The Self-Undoing of Israel: Has Zionism Crossed the Point of No Return?

Is Israel’s trajectory toward isolation and collapse self-inflicted, and has Zionism reached the point of no return?

Every war led by Benjamin Netanyahu is framed not as policy, but as fate.

“There are moments in which a nation faces two possibilities: to do or die,” Netanyahu declared on October 28, 2023, as Israel expanded its genocide in Gaza.

The wording is familiar. The urgency is always absolute. The implication is unmistakable: Israel is not choosing war. It is forced into it.

For many, the claim is inherently contradictory. How can a state initiate war—and in Gaza’s case, sustain a genocide—while insisting that it is merely defending itself from annihilation? Yet within Israeli political discourse, and across much of Western media, this contradiction is rarely interrogated. It is normalized.

That normalization is not incidental. It is foundational.

Long before the establishment of Israel on the ruins of historic Palestine in 1948—the Nakba, or catastrophe, for Palestinians—the language of existential threat was deeply embedded in Zionist political thinking. Survival was never framed as coexistence, but as triumph. Security was never separated from expansion.

In recent years, that fatalistic language has returned with renewed intensity.

The events of October 7, 2023, brought a sudden end to what had been, for Netanyahu, a moment of unprecedented political triumph. Prior to the Al-Aqsa Flood operation, Israel was not merely secure—it was ascending. A parallel “flood” was underway: normalization.

Arab, Muslim, African, Asian and even Latin American states were steadily incorporating Israel into their political and economic frameworks. The so-called isolation of Israel was collapsing.

Netanyahu was openly celebrating this shift. In September 2023, speaking alongside US President Joe Biden, he said, as reported by Reuters: “I think that under your leadership, Mr President, we can forge a historic peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia,” adding that such a deal would “go a long way first to advance the end of the Arab-Israeli conflict, achieve reconciliation between the Islamic world and the Jewish state.”

Days later, addressing the United Nations, he spoke of “the blessings of a new Middle East,” according to the official transcript of his September 22, 2023, UN speech.

This was not merely political rhetoric. It reflected a broader strategic project: Israel’s integration into the region, not through justice, but through power—through alliances with wealthy Gulf states, economic expansion, and geopolitical repositioning.

The genocide in Gaza shattered that trajectory.

Far from cementing Israel’s regional and global standing, the war has accelerated its isolation. According to a June 2025 Pew Research Center survey, majorities in most of the 24 countries surveyed held unfavorable views of Israel, while confidence in Netanyahu remained low across nearly all regions.

This shift is not limited to the Global South. It reflects a broader erosion of Israel’s legitimacy, even among traditional allies.

In response, Israeli political discourse has returned—almost instinctively—to the language of existential war.

Even when Netanyahu attempts to revive earlier narratives about shaping a “new Middle East,” the rhetoric repeatedly collapses back into warnings of annihilation. This reveals a deeper truth: within Israeli political thinking, the alternative to dominance is not coexistence, but destruction.

Part of this can indeed be explained through the logic of settler colonialism. Expansion is not incidental to settler-colonial projects; it is built into them. Such systems do not merely occupy land. They must continuously secure, reorder and enlarge their control, while presenting indigenous resistance as irrational violence.

Other settler-colonial societies remained colonial in essence while their territorial expansion was curbed by larger geopolitical constraints. Israel has never truly encountered such limits. It has not been meaningfully held accountable. Shielded by unconditional US support and enabled by Western powers that were themselves former or current colonial actors, it has had every structural incentive to continue.

But Israel’s fixation on existential danger even at the height of military superiority points to something deeper. It suggests a political culture haunted by its own origin story.

One possible explanation is moral and historical illegitimacy. Israel knows, at some buried but irrepressible level, that it was founded on the destruction of another people, on expulsion, massacre and erasure. A state built on the ruins of Palestine cannot indefinitely silence the history beneath it.

Still, there is more to the story.

Even before the genocide in Gaza, Israel was gripped by internal debates about its own continuity. In 2023, amid a profound political crisis, President Isaac Herzog warned of a possible “constitutional collapse,” according to Reuters. At the same time, Israeli discourse increasingly invoked the so-called “eighth decade curse,” the notion that Jewish political entities historically falter as they approach their eighth decade.

As noted in various newspapers, Netanyahu has been described as viewing himself as uniquely capable of leading Israel “into its eighth decade and beyond,” reflecting a deeper anxiety about national continuity.

October 7 brought these fears roaring back. So did the emergence of a more assertive regional pro-Palestine camp, particularly within what is often called the Axis of Resistance. True, several Arab regimes remained aligned with Washington and eager to contain the fallout. But in doing so, many only further exposed their own fragility.

From Israel’s perspective, this convergence of pressures reinforces both real and imagined fears—not only to state security, but to the ideological foundations upon which the state was built.

What makes this especially striking is that Israel has failed to secure decisive strategic outcomes in war after war. In Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen and beyond, it has relied on overwhelming force without achieving lasting political resolution.

Here lies the central irony.

Israel’s fears, long framed as hypothetical or exaggerated, are being transformed into tangible risks—not by inevitability, but by Israel’s own actions.

The result is a self-fulfilling trajectory: a march toward deeper isolation, perpetual conflict, and internal uncertainty—driven not by necessity, but by an inability, or refusal, to imagine an alternative.

That march may yet reach its logical end.

The deepest irony is that Israel once had alternatives. It was not fated to choose this path. But a just coexistence—one grounded in equality and historical reckoning—has never been intelligible within Zionist political vocabulary. There, coexistence is recast as disappearance.

And so Israel is not merely confronting a crisis.

It is undoing itself, by its own hand.

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