I see Israel as a welfare state -- as a state that can't survive on its own. It requires massive amounts of international aid and good will, and equally large amounts of investment in a military apparatus that it can't sustain on its own but without which it wouldn't be able to protect its existence. How can it not be a failed state, then?
Since its foundation, Israel has done nothing but to increase several folds the many threats against its existence. Where no enemy previously existed, Israel created them. A case in point is Lebanon, where the Muslim population, previously neutral regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, turned strongly against Israel due to Zionist acts of brutality against Lebanese civilians following the 1982 invasion.
How can this country, this very small country, survive if all it does is give fodder to those interested in imperiling its existence? Just watch how Israel, all by itself, disrupted previously good ties with powerful neighbors -- Turkey and Egypt -- over its refusal to merely issue apologies to disastrous actions against innocent people of those countries (in the Gaza flotilla and in the Sinai).
Israel has voluntarily isolated itself from its neighbors and from the world at large. It's not without reason that even some Israelis now say that their country is the world's most dangerous for Jews to live.
One can say that bringing upon itself the ire of external actors serves a purpose for the Israeli leadership: it forces Israelis to present a united front against foreign enemies, it creates social cohesion where none might have existed.
But has this strategy been successful?
- In the 1950s, Mizrahi Jews rioted and rebelled over their poor life standards and the racism of the Ashkenazi Jewish establishment towards them.
- In the 1970s, they were joined by Israeli Arabs, finally rebelling against the looting of their lands by the Israeli state. And Israeli Arabs aren't given to rioting for just over nothing -- in fact, they were said by Israeli military hero Moshe Dayan to be the world's quietest minority.
- In the 1980s, again talk of civil war between Mizrahi and Ashkenazi Jews.
- In the 1990s, even Israel's Arab loyalists, the Druze, who've contributed much to Israel's national security, started protesting against the racism of the Jewish establishment in the state and in job market.
- And in the 2010s, these divisions haven't blurred or disappeared; they have been worsened. There's now a deep division between secular and Haredi Israelis, and between the poor and the rich -- divisions that have pushed Israelis into immolating themselves in acts of desperations that were previously imaginable only in poor regions such as Tunisia and Tibet. And Israel's Arab population -- and the Druze with them -- increasingly identity with Palestinians, instead of their Jewish countrymen.
Israel's multiple challenges -- external and internal -- are only increasing. It wouldn't be surprising to me if, in the next few years, Israeli society collapses. That Israel is also a prosperous country, doesn't mean it can't also be a failed state. Quite the contrary, instead of admiring Israel, one should marvel at the fact that such a rich country can nonetheless come across as a basket case.