Netanyahu’s Comparison of Israel to Sparta Is Bad History and Bad Strategy

“We Jews are still here, but where is the ancient Greeks?”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a classic historian, asked me this question 10 years ago when we met at a national award ceremony. After a decade, it appears that he found them.

Last week, Netanyahu protested the ancient Greeks to make a blatant warning to his country. Quoting Europe’s increasing hostility, and the influence of Muslim Muslim minorities on European foreign policy, and what he described as the campaigns of misinformation from Qatar on social media, Netanyahu argued that Israel is facing crawling international isolation. Hill: Preparing for a new economic and strategic reality.

“We will need to adapt to the economy with automatic features,” I declared. “I am a supporter of free markets, but to survive, we must ensure the ability to produce what is necessary for national security, especially weapons. We are Athens and Sparta-Perhaps Sparta super. We have no choice.”

The measurement is tempting, but it is dangerous. Besides discourse punch, “Super-SPARTA” reflects a wrong reading of history and the disturbing projection of the future of Israel. Measurement is not of strength, but from insecurity. If it is taken seriously, it risks Israel to direct the same fate that analyzed the original Sparta: the erosion of the state and society, and in the end the military defeat.

Sparta and Athens It already works as models of ancient times. Athens stood for openness. commerce; Intellectual curiosity. However completely, democracy. Like Sparta, the madness of greatness and militarization: a secret society, governed by a fighting elite, which has been permanently filled for war, and fears the enslaved nation that has controlled it.

Netanyahu summoning both Athens and Sparta is a curious, because the two were not integrated, but they are aggressive. When Netanyahu suggests that Israel is “Athens and Sparta” and perhaps “Super-SPARTA”, the division collapses into one vision of survival through isolation and siege-which is much more vision in the Spartan model.

Not only is Netanyahu’s borrowing in military images, but in the deepest historical logic that calls him. Ancient Sparta, like the written Israel, justifies its presence on its soil through what historians call The legends of the charter. Both societies did not see themselves not citizens of their lands, but rather were one of the new arrivals who seized it with a divine punishment. For the Israelis, the promise was made to Ibrahim by God. For Sparta, it was delivered by Zeus to the descendants of Herrakles.

Charter myths – do not gain legitimacy to regional possession – do not arise from confidence but from anxiety. What is taken intuitive does not require any complex justification. The ancient city of Erico is a country between the two rivers, which is supposed to be its existence due to the moment of creation itself, does not need a constituent story or a story of invasion. Its existence was beyond the challenge.

On the contrary, the people who looked at themselves as comments to history often, often build detailed accounts of the reason for their affiliation. Both the ancient and Hebrew Greeks themselves understood that they were strangers, who have arrived, and they were deluded from others, and they settled. Their myths addressed political questions: What do we do here? Why here? Who is our existence?

As for the Hebrews, legitimacy was based on the divine promise – the covenant with Ibrahim and the narration of the exit. For Spartans, it was the legend of “Herrakles’s descendants”. In this story, Zeus himself gave Sparta to Spartans, justifying the overthrow of the older family from Minilus and Helen and creating a new Dorian.

Israel’s written novel reflects an anxious people about the fragility of its suspension on the ground. When Netanyahu reaches Sparta like analog of Israel, he unintentionally reveals flexibility but does not worry.

Whether Netanyahu knows this or not, the idea of ​​rapprochement between the Jews and Sports has already appeared in ancient times. Early in the second century BC, when the Mediterranean powers routinely make kinship links together, echoes such a connection appear. According to 1 Maccabees, King Areus of Sparta addressed a message to the older priest in Jerusalem:

“King Arius from Spartans. To the higher priests Unias. Greetings! He discovered in a written record that Spartans and Jews are relatives and both of the Ibrahim family.”

The claim was definitely a political invention. However, it reflects, perhaps, a perception of parallel destinies – from the small nations that justify their place in the world.

Based on a permanent feeling of insecurity, the “Super-SPARTA” analogy is especially suitable as a strategic model for the twenty-first century. Sparta cannot only maintain the appearance of self -sufficiency because it sat on top of a rich agricultural economy that works by a group of worshipers.

However, even this isolation image is misleading. In fact, Spartan Autarky was a legend. Sparta was not cut off from the wider world. Follow colonialism, maintain foreign trade, and rely on commercial networks for their visual societies – PerioikoiOr “residents about” its lands.

Netanyahu offers Israel, like Sparta, as a besieged country surrounded by enemies and is forced to permanently defense. But this offends both countries. In fact, Sparta was never the besieged victim. Like modern superpower, Sparta was a regional domination of dominance outside its borders. Likewise, unlike the first days in which it was already besieged, Israel is now offering power throughout the Middle East. This was not more clear than Gaza, as Israeli military campaigns produced unprecedented destruction and civil suffering.

Moreover, Israel’s economic miracle depends on integration in global markets – high technology, pharmaceutical preparations, energy exports, and investment capital flows. Noting that Israel can – or should retreat to Autarky is to undermine the foundations of its prosperity. Even its defensive industries, which Netanyahu champion as the backbone of national self -sufficiency depends on international partnerships, global supply chains and export markets. There is no small country, whatever the military, can flourish by cutting itself from the world.

In fact, the austere model was eventually not sustainable even for Sparta itself. The strict military handed over a short -term domination, but it guaranteed a long -term decrease. In the old period, Sparta produced art, poetry and music. But by the classic era, in the fifth and fourth centuries BC, these cultural expressions often disappeared. The consumer focus drained on internal control and external conquest on the city’s resources, and its citizen’s body has eaten steadily. What started as a military lifestyle aimed at securing the booming police has become gradually in itself – which spoils a small space for anything else.

In contrast, in contrast to a defeat in the war, it left a legacy of ideas, institutions and culture that formed Western civilization.

Athenian Spartan The measurement lasts because it reflects a real strategic dilemma: openness in exchange for closure and democracy in exchange for militarization and participation in exchange for the siege. Netanyahu’s answer is clear. But history indicates that those who choose the Spartan path, no matter how proud, find themselves weaker, and not stronger.

Sparta myths were born from the divine promise of fear. Its strict regime and the body of the subject of the disciplined caused a decrease. The power of Israel has always been its ability to combine security and openness in order to become a prosperous democracy, a center for global innovation, and a bridge between cultures. Abandoning this in favor of a misleading image of the austere self -sufficiency is a fragility error.

The “Super-SPARTA” alternative is to participate. Israel’s survival will depend not only on its military power but also on its ability to maintain alliances, integrate economically, and remain credible as democratic.