No careful observer can overlook the anxieties occupying Israelis, at both popular and elite levels, over whether the Jewish state has effectively been moved into an intensive care ward, dependent on life support and lacking any guarantee that would shield it from a feared disappearance from the map of the Middle East.
The question of Israel’s possible disappearance has given rise to other hypothetical and darker questions. What would happen if Israel were to vanish from the world?
In 2025, Eugene Bruselovski wrote in The Times of Israel, asking: “What if the Jews disappeared: a thought experiment about Israel and the world?”
In 2009, the Russian film Lekh Lekha, directed by M. Kovinsky, imagined a world struggling with the sudden absence of Jews. Produced many years before 7 October, the film depicts a state of confusion and instability, ultimately claiming that the world cannot do without a Jewish presence.
In June 2016, the former editor in chief of Haaretz, Aluf Benn, wrote in Foreign Affairs under the title “The End of Israel” that Israel, at least the secular and progressive version that once captivated the world’s imagination, had come to an end.
Because mention of Jews has become inseparably linked in the public imagination with the State of Israel, it inevitably raises the question of whether it is conceivable that Israel could one day disappear.
A report by Harvard University pointed to the demographic terror haunting future policy makers of the Jewish state, a fear that led to the erasure of nearly 200,000 Palestinian children in Gaza.
The significance of the report lies in the identity of its author, the Israeli academic Jacob Garb, who employed data driven analysis and spatial mapping to show how the Israeli army’s siege of Gaza and indiscriminate attacks on civilians in the Strip resulted in a dangerous decline in its population.
In late November 2007, in an interview with Haaretz, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert warned of the spectre of Israel’s disintegration if a two state solution with the Palestinians was not reached. He said: “If the day comes when the two state solution collapses and we face a South Africa style struggle for equal voting rights with the Palestinians, then the moment that happens, the State of Israel is finished.”
Israel is sensitive to any comparison with South Africa under apartheid, yet Olmert had previously expressed similar views. When he served as deputy prime minister under Ariel Sharon, he supported withdrawal from most of the territories occupied by Israel in the 1967 war, a move that would have left Israel with the largest possible number of Israelis and the smallest possible number of Palestinians.
These anxieties have reached the point of contemplating scenarios for a future after collapse and downfall, a prospect no longer unthinkable despite the difficulty of imagining it, according to a range of serious analyses emerging from within Israeli opinion shaping circles.
Although the disappearance of Israel is widely regarded as inconceivable, it is nevertheless highly possible, according to Robin Washington, editor in chief of the independent Jewish newspaper The Forward.
He takes these scenarios seriously, asking in January 2024: if Jews were expelled from the river to the sea, without even addressing how such atrocities would be carried out, how would the world view those of us who remained? Would Jews be returned to their historical status as a people without a state upon the return of Palestinians to their homeland? Would they return to the diaspora as they were for most of the past two thousand years?
In the book The End of Israel, published after the Al Aqsa Flood in November 2023, articles by the prominent Israeli journalist Bradley Burston of Haaretz traced the deep roots of what he described as the horrific war between Israel and Hamas, exploring how the country might have chosen a different path and the options available for its future.
The articles detail, in Burston’s words, “the decline and fall of a failed nation, which even before the war had begun to ask whether this year’s Independence Day might be its last.” He wrote: “Israel, where delusion and fanaticism rule, is a land that, as the Book of Numbers warns us, devours its inhabitants alive.” He added: if you ask me, “How are things here?” I will answer: “Things here are beyond madness.”
In June 2016, Aluf Benn again wrote in Foreign Affairs under the title “The End of Israel”, arguing that Israel, at least the secular and progressive version that once captivated the world, had passed. While that version was in some respects mythical, the legend was at least rooted in reality.
Today, Benn believes, that reality has changed. The state that replaced it is fundamentally different from what its founders imagined some seventy years ago.
He reaches early conclusions about the country’s future, noting that since the March 2015 elections, the pace of several long term trends has accelerated dramatically. If they continue, they could soon render the country unrecognisable.
Benn returned to write again in March 2024, after 7 October 2023, on the same platform, Foreign Affairs, under the title “Israel Is Destroying Itself”. He drew a revealing comparison between Moshe Dayan and Netanyahu. He recalled that on a bright April day in 1956, Moshe Dayan, then chief of staff of the Israeli army and known for his single eye, travelled south to Nahal Oz, a newly established kibbutz near the Gaza border.
Dayan had come to attend the funeral of Roy Rotberg, a 21 year old killed the previous morning by Palestinians while patrolling the fields on horseback. The incident shocked the country.
Dayan said at the time: “Let us not blame the murderers. They have spent eight years in refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we were turning the land and villages where they and their fathers lived into our own property.”
Dayan was referring to the Nakba, when the majority of Palestinian Arabs were forced to flee following Israel’s victory in the 1948 war.
The former Haaretz editor sought to draw an implicit comparison between two experiences. The rationality of the 1950s under Dayan, which fortified Israel and delayed early collapse, and the present era of irrationality, predicting that Israel’s end would come at the hands of the current prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Yoav Rennon, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, told the French magazine Orient XXI that Samson, Israel’s religious nationalist hero, was “an egotistical fanatic” who “felt a need to humiliate”.
This symbolic figure for messianic Zionists, who hasten the return of the messiah and currently participate in governing Israel, believed that their power made them invincible. That myth, repeated endlessly in propaganda texts, is now on the path to collapse.
The liberal historian Yuval Noah Harari argues that “Netanyahu continues to promise Israelis ‘total victory’, but the truth is that we are on the verge of a crushing defeat.” In his view, the prime minister has displayed “arrogance, blindness and a desire for revenge”, much like Samson.
There were early warning signs expressing concern over the fate of the state, suggesting it may have crossed the threshold of endurance it clung to for seven decades.
The matter is no longer confined to elite platforms and cultural salons. It is now closer to a plausible reality, supported by figures, statistics and empirical studies grounded in facts on the ground.
Middle East Monitor described a report by Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, issued in early 2025 on reverse Jewish migration, as producing “shockwaves”. Israeli media headlines labelled the figures “bleak”, noting that 82,000 people were removed from the population count, a development the organisation described as bad news for Israeli political and security circles.
This coincided with the latest Knesset report, issued in October 2025, on the mass flight of Jews from Israel. Itamar Eichner, writing on the leading Israeli news site ynetnews, described the report as presenting an extremely grim picture, stating that the events of 7 October drove 145,900 Israelis to flee.
A recent survey conducted by the Hebrew University at the initiative of the World Zionist Organization found that a striking 80 percent of Israelis who left the country say they do not intend to return.
The survey’s authors quoted Gusti Yehoshua Braverman, head of the diaspora activities department at the World Zionist Organization, telling Hebrew media that most Israelis do not intend to return to Israel.
The geopolitical news platform The Cradle reported that in the first months following the 7 October operation, nearly half a million Israelis left the occupied territories, while the number of Jewish immigrants to Israel fell sharply.
In an interview with Press TV, the renowned Israeli historian Ilan Pappe explained why he believes Zionism has entered its final phase and how Israeli society is disintegrating from within.
A report published by The Times of Israel in October 2025 stressed that the Gaza war has changed Israeli society in ways no previous war had done. It noted that Israel had long imagined itself as an impregnable fortress surrounded by enemies.
Today, that fortress is cracking from within. The greatest threat to Israel’s stability no longer comes from Iran or Hamas, but from the divisions tearing through its society.
The term “civil war”, once considered exaggerated, is now widely used among ordinary people. What was once unthinkable has become a common expression of the anxiety overshadowing Israeli life.
Civil wars rarely begin with the first shot. They begin when citizens stop seeing one another as members of a shared political community.
This, according to Yehuda Lukash, a professor at George Mason University, is precisely what is happening in Israel today.
