The New Yorker:

Benjamin Netanyahu says that Israel must become Sparta, hardened against the world. What does that mean for the country’s future?

By Ruth Margalit

On Monday afternoon, a few hours before the first ferocious attacks of Israel’s ground offensive in Gaza City made buildings tremble as far away as Tel Aviv, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in Jerusalem for an economics conference. With his far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, sitting in the front row, Netanyahu took the stage, looking a little peeved, and berated the event’s organizers for muddling his slide show. Then he turned to the audience: a group of officials from the treasury, whom he needed to persuade to expand the national deficit in order to finance the next phase of the war.

Israel is “facing a new world,” he said—and the reason isn’t the war in Gaza. Rather, he cited two other factors that imposed “limitations” on the country’s prospects. The first, he said, is “limitless migration” of Muslims to Western Europe, where they have become a “significant minority—very vocal, very, very belligerent.” The second is a digital revolution that has led Qatar, China, and other countries to invest in social-media platforms that promote an “anti-Israel agenda.” The result was “a sort of isolation,” he said, sounding more like a pundit than like the leader of a country that a United Nations commission has just concluded is committing genocide.

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