CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

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

Image by Cole Keister.

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........

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