Retired Israeli Major General Yitzhak Brick warned that Tel Aviv cannot remain in complete isolation for long after “losing its legitimacy and allies.”
اضافة اعلان
Brick issued the warning in an article published by the Hebrew-language newspaper Maariv, titled “Election Results Are the Official Death Certificate of the State of Israel.”
Brick is one of the most prominent former Israeli armored corps officers. He previously served as commander of the military colleges and head of the army's complaints committee.
Preliminary parliamentary election results showed that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's bloc secured 53 seats out of the 120-seat Knesset, compared with 48 seats for Jewish opposition parties and 19 seats for Arab parties.
The election results leave Israel facing five possible scenarios: forming a government with Arab support, establishing a national unity government, Netanyahu splitting the opposition ranks, forming a transitional government, or holding new elections.
Brick said Israel is not experiencing a “political crisis, but rather a comprehensive, multi-system collapse from which there is no return.”
He criticized television analysts for focusing on counting parliamentary seats and discussing potential coalitions instead of addressing the crises facing the country.
“I followed the election coverage on Channels 11, 12 and 13 and felt as though I was watching a musical orchestra playing aboard the Titanic in its final moments,” he said.
He added: “No discussion panel dares to tell the public the pure, harsh and horrifying truth: the results of these elections are the official death certificate of the State of Israel as we have known it.”
Army in Decline
Regarding the military, Brick said that “our ground forces are suffering from structural and moral collapse.”
He argued that they “no longer possess the operational capability to protect the country's borders against threats emerging simultaneously from outside and within.”
He warned of the possibility of a full-scale regional war erupting along all fronts.
“A large-scale ground invasion will take place inside the Green Line,” he said, referring to the territories occupied by Israel since 1948.
He added that the “exhausted and weakened army will be unable to stop it or protect civilians in their homes.”
Brick said that “the hell and massacre we experienced in the Gaza envelope on October 7, 2023, will be nothing more than a small preliminary scene compared with what will happen across Israel as a whole.”
Mounting Debt
On the economic front, Brick said that the “endless war, which has not achieved and will never achieve any of its objectives, has raised the national debt to an unimaginable figure of 1.4 trillion shekels ($450 billion).”
He said this is happening alongside an “international stranglehold.”
He added that European countries, the United States and other major powers are imposing what he described as “silent economic sanctions, arms embargoes, and the gradual isolation of the Israeli banking system from the rest of the world.”
Brick described Netanyahu's proposal to use cryptocurrencies to counter potential European sanctions as “naive and absurd.”
He said it was a “nonsensical proposal that was met with ridicule and disgust by senior economic and banking officials and sensible economists.”
He warned that “if this situation continues, it will not be long before Israelis lose their savings.”
International Isolation
Regarding Israel's international standing, Brick said it had become “a pariah state and a source of disgust around the world.”
He added that Israel had “lost its legitimacy and allies” and was now exposed to what he claimed was an “unprecedented and escalating wave of antisemitism sweeping the world.”
“Israel cannot remain in complete isolation for long. The fate of a pariah state is disintegration and a slide down the slope of history until it disappears from the map,” he warned.
A Silent Civil War
Turning to education, Brick said the sector was suffering from a “malignant disease.”
He explained that “the absence of core curricula and universal values, alongside the prioritization of ignorance, is pushing Israel into a rapid decline from its position as an advanced technological power toward becoming a backward, illiterate and divided Third World country.”
He further said Israeli society was “not merely experiencing polarization, but is living through the peak of a silent civil war.”
He noted that “the hatred simmering between sectors, groups and communities has reached temperatures that no amount of water in the world could extinguish.”
Brick added that “the country's engines of growth are collapsing one after another.”
He said doctors, scientists, high-tech entrepreneurs, businesspeople and highly skilled professionals were “packing their bags and leaving.”
He continued that the expertise, knowledge and professional capabilities built over decades were “going to waste, leaving behind a vacuum that no one is capable of filling.”
Institutional Erosion
On political and institutional affairs, Brick said that “decay has spread all the way to the roots.”
He added that the rule of law and democratic institutions were eroding, while the public sector was becoming “an arena for superficial political appointments and blind loyalty instead of competence and integrity.”
He continued: “A state in which the law becomes nothing more than a recommendation and justice is openly trampled upon turns into institutional chaos.”
He stressed that “Israel is not going through a passing storm, but is descending into an abyss of oblivion, like a wrecked and punctured ship in a raging sea, on the verge of sinking completely in a short time.”
“After reflecting on the dismal and unfortunate election results, I reached the bitterest conclusion: there is no one among this people with whom one can talk,” he said.
He added: “The majority of the public is unable and unwilling to acknowledge the horrifying situation we are in.”
He continued: “For them, the disasters, blows and multi-faceted collapse unfolding before our eyes are nothing more than a minor scratch on the wing of an airplane.”
Warning Over Iran
Brick warned that an attack on Iran by US President Donald Trump and Netanyahu following next Tuesday's US midterm congressional elections would “set the entire Middle East ablaze.”
He argued that such a move would worsen Israel's already enormous crisis across all sectors and could completely extinguish what little fragile hope remains.
On Sunday, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that Netanyahu, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court over alleged war crimes in Gaza, “would not hesitate to use a war with Iran to serve his political interests.”
The newspaper added that he had “an interest in thwarting a change of government and is therefore working to undermine confidence in the election results. He has no mandate to ignite a security escalation.”
On Saturday, Trump threatened to launch new strikes against Iran, targeting one or two sites, while Tehran vowed to launch a counterattack without any geographical restrictions.
