Israel. Is the Game Over?

More than twenty years ago, I cried out at the tragic end of Zionism. Already then, democracy in Israel was dying on the hilltops of the occupied territories, and the country’s soul had already been infected with a deadly disease. “After ceasing to care for Palestinian children,” I wrote, “we should not be surprised when they return, filled with hate, to blow themselves up in our escapist city centers. They entrust their lives to God amid our leisure districts, because their lives are filled with suffering. They shed their blood in our restaurants to ruin our appetite, because they have hungry, humiliated children and parents at home.”

Years have passed since then. Countless funerals. The prophecy fulfilled. The affliction has only grown more acute, and now we can no longer avoid the question that refuses to let go: Could it be that the current State of Israel, that its body stronger than ever and its spirit deader than ever, no longer deserves to exist? Not because of what happened on October 7, but because of everything that came before, and everything that has erupted since.

There are moments when a nation and each of its citizens must pause and confront the most difficult questions. For many Israelis and Jews around the world, this is one of those moments. The realities of Gaza are unbearable: dead children, starving families, entire neighborhoods erased. Sacred sites reduced to rubble, ancient communities annihilated. And once again masses of refugees, many for the second or third time, are homeless in the besieged Gaza Strip. This time, there is no external oppressor to blame. We are Gaza’s tormentors. Willfully and deliberately. And if that weren’t enough, our crimes are compounded by a chilling indifference. Most of Israeli society remains numb, unmoved. The destruction of Gaza is a damning indictment of Israel’s moral bankruptcy. And we must face the truth: Israel without an ethical foundation has no justification to exist.

The initial Israeli response to October 7 was swift and fierce. Born of mass hysteria that gripped everyone, from the prime minister to the last citizen. But hysteria soon gave way to something darker: a cold, calculated campaign of revenge, driven by a merciless thirst for blood. And now we’ve crossed into a third phase. The Israeli government, with chilling composure, is implementing a plan that has long lurked in the national psyche: to erase Palestinian existence from every area under Israeli control. Through harassment, discrimination, segregation, starvation, expulsion, and killings, all intentional. That horrific day served as a certificate of legitimacy for the darkest impulses within us. Netanyahu and his gang won’t miss the opportunity. They are executing what they see as the final stage in Israel’s founding mission: the completion of the 1948 expulsion. In their warped vision, “Ben-Gurion didn’t finish the job.” Israel of 2025 has signed a divorce decree from the liberal democracy that once tried to survive amid a tangle of identities, traumas, and threats.

That older Israel, now nostalgically remembered, was a fledgling democracy. It bore the birth pangs of a new state and the injuries of an old, traumatized society: Holocaust, dislocation, and the Nakba. It was far from perfect, but it leaned toward a more positive horizon. Democracy evolved. Fragile peace agreements were signed. A welfare-oriented economy improved lives. Activist courts, responsive governments, and a vibrant civil society worked to narrow gaps, fix flaws, safeguard rights, and extend liberties. Optimism had reason to hope.

Zionism began as an ancient dream. A refuge, a place of dignity and repair. A haven from antisemitism, a home where Jews could live freely and equally, not as occupiers, and not as victims. That dream has become a nightmare. The occupation has dragged on for over fifty years. The two-state solution is a tired joke. Gaza lies in ruins. Palestinian lives are worthless in Israeli public discourse. Arab citizens of Israel are discriminated as second-class. Dissenting voices are branded traitorous. The leader is a demigod, his followers, a violent and deluded cult. Israel 2025 is not democratic, not liberal, not secular, not rational, not peace-seeking, and no longer a part of the Western world. Its identity is primarily religious. Its economy is a grotesque hybrid: capitalist for the productive and tax-paying sectors, Soviet-style socialist when it comes to allocating resources to favored groups. The government is corrupt. The state murderous. The society, disintegrated.

There is no longer one Israel. There are four separate societies, bound together only by the perpetual war that sustains the illusion of unity. Without war, everything would collapse. There is nothing left to hold Israelis together, except real and imagined threats. Look and see:

The ultra-Orthodox have become the Shylocks of greed. They brand themselves as defenders of Israel’s “Jewishness,” yet have shown no moral, human, or religious concern for the hostages or the fallen. Why should they care? It’s not their war. Their sons are not fighting or dying. For decades, they’ve focused solely on two sectoral goals: to perpetuate their exemption from military service, and to extract as much state funding as possible. Exploiting resources they did not help generate. Their separatism and greed have destroyed the basic solidarity of the society.

The national-religious Zionists are dying in droves and killing just as many. Because the military ethos is central to their identity. They are the opposite of the Haredim in this respect. They rush to war, many driven by a messianic fervor. Raised on the belief that the land is sacred and that conquering it is the first step of redemption; they see the State of Israel as “the dawn of the redemption.” Every war with Palestinians is, for them is a holy war. Their goals are chillingly clear: cleanse the land of its foreigners, destroy this generation’s Amalek, and usher in the Messiah. A war with no end. For their rabbis and ministers, war is not a threat it is an opportunity. A miraculous era. Their messianism has extinguished rational Israel.

Secular Israelis if any still exist, have collapsed. They carry the burden of the entire state. They are the productive, creative class. They pay the taxes, serve in the army and the reserve service. It is them who maintain Israel’s image as a modern, innovative, liberal democracy. They are the Israel that was. Yet politically they are weak, fragmented, and unfocused. Exhausted and exploited. Serving and carry out policies they may not even believe in. They don’t revolt, even though their backs can no longer bear the weight of parasitic ultra-Orthodox and messianic fundamentalists. And when they finally fall, who will fund the fantasy? Their political weakness and the pitiful state of their leadership are the clearest signs of Israel’s demise.

And then there are the Palestinian citizens of Israel. From the day the state was founded until the destruction of Gaza, they have never known equal citizenship. And yet they have risen above. With restraint and dignity, they have prevented the opening of a new internal front against the very state that is annihilating their people. Their “reward” from Netanyahu’s inciting regime? More incitement, more persecution, and deeper neglect of every aspect of civilian life. Their ongoing harassment by Netanyahu and his thugs as well as deafening silence of the opposition leaders, has eliminated any remaining claim that Israel is a democracy of all its citizens.

To ask whether the Israeli project has failed is a genuine attempt to name the chasm between vision and reality. A voice within says: a state that systematically denies rights to millions, that justifies mass killing as a security strategy, and that elevates Jewish supremacy and inequality to the level of ideology, such a state may no longer claim moral legitimacy. Perhaps the Israel that has severed itself from its founding values and now stands in defiance of the very international norms that brought it into being, has lost the right to exist.

There are no easy answers. I do not seek destruction. I reject despair. But my eyes are wide open. And I know we’ve reached an abyss from which there is only one path back: a different kind of social contract. Not one based on tribal nationalism, but on shared humanity and equal citizenship. A covenant in which Jews and Arabs live together. Not as enemies, not as rulers and ruled, but as partners across the trauma. Who swear to themselves and to one another: Never Again. Together, we must set out on a new path, different from all past attempts. Because if we cannot redirect the course of history, then we must admit: it’s over. Truly over. And perhaps, justly so.