Israel’s New Occupation
Benjamin Netanyahu says that Israel must become Sparta, hardened against the world. What does that mean for the country’s future?
By Ruth Margalit
September 18, 2025
Photograph by Nathan Howard / Getty
On Monday afternoon, a few hours before the first ferocious attacks of Israel’s ground offensive in Gaza City made buildings tremble as far away as Tel Aviv, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in Jerusalem for an economics conference. With his far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, sitting in the front row, Netanyahu took the stage, looking a little peeved, and berated the event’s organizers for muddling his slide show. Then he turned to the audience: a group of officials from the treasury, whom he needed to persuade to expand the national deficit in order to finance the next phase of the war.
The Lede
Israel is “facing a new world,” he said—and the reason isn’t the war in Gaza. Rather, he cited two other factors that imposed “limitations” on the country’s prospects. The first, he said, is “limitless migration” of Muslims to Western Europe, where they have become a “significant minority—very vocal, very, very belligerent.” The second is a digital revolution that has led Qatar, China, and other countries to invest in social-media platforms that promote an “anti-Israel agenda.” The result was “a sort of isolation,” he said, sounding more like a pundit than like the leader of a country that a United Nations commission has just concluded is committing genocide.
Since the war in Gaza began, sparked by the Hamas-led attacks of October 7th, 2023, Israeli officials have experienced growing international isolation. In a sharp blow to Israel’s diplomatic efforts, many countries—including its longtime allies, such as Britain, France, and Canada—have declared that they will recognize a Palestinian state at the United Nations General Assembly next week. Some of these countries have restricted the sale of arms to Israel; a number of others have banned selling weapons to the country entirely. But this ostracism has also been felt more widely across Israeli society, including among the large numbers of Israelis who oppose the war. Cultural events, festivals, research grants, and academic conferences have increasingly excluded Israelis simply because of their nationality. Israeli tourists have been singled out for abuse overseas, and violent attacks on non-Israeli Jews are on the rise.
After the International Criminal Court sought to issue an arrest warrant for Netanyahu over war crimes, in May of 2024, he lashed out against its top prosecutor, calling him one of the “great antisemites in modern times.” Drawing again on a sense of grievance, Netanyahu warned in his speech on Monday, “We will increasingly need to adapt to an economy with autarkic characteristics.” This technical term, referring to a closed-off and self-reliant economy, is “the word I most hate,” he went on. “I am a believer in the free market, but we may find ourselves in a situation where our arms industries are blocked.” In a scenario of “Athens and Sparta,” he said, Israel will “have to become Athens and super-Sparta. There’s no choice. In the coming years, at least, we will have to deal with these attempts to isolate us. What’s worked until now will not work from now on.”
The Tel Aviv stock exchange dipped, and a public uproar began. The opposition leader Yair Lapid called Netanyahu’s speech “crazy.” The Israel Business Forum, which represents two hundred of the country’s largest companies, issued a stern warning: “We are not Sparta.” The real problem, it suggested, was that government policies were leading Israel “toward a political, economic, and social abyss.” Yossi Verter, of the liberal newspaper Haaretz, wrote a column titled “Netanyahu Turns Start-Up Nation Into Sparta Nation—and Indicts Himself Along the Way.” He suggested that Netanyahu’s speech was a misguided attempt to replicate Winston Churchill’s famous evocation of “blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” But, he added, this rhetorical failure was still revelatory: for the first time, Netanyahu had given a “realistic” depiction of Israel’s standing in the world.
Others focussed on Netanyahu’s odd choice of metaphor. Nadav Eyal, a columnist for the centrist broadsheet Yediot Ahronot, posted a tart historical reminder: “By the way, Sparta lost.” Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli diplomat, told me, “You would think that a guy who boasts about his understanding of the patterns of history would know what the fuck he’s talking about.” During the past century, Pinkas said, four countries have behaved like an autarkic Sparta: Nazi Germany, apartheid-era South Africa, Albania under its Communist regime, and, most recently, North Korea. “This is the club you want to join?” Pinkas asked.
By the following day, even Netanyahu’s allies were conscious of the fallout. Channel 12, Israel’s dominant television network, reported that Smotrich had privately told the Prime Minister, “You did damage. Now you’re the one to fix it.” Netanyahu hastily convened a press conference, where he alternated between Hebrew and English. “There has been a misunderstanding,” he said, arguing feebly that the only area in which Israel risked isolation was in arms manufacturing. He reiterated that he had “full confidence” in the country’s economy, and he hailed foreign investments. He didn’t mention that per-capita growth rates in Israel have been negative for two years running.
Supporters of the government suggested that Netanyahu’s error was merely one of framing—and that he needed tough language in order to persuade treasury bureaucrats to bankroll his expanded military operation. Indeed, throughout his speech to the treasury officials, Netanyahu kept imploring his audience, in English, to “cut down the bureaucracy!” A column in the Jerusalem Post, a right-leaning English-language newspaper, argued that the speech was “a sales pitch, not his aspirational philosophy.”
But Netanyahu’s rhetoric, if impolitic, was resonant: the image of Israel as a militarized city-state will be hard to dispel. While analysts argued about the Prime Minister’s wording, tanks rolled into central Gaza, and tens of thousands of Palestinians fled on foot, heading to southern areas of the enclave where there is no infrastructure to accommodate them. Hundreds of thousands more remained in Gaza City, either unable or too exhausted to escape. Mohammed Abu Salmiya, the director of Gaza City’s Al-Shifa Hospital, posted an image of six premature babies crammed inside a single incubator, and warned of imminent danger to their lives. Haaretz reported that roughly a hundred Palestinians were killed in less than twenty-four hours.
Israel Katz, the Israeli defense minister, issued a celebratory announcement online: “Gaza is burning.” The military, he added, was fighting “for the release of the hostages and the defeat of Hamas.” Meanwhile, the families of several hostages had camped outside Netanyahu’s residence in Jerusalem overnight, pleading with him through a megaphone to halt the occupation, for fear of endangering their loved ones.
The plan to conquer central Gaza has drawn international condemnation from the moment it was first announced, last month. Inside Israel, the security establishment and the military’s top commander, Eyal Zamir, also criticized the initiative. In a poll released earlier this month, forty-one per cent of Israelis said that they opposed the military occupation, and only twenty-eight per cent said that they supported it. (Close to a third of respondents were undecided.) The sense inside Israel is of a country “hijacked” by its leader, as the Israeli journalist Roni Dori has put it—expanding a war that most of the public has long wanted to see end in a deal that will secure the return of the hostages.
Netanyahu insisted that an operation in central Gaza—which the Israeli military had previously refrained from entering, because many of the remaining hostages are believed to be held there—was necessary to deal a final blow to Hamas. On Tuesday, however, he implied that his decision was tied to an ongoing criminal investigation against him on charges of corruption. (He denies any wrongdoing.) Appearing in court for a long-scheduled testimony, he asked the judges if he could be excused early: the military had just embarked on an “intensive phase” of fighting, he said. The judges agreed to reduce his testimony by three hours.
Pinkas told me that Netanyahu’s attempt to project strength was actually an admission of failure. “If this is a just war, and Israel was savagely attacked, yet we are isolated to the point of becoming a super-Sparta, then it’s a sign of defeat,” he said. What would it mean for Israel, a country built by refugees from the ashes of the Holocaust, to become a warmongering Sparta? What does it mean to emulate a place where boys as young as seven were trained only to fight? For years, Israelis have been at the forefront of scientific and technological innovation. Now they are being called on by their leader to adapt to a grim reality of military might. In Netanyahu’s view, Pinkas went on, “We are alone, and the year is always 1938.” Ironically, this vision of the future precisely matches one that the international movement to boycott Israel wishes to see: a country divested from and sanctioned, left to fend for itself.
By Wednesday, two divisions of the Israeli military were approaching the center of Gaza City; a third is expected to join them there. There were reports in Israel that reservist soldiers who previously had exemptions because of P.T.S.D. or other mental-health conditions were being called to serve. The only thing that can reverse the government’s decision at this point is sustained pressure from the U.S., of the kind that President Donald Trump, working with the outgoing Biden Administration, applied over the winter, when he forced on Israel and Hamas a temporary ceasefire and hostage release. Yet the public statements coming from the U.S. appear much weaker this time around. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said this week that Trump wants the war “to be over quickly.” But Netanyahu did not commit to a timeline of retreat. Someday Trump “will presumably understand that this is a bluff,” Chaim Levinson wrote in Haaretz, on Thursday. By then, it may be too late. In both Israel and Gaza, the fear is that this will be a protracted operation—that once Israel seizes territory in the central enclave its government will refuse to give it up. Smotrich declared on Wednesday that Gaza will be a “real-estate bonanza,” adding, “The demolition, the first stage in the city’s renewal, we have already done. Now we just need to build.” The risk of further isolation—of economic sanctions, of boycotts of Israeli universities, of the withdrawal of foreign investments—looms large.
One part of Netanyahu’s speech received little attention. “We’ll have to decide if the law is more important than life,” he said. “I always thought that the law should serve life.” In pitting the law against “life”—a category vague enough as to encompass seemingly anything—Netanyahu appeared to pave the way not only for an “autarkic” future but an autocratic one. Already, his government has used the war to attempt to fire Israel’s attorney general; it has also floated the possibility of a bill that would allow it to dismiss military officials as it sees fit. With Israeli elections expected in the coming year, there is every reason to take his words seriously. ♦
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Photograph by Nathan Howard / Getty
On Monday afternoon, a few hours before the first ferocious attacks of Israel’s ground offensive in Gaza City made buildings tremble as far away as Tel Aviv, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in Jerusalem for an economics conference. With his far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, sitting in the front row, Netanyahu took the stage, looking a little peeved, and berated the event’s organizers for muddling his slide show. Then he turned to the audience: a group of officials from the treasury, whom he needed to persuade to expand the national deficit in order to finance the next phase of the war.
The Lede
Israel is “facing a new world,” he said—and the reason isn’t the war in Gaza. Rather, he cited two other factors that imposed “limitations” on the country’s prospects. The first, he said, is “limitless migration” of Muslims to Western Europe, where they have become a “significant minority—very vocal, very, very belligerent.” The second is a digital revolution that has led Qatar, China, and other countries to invest in social-media platforms that promote an “anti-Israel agenda.” The result was “a sort of isolation,” he said, sounding more like a pundit than like the leader of a country that a United Nations commission has just concluded is committing genocide.
Since the war in Gaza began, sparked by the Hamas-led attacks of October 7th, 2023, Israeli officials have experienced growing international isolation. In a sharp blow to Israel’s diplomatic efforts, many countries—including its longtime allies, such as Britain, France, and Canada—have declared that they will recognize a Palestinian state at the United Nations General Assembly next week. Some of these countries have restricted the sale of arms to Israel; a number of others have banned selling weapons to the country entirely. But this ostracism has also been felt more widely across Israeli society, including among the large numbers of Israelis who oppose the war. Cultural events, festivals, research grants, and academic conferences have increasingly excluded Israelis simply because of their nationality. Israeli tourists have been singled out for abuse overseas, and violent attacks on non-Israeli Jews are on the rise.
After the International Criminal Court sought to issue an arrest warrant for Netanyahu over war crimes, in May of 2024, he lashed out against its top prosecutor, calling him one of the “great antisemites in modern times.” Drawing again on a sense of grievance, Netanyahu warned in his speech on Monday, “We will increasingly need to adapt to an economy with autarkic characteristics.” This technical term, referring to a closed-off and self-reliant economy, is “the word I most hate,” he went on. “I am a believer in the free market, but we may find ourselves in a situation where our arms industries are blocked.” In a scenario of “Athens and Sparta,” he said, Israel will “have to become Athens and super-Sparta. There’s no choice. In the coming years, at least, we will have to deal with these attempts to isolate us. What’s worked until now will not work from now on.”
The Tel Aviv stock exchange dipped, and a public uproar began. The opposition leader Yair Lapid called Netanyahu’s speech “crazy.” The Israel Business Forum, which represents two hundred of the country’s largest companies, issued a stern warning: “We are not Sparta.” The real problem, it suggested, was that government policies were leading Israel “toward a political, economic, and social abyss.” Yossi Verter, of the liberal newspaper Haaretz, wrote a column titled “Netanyahu Turns Start-Up Nation Into Sparta Nation—and Indicts Himself Along the Way.” He suggested that Netanyahu’s speech was a misguided attempt to replicate Winston Churchill’s famous evocation of “blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” But, he added, this rhetorical failure was still revelatory: for the first time, Netanyahu had given a “realistic” depiction of Israel’s standing in the world.
Others focussed on Netanyahu’s odd choice of metaphor. Nadav Eyal, a columnist for the centrist broadsheet Yediot Ahronot, posted a tart historical reminder: “By the way, Sparta lost.” Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli diplomat, told me, “You would think that a guy who boasts about his understanding of the patterns of history would know what the fuck he’s talking about.” During the past century, Pinkas said, four countries have behaved like an autarkic Sparta: Nazi Germany, apartheid-era South Africa, Albania under its Communist regime, and, most recently, North Korea. “This is the club you want to join?” Pinkas asked.
By the following day, even Netanyahu’s allies were conscious of the fallout. Channel 12, Israel’s dominant television network, reported that Smotrich had privately told the Prime Minister, “You did damage. Now you’re the one to fix it.” Netanyahu hastily convened a press conference, where he alternated between Hebrew and English. “There has been a misunderstanding,” he said, arguing feebly that the only area in which Israel risked isolation was in arms manufacturing. He reiterated that he had “full confidence” in the country’s economy, and he hailed foreign investments. He didn’t mention that per-capita growth rates in Israel have been negative for two years running.
Supporters of the government suggested that Netanyahu’s error was merely one of framing—and that he needed tough language in order to persuade treasury bureaucrats to bankroll his expanded military operation. Indeed, throughout his speech to the treasury officials, Netanyahu kept imploring his audience, in English, to “cut down the bureaucracy!” A column in the Jerusalem Post, a right-leaning English-language newspaper, argued that the speech was “a sales pitch, not his aspirational philosophy.”
But Netanyahu’s rhetoric, if impolitic, was resonant: the image of Israel as a militarized city-state will be hard to dispel. While analysts argued about the Prime Minister’s wording, tanks rolled into central Gaza, and tens of thousands of Palestinians fled on foot, heading to southern areas of the enclave where there is no infrastructure to accommodate them. Hundreds of thousands more remained in Gaza City, either unable or too exhausted to escape. Mohammed Abu Salmiya, the director of Gaza City’s Al-Shifa Hospital, posted an image of six premature babies crammed inside a single incubator, and warned of imminent danger to their lives. Haaretz reported that roughly a hundred Palestinians were killed in less than twenty-four hours.
Israel Katz, the Israeli defense minister, issued a celebratory announcement online: “Gaza is burning.” The military, he added, was fighting “for the release of the hostages and the defeat of Hamas.” Meanwhile, the families of several hostages had camped outside Netanyahu’s residence in Jerusalem overnight, pleading with him through a megaphone to halt the occupation, for fear of endangering their loved ones.
The plan to conquer central Gaza has drawn international condemnation from the moment it was first announced, last month. Inside Israel, the security establishment and the military’s top commander, Eyal Zamir, also criticized the initiative. In a poll released earlier this month, forty-one per cent of Israelis said that they opposed the military occupation, and only twenty-eight per cent said that they supported it. (Close to a third of respondents were undecided.) The sense inside Israel is of a country “hijacked” by its leader, as the Israeli journalist Roni Dori has put it—expanding a war that most of the public has long wanted to see end in a deal that will secure the return of the hostages.
Netanyahu insisted that an operation in central Gaza—which the Israeli military had previously refrained from entering, because many of the remaining hostages are believed to be held there—was necessary to deal a final blow to Hamas. On Tuesday, however, he implied that his decision was tied to an ongoing criminal investigation against him on charges of corruption. (He denies any wrongdoing.) Appearing in court for a long-scheduled testimony, he asked the judges if he could be excused early: the military had just embarked on an “intensive phase” of fighting, he said. The judges agreed to reduce his testimony by three hours.
Pinkas told me that Netanyahu’s attempt to project strength was actually an admission of failure. “If this is a just war, and Israel was savagely attacked, yet we are isolated to the point of becoming a super-Sparta, then it’s a sign of defeat,” he said. What would it mean for Israel, a country built by refugees from the ashes of the Holocaust, to become a warmongering Sparta? What does it mean to emulate a place where boys as young as seven were trained only to fight? For years, Israelis have been at the forefront of scientific and technological innovation. Now they are being called on by their leader to adapt to a grim reality of military might. In Netanyahu’s view, Pinkas went on, “We are alone, and the year is always 1938.” Ironically, this vision of the future precisely matches one that the international movement to boycott Israel wishes to see: a country divested from and sanctioned, left to fend for itself.
By Wednesday, two divisions of the Israeli military were approaching the center of Gaza City; a third is expected to join them there. There were reports in Israel that reservist soldiers who previously had exemptions because of P.T.S.D. or other mental-health conditions were being called to serve. The only thing that can reverse the government’s decision at this point is sustained pressure from the U.S., of the kind that President Donald Trump, working with the outgoing Biden Administration, applied over the winter, when he forced on Israel and Hamas a temporary ceasefire and hostage release. Yet the public statements coming from the U.S. appear much weaker this time around. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said this week that Trump wants the war “to be over quickly.” But Netanyahu did not commit to a timeline of retreat. Someday Trump “will presumably understand that this is a bluff,” Chaim Levinson wrote in Haaretz, on Thursday. By then, it may be too late. In both Israel and Gaza, the fear is that this will be a protracted operation—that once Israel seizes territory in the central enclave its government will refuse to give it up. Smotrich declared on Wednesday that Gaza will be a “real-estate bonanza,” adding, “The demolition, the first stage in the city’s renewal, we have already done. Now we just need to build.” The risk of further isolation—of economic sanctions, of boycotts of Israeli universities, of the withdrawal of foreign investments—looms large.
One part of Netanyahu’s speech received little attention. “We’ll have to decide if the law is more important than life,” he said. “I always thought that the law should serve life.” In pitting the law against “life”—a category vague enough as to encompass seemingly anything—Netanyahu appeared to pave the way not only for an “autarkic” future but an autocratic one. Already, his government has used the war to attempt to fire Israel’s attorney general; it has also floated the possibility of a bill that would allow it to dismiss military officials as it sees fit. With Israeli elections expected in the coming year, there is every reason to take his words seriously. ♦
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