exposes Western hypocrisy beyond repair.
The tragedy is not merely geopolitical — it is moral. The United States could have embraced pluralism; Israel could have embraced coexistence. Instead, both chose supremacy over justice. They shrink inward, fortress-minded, afraid not of enemies but of equality itself. The more they cling to force, the more they unravel. The barbarism they claim to resist has emerged from within, not from without.
History also teaches that collapse is not only an ending — it is an unveiling. The fall of empire makes space for the rise of humanity.
When power forgets the sacred
History is not only a ledger of conquest; it is a moral theatre where civilizations prove their worth. Societies do not perish solely through defeat — they perish when they abandon the ethical foundations that once justified their existence.
Judaism warns against ḥurban, the ruin born of injustice. Christianity teaches that pride precedes destruction. Islam calls oppression a darkness that consumes the oppressor first. These traditions converge on a single truth: power that violates human sanctity ultimately collapses under its own weight.
Israel and America did not have to choose this path. Their founding scriptures called them to justice, mercy, humility, and care for the stranger. Instead, they sanctified strength and turned fear into doctrine. Their decline is therefore not simply political — it is spiritual.
There comes a threshold in every empire’s life where weapons cannot save it, and legitimacy cannot be manufactured by force. At that moment, power stands naked before history. And in that silence, it learns too late that domination without justice is not security – it is suicide.
The future will belong not to those who dominate, but to those who coexist; not to those who rule by fear, but those who practice mercy; not to those who hoard power, but those who humanise power.
As Elie Wiesel reminded us: “There must never be a time when we fail to protest.” For protest is not merely resistance, it is fidelity to the sacred truth that sustains civilisation: the world endures not by might, but by conscience. And on that foundation, a new order is already being born.
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