I had written an article about the belief of a large part of Palestinians that the second half of the eighth decade of the State of Israel will be the beginning of the end for this state, but it turned out that Israelis also believe in one way or another in this belief, especially the leaders of the Israeli political elite who take this belief/obsession very seriously and calculate for it. Benjamin Netanyahu was perhaps the first of Israel's prime ministers to speak in this sense, claiming that his survival as prime minister is the only guarantee of Israel's survival after its eighth decade and over a century, contrary to the history of the Jews, whose state did not last more than eight decades.

Then there was the speech of Naftali Bennett, the current Prime Minister of Israel, in his 2020 election campaign, in which he echoed the same contents and urged Jewish voters to stand behind the Blue and White coalition he leads, in order to overcome the eighth decade knot and ensure the continuation of the State of Israel after its eightieth year, and here is Ehud Barak, former Prime Minister of Israel, writing to confirm the same knot, the fear of survival, knowing that these mentioned people are not just rabbis who believe in religious superstitions that have nothing to do with reality, but they are the political leaders of Israel.

The important question here is why this fear of the future despite all the manifestations of strength that Israel was keen to show directly or indirectly? Why this fear despite all this American and European financial, military and legal support, which made Israel an entity above the law and above criticism, and protected it in international institutions, the Security Council and the world media? Israel has acquired American weapons systems that exist only in the United States and has the largest American weapons store at its disposal, and it enjoys a military advantage that no country in the region enjoys, namely the nuclear bomb.

Israel's leaders have long sung about Israel's penetration of the Arab political elite and its polarization of influential Arab countries such as Egypt, Morocco, the UAE, Jordan and others. It has also succeeded in achieving the complete subjugation of the Palestinian Authority and turning it into a security tool in its hands, in addition to Israel's role in creating strife and unrest in the Arab countries around it, such as Iraq, Syria and Sudan, which sought to impose a suffocating economic blockade on Iran, under the pretext of its work to produce a nuclear bomb that could threaten Israel's security, and worked to turn Iran into a pariah state in the international community.

However, Israel still suffers from a chronic fear complex, a complex that is reflected in the public discourse of its intellectuals, journalists, academics, and intellectuals, the speeches of its prime ministers, and the fear of the future of its citizens, who see dual citizenship as a lifeboat when every danger approaches. They philosophize this existential fear of the future based on Jewish history, and even turn it into a universal phenomenon across civilizations and centuries, as Ehud Barak did a few days ago on the pages of Yediot Aharonot, because - apparently - they do not see the world outside their limited subjective experience.

We see them at every historical turning point, or an important external or internal event, engaging in a debate about the future of Israel's survival. It is a rare situation, as there is hardly a state in the whole world that discusses the idea of its survival or continuation. A leader or a party may lose power, and the state may change from one regime to another or from one form to another, but it does not occur to its elite or its citizens that the people, the homeland and the state are subject to extinction. We saw the Soviet Union crumble, but its people remained, and the state transformed into smaller entities, and shifted from one system to another, but it did not perish. We saw how Yugoslavia was fragmented into smaller pieces, but the people, culture, and land remained. It is true that Germany suffered a tremendous blow in World War II and was fragmented into two parts but eventually recovered and achieved unity, but this is not the case in Israel at all.

Ehud Barak, Israel's former prime minister, army commander and most honored general, presented the danger of internal division as the greatest threat to Israel's survival. He minimized all the external dangers that surround Israel, claiming that Palestinian resistance operations are painful for Israel, but in his view, they do not represent a real existential threat, and even Iran's nuclear ambitions are not an existential threat, because even if it succeeds in producing the nuclear bomb, it will not be able to use it against Israel, and this supposed nuclear weapon will only be a deterrent weapon and nothing more.

There is no doubt that Ehud Barak's concerns did not come out of nowhere, as Israel is an entity full of contradictions, which someone like Netanyahu was keen to present it as a kind of benign and disciplined diversity similar to what happens in the United States of America, but in reality it is a very dangerous contradiction, as it is a heterogeneous mixture of ethnicities, cultures, loyalties and ideologies, even the Jewish religion under which they gather has conflicting schools and interests that could ignite an internal religious war that could turn Israel into ashes. We saw some of this in an exchange documented by cameras between two rabbis, one from the Haredi sect and another from religious Zionism, when the former accused the latter of being responsible for the Elad operation carried out by two Palestinians against a group of settlers, and said that their exploitation of religion contrary to the Torah and their constant provocation of Muslim feelings by storming Al-Aqsa Mosque is what incites Palestinians and pushes them to retaliate and kill Jews, and that they are the ones paying the price for the mistakes of religious Zionism.

The state of political and religious rivalry is the same that today threatens the fall of Bennett's government and the holding of new elections that could deepen the state of division and internal polarization. The elections - in this case - would be the fourth to be held within two years, which means that the average life span of one government does not exceed six months, which is an indication of the failure of the system of governance in Israel and the bankruptcy of the Israeli political class.

Yesterday morning, the Israeli army assassinated - as it has done countless times before - the journalist Shirin Abu Aqla, who holds American citizenship in addition to Palestinian, and the entire coverage of Al Jazeera channel shifted from covering the Russian-Ukrainian confrontation to covering this painful incident, and thousands of organizations around the world issued the Israeli occupation, which tried from the first moment to follow its usual strategy by shifting responsibility for its criminal acts to the Palestinian side, although this is practically impossible, thinking that by claiming to investigate the incident, it will absorb popular outrage and eventually come out with a cold statement with multiple interpretations.

It is this kind of arrogant behavior and disregard for the truth that will push all those who support Israel to abandon it, and will gradually turn the conflict into an internal conflict as each side holds the other responsible for Israel's chronic failure, not biblical prophecies, not arbitrary interpretation of historical events, and the obsession that Israelis suffer from will become a tangible reality as a result of their reckless actions.