Crossposted from European Tribune.
Western advocates of Israel tend to see it as a reincarnation of ancient Athens of the 4th century B.C. Like that celebrated city-state, it is the only functioning democracy in its region; a flourishing center of science, scholarship, and the arts; a technological powerhouse; and a bustling, free-trading economy of innovation and export. To paraphrase Pericles, Israel is “an education to all Middle East.”
In contrast, Israel’s Western detractors tend to view it as a modern-day Sparta, Athen’s arch-rival and nemesis, which colonized and oppressed the neighboring Messenia. Upon the latter’s revolt in 630 B.C., Sparta transformed itself into a permanent military camp — austere, oligarchic, insular, and rigid — to keep its conquered serfs under boot. In the same way, allege its critics, Israel uses a formidable standing army, based upon long compulsory service, to subjugate another people and steal its land.
In fact, Israel combines key traits of both Athens and Sparta.* It is a democratic, open society, yet sufficiently militaristic to constitute the world’s fourth-ranking military power at some six million citizens, of whom only 80 percent belong to the ethnic majority and are thus accepted in the army. It is a world-class producer of electronics that occupies and colonizes other people’s land while invading or bombing neighboring countries at will.
In terms of worldly success, or power, this is an extremely potent combination. Rome, the only ancient city-state to embody something like it, won itself an empire of fifty million, including all of Greece. But it is also an unstable combination, especially under modern conditions.
Whenever Israel’s Spartan side predominates, the economy suffers. During the Oslo peace process from 1993 to 1999, growth was 74 percent, compared to 18 percent from 1999 to 2004. Particularly vulnerable is the high-tech export sector at the heart of Athenian Israel. Meanwhile, the imperatives of constant war and occupation are a strain on its democratic culture and civil society.
Paradoxically, those in the West who emphasize Israel’s Athenian nature are also the only ones outside Israel itself to applaud its Spartan excesses. If Israel truly does turn into a contemporary Sparta in the face of ever more hostile surroundings, then its Western enablers will have helped make their own opponents right.
*) Note, though, that the popular image of Athens versus Sparta is a bit inaccurate. Athens was hardly a democracy by modern standards, and for a long time it was more expansionist than Sparta, sometimes brutally so. For its part, Sparta, with its sophisticated pottery and poetry, was not quite the cultural wasteland as which it is often portrayed.
