Israel, the Hermit Kingdom

Like the U.S., Israel is a melting pot of immigrants where assimilation is expected to include learning the national language. Unlike us, who have been blessed with seeing our mother tongue spread as the 20th and 21st centuries' lingua franca, more than 90% of Israelis read and speak one of the most globally useless languages anywhere, an artificially revived form of long-dead Hebrew. Curious Americans looking for viewpoints outside the mainstream-media echo chamber can access the BBC, CBC and Al Jazeera English for foreign coverage in English. Israelis looking for alternative news and opinions in Hebrew have no options.

Founded in large part by Holocaust survivors and veterans of numerous wars, and beleaguered by countless terrorist attacks, Israel is understandably obsessed with security. But security is a two-edged sword. When you keep other people out, you yourself remain inside. And you are deprived of the insights and different ways of looking at things that people get when they interact with others and opinions that differ from their own.

It's also not very effective. Israel, a self-declared safe haven for global Jewry, is by far the most dangerous country for Jewish people.

Consider, for example, the massive "smart" high-tech security walls Israel built to keep out residents of the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank. They were remarkably effective (until Oct. 7) at segregating populations that Israelis have come to view as dangerous, if not as inherent enemies. At the same time, Israelis now have no day-to-day interaction with their Arab neighbors. They don't do business together, they don't make friends, they don't date, they don't talk, they can't get each other. Walling off Gaza is such an extreme act that it cuts off Israel from the Mediterranean Sea; no country interested in its internal security or military strategy voluntarily relinquishes access to the sea. Even the Arab Israelis who comprise 20% of Israel's population have found themselves discriminated against, isolated and alienated within their own country.

It's the height of irony. It's not just the people of Gaza who live in a giant open-air concentration camp. Survivors of Germany's camps have built their own prison camp -- for themselves -- and it's the biggest, most effective one of them all.

No wonder Israelis can't relate to the rest of the planet. They've been living on the inside so long they don't see the real world anymore. Colonialism, a distinctly 19th and early 20th century project, is an anachronism. Apartheid, too. Israelis don't see that opposing the war against Gaza isn't the same as anti-Zionism, which itself isn't the same as antisemitism. They don't understand that, these days, even if you don't care about the people you are killing to steal their land, you have to pretend you do (e.g., Biden's parachute drops of food into the same place his bombs are killing the starving locals).

A poll by the Israel Democracy Institute found that 75% of Jewish Israelis think the country should ignore pressure from the U.S. to wind down the war in Gaza. A Gallup poll showed 65% oppose an independent Palestinian state. "It isn't fashionable to trust Palestinians, any Palestinians," former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert observes. That's how white South Africans felt about Blacks during apartheid. Now, of course, they're fine. So it would be in a unified post-apartheid Palestine.

Now the highest-ranking Jewish politician in the U.S., Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, has formally issued a Biden-approved verbal demand for regime change in Israel, saying Israel should call new elections, which polls indicate Netanyahu might lose.

Yet Netanyahu persists. "No international pressure will stop Israel," the prime minister says, pledging to attack Rafah despite Biden's warning.

"Isolated, cloistered, militaristic and more unhinged than ever, Israel is becoming the North Korea of the Middle East," Uri Misgav writes in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. Israelis need to tear down their paranoia-grounded security walls, not just to liberate the Palestinians -- though that is way overdue! -- but to free themselves.

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Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted's hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.