If ever a book had an unfortunate publication date, it is Dan Steinbock’s The Fall of Israel,The Degradation of Israel’s Politics, Economy & Military (Clarity Press, 2025)
The book’s publication coincided with a breakthrough in Israel’s establishment of Greater Israel from the Nile to the Euphrates with a chunk of Saudi-Arabia added. With Washington and Turkey’s help and Russia and Iran’s complicity, Syria has been overthrown with Israel now occupying areas of southern Syria and announcing that Israel is there to stay. The process now begins by which Israel will absorb much of Syria.
Oded Yinon decades ago wrote that there is one ring–Israel’s–to enslave them all. The dissolution of Syria and Iraq would be achieved, and now has been, leaving Iran isolated and Hezbollah in Lebanon, formerly a check on Israel, unable to be supplied.
With Trump’s Zionist government in waiting advising the president in waiting that Iran is in a weak position and ready to be overthrown, Greater Israel, once a fantasy of Zionists, is ready to be achieved. Of course, Washington, that is, Americans, have to make the gift to Israel of rule over the Middle East.
The question is: Who rules the territory of what was Syria before Russia and Iran turned their backs on Syria? There is divided rule. Israeli military forces are 15 miles from Damascus, the capital of former Syria. The Turks are in northern Syria attempting to dispose of the Kurds. Washington has the oil region. The terrorists, now democratic jihadists, are an “interim government” that controls what?
Whose side is the “interim government” on? Apparently on the side of the dominant contending parties. They demand that the Kurds lay down their arms to the Turks: https://sputnikglobe.com/20250106/new-syrian-authorities-demand-kurdish-fighters-lay-down-arms-1121367721.html They express friendship to Israel.
Washington and Trump show no inclination to let loose of the oil region, and the Israelis have announced that they are in Syria to stay, claiming it as part of Greater Israel.
So what is the purpose of an “interim government” in a partitioned country that no longer exists? This question is evaded by every government, news organization, and, it seems, every commentator.
So, as I began this review, the situation seems dire for Steinbock’s book. But in fact it is not. By the fall of Israel Steinbock doesn’t mean, as so many hope, Israel’s demise. Israel’s political fall means Israel’s fall from an accountable democracy to a theological dictatorship headed by a person under criminal indictment not only abroad but within his own Israel.
In Chapter 7, Steinbock describes factually Israel’s economic erosion, which means Israel’s financial burden on the United States will rise.
In Chapter 9, Steinbock takes up Israel’s moral degeneration from imposing apartheid on Palestinians to conducting genocide against them. Washington, of course, is the co-conspirator against the Palestinians.
Steinbock’s book is full of important information long ignored because none of the facts fitted the cover that the “two state solution” provided for Israel’s gradual absorption of Palestine. Israel unlike the West is not diverse. It is a Jewish ethnic nation, an existence that the British, French, Germans, and Americans are not permitted. For 75 years Israel’s clearly stated intentions of the demise of Palestine were ignored by the world’s governments, Arabs, and foreign affairs experts. During 1947-49 418 Palestinian villages were depopulated. To prevent Palestinians from returning the villages were blown up and bulldozed creating a wasteland that Zionists claimed proved that Palestine was an empty land before the Jewish settlers arrived.
With the destruction of Syria and only Saudi-Arabia the remaining Arab state, Israel is poised to exercise hegemony over the Middle East. Will Israel’s degradation described by Steinbock be arrested by the sudden change in the correlation of forces in Israel’s favor, or will Greater Israel be a bridge too far that will speed up the fall of Israel? Is Israel’s hold over America so total that Washington will accept the replacement of its hegemony over the Middle East by Israel’s? Have the American neoconservatives sold out American hegemony to Israel?
Steinbock has given us an important book with the whole story written in 394 pages, 52 pages of endnotes, and a thorough index.
