This is Part One of a two-part feature examining how Gaza and Zionism expose the deeper structural contradictions of the Western-led World order.
The war on Gaza has revealed more than brutality or Eurocentrism; it has exposed the exhaustion of a civilisational order. The Western-led system — once sold as the “endpoint of history” — is in retreat, unable to enforce norms, restrain its clients, or reconcile its contradictions. Gaza, beyond being the worst humanitarian catastrophe on the Arabian Peninsula in living memory, is a strategic rupture. And in Pakistan’s streets and salons the question is simple: Why can’t we do anything for Gaza?
Genocide by Design and the Paralysis of the Global Order
The question is not misplaced, as the figures of Gaza — a besieged enclave five times smaller than Lahore, one sixth of its population, nearly as dense, with far fewer resources, and ring-fenced by siege — are painting a portrait of calculated annihilation that eclipses some of history’s darkest chapters. Conservative estimates, including peer-reviewed analyses in The Lancet, now project ~80,000 deaths since October 2023, potentially reaching 400,000 when factoring in indirect deaths from famine, disease, and collapsed healthcare — 59-70% of them being women, children, and the elderly, a demographic slaughter that UN experts have likened to “generational culling”. Over 3,000 infants under a year have perished, crushed in airstrikes or starved in dead incubators. According to UNICEF, over the last 5 months, Israel killed 540 children per month while 44,000 children have been orphaned in past 22 months; Gaza now bears the world’s highest cohort of child amputees as per UN statement — 10,000+ maimed, many enduring surgeries without anaesthesia, left to drag themselves through debris. The director of Al-Shifa Medical Complex in Gaza has said that most of the children in the Strip are suffering from psychological trauma, around 320,000 children under the age of five are affected by malnutrition, and more than one million children suffer from varying degrees of undernutrition.
Some 90,000 tonnes of explosives — equivalent to six Hiroshima bombs — have razed 93% of Gaza’s structures into 42–50 million tonnes of toxic rubble, a graveyard that may take 14 to 40 years to clear. Some 2,000 Gazans have been shot or trampled in aid queue massacres, like the July 2025 slaughter that killed 94 aid seekers in a single day; at least 235, including 106 children, have starved to death in skeletal agony. Around 1,600 healthcare workers have been killed since the beginning of the genocide. Gaza’s hospitals, all 36 of them, have been systematically bombed, raided, or besieged into non-functionality, with 94% damaged or destroyed. Al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest, was reduced to a “crushed shell” after repeated sieges where premature babies died in powerless incubators, surgeons operated by flashlight amid rotting corpses, and mass graves revealed bound bodies with summary execution wounds, while Israeli forces used explosive weapons near health facilities over 230 times in 2024 alone. Many of Gaza’s doctors were kidnapped and raped to death, if not specifically targeted and killed when they returned home to be with their families. Rescue workers and ambulance staff, too, are relentlessly targeted, with over 430 aid workers slain; in a March 2025 horror, Israeli forces executed 15 medics in Rafah at close range — some bound and shot in the head — before bulldozing their bodies and marked vehicles into a mass grave to cover up the worst massacre of modern history. Over 249 journalists, including entire media teams of Al Jazeera, Al-Aqsa, and Palestine TV, have been hunted to silence witnesses to horrors like detainee torture and point-blank executions. It is not merely worse than Syria, Iraq, Yemen, or many WWII atrocities; it is the convergence of every method of annihilation modern warfare has refined.
In fact what is happening is not only unprecedented in scale and method but this is a genocide by design. Never before has the world witnessed famine and siege weaponised so openly as instruments of genocide, nor has it seen the global legal order so paralysed. The evaporation of children’s bodies under bunker busters and thermobaric munitions, the grotesque parade of decapitated or emaciated corpses — all recorded in HD and streamed globally — are warnings, not accidents. Yet no meaningful global action follows. The worst imaginable cruelties have been surpassed; the Zionists have raised the bar of human evil beyond any precedent. Every institution created to prevent such horrors — the UN, the ICC, the very body of humanitarian law — lies paralysed, bypassed, or co-opted.
The Pakistani public, like others, sees this clearly. But it does not yet grasp why the global order is behaving this way — nor how deep the implications run. For those who understand history through the physics of power, the implications are structural, not just moral.
The Western System: Late-Stage Reflexes of a Spent Civilisation
Since the treaties of Westphalia in 1648 and all the way up to 1945, the Western order — through nation states, sovereign borders, bilateral and multilateral treaties making up the international law, and secular international norms, and later through Bretton Woods institutions, the UN, and global narrative monopolies — maintained hegemony by suppressing and managing entropy beyond its borders. By design, it was never about balance, but about preserving command while freezing the balance of power at 1945.
The framework worked by combining hard infrastructure (military and finance) with soft overlays (law, media, norms) to produce the illusion of legitimacy. Not to undo injustice, certainly not to empower Muslims to redraw maps. For the Muslim world, this order offered no political imagination beyond the management of suffering.
But, borrowing Toynbee’s language, civilisations do not collapse from invasion; they collapse when ruling elites can no longer adapt to challenges without amplifying internal contradictions. Zionism is one such contradiction. It cannot be assimilated into the liberal order; it survives by exception, and therefore pulls the entire structure toward incoherence.
Zionism: A Colonial Relic in a Post-Colonial World
Zionism is not merely a nationalist project, and this was well understood by its founders and ideologues. Reading into US, Western, and Zionist internal epistemologies makes it clear what Zionism really is: at the very least, a settler-colonial state inserted into the region with no civilisational affinity with its surroundings. At times, it also functions as a biblical-eschatological project for Greater Israel, which echoes in the language of Western legislatures, Israeli leaders, and even at the International Court of Justice. Julia Sebutinde, Uganda’s vice-president judge at the ICJ, openly declared:
“God is counting on me to stand on the side of Israel… the signs of the end times are being shown in the Middle East… God has allowed me to be part of the last days.”
Within that spectrum, Zionism does not aim to integrate; it aims to dominate, segment, and survive behind walls. Unlike modern nationalisms that seek recognition, Zionism remains pre-modern in its logic — rooted in myth, bloodline, and permanent militarisation. It is not a modern civilisational model; it is a colonial anachronism that never underwent metamorphosis.
Zionism cannot become pluralistic. It cannot decolonise. It cannot coexist. Its survival depends on perpetual paranoia, permanent exceptionalism, and the endless mobilisation of Western guilt and capital. It has no path to long-term legitimacy — only to entrenchment or self-destruction.
Oswald Spengler, German polymath known for The Decline of the West, would describe it as Faustian civilisation in degeneracy: technology in full flourish, but culturally dead, spiritually isolated, and paranoid. Israel’s security doctrine is no longer outward but defensive, domestically focused, aimed at surviving entropy rather than shaping it.
It fears not intentions, but capacity. Iran understood this early, even if it lacked the doctrinal language for it. Israel’s deterrence posture today reflects quiet panic: if its enemies build sufficient technical and structural resilience, the era of Zionist impunity ends. The Gaza war has made this clear — Israel’s army is not geared for prolonged urban or asymmetric warfare. Its real strength has never been battlefield adaptation, but monopoly over narrative and airspace. Both are eroding.
So what happens next?
How Israel Will Collapse?
Zionism will continue to push the West into a permanent state of siege — morally, politically, and militarily. That will bind the Western psyche into a war-of-civilisations posture it cannot sustain. This will bleed the West’s remaining moral credibility, alienate the East and Global South irreversibly, and — most critically — drain its technical, cognitive, and financial capital, precisely when the East is rising. But even if the West eventually pulls the plug, Israel will not fall to an invasion while bullying the world with the Samson Option. Like Apartheid South Africa, French Algeria, the Crusader States, and even the Soviet Union, Israel is less likely to die from external assault than from implosion under its own contradictions if not course corrected by accepting a free Palestinian state or one state with equal rights for all. Its collapse will be structural, not cinematic.
The foremost of those structural dilemmas is Israel’s inability to integrate. Throughout history, the powers that endured were those that absorbed outsiders into their system: Rome extended citizenship, Athens drew in foreign talent, the Rashidun Caliphate undid the Byzantine empire by homogenising its populace at cultural and civilisational level, Ottomans institutionalised pluralism through the millet order, and Mughals assimilated themselves into their polity. By contrast, settler states that barricaded themselves collapsed once their legitimacy evaporated. The closest parallel in modern memory is apartheid South Africa, where racial engineering, armed superiority, and decades of Western patronage still could not withstand the tide once the world turned against it. That same tide is now closing in on Israel, isolating it in ways no military edge can offset.
The only solution Zionist ideologues have come up with so far is to force or feign an integration: token inclusion of Arab citizens, the illusion of parliamentary democracy, the branding of a “start-up nation”. The problem is that the absence of organic integration demands a constant need for a security doctrine. That is why no country in modern history has had the need for so many security doctrines like Israel had since 1948 – from Periphery doctrine to the, much talked about these days, No-Day-After and Integrated Border doctrines, Israelis have had to make up 15-16 different strategic doctrines so far. The essence of all these doctrines is the fear of parity and this constitutes the second structural dilemma faced by the Zionist project. The Crusader kingdoms illustrate this pathology with clarity. Their castles and superior arms symbolised strength, but also isolation. Their refusal to blend with their surroundings meant they survived only as long as distant patrons fed them. Israel’s Iron Wall doctrine is born of the same anxiety: it offers safety only through dominance, never through coexistence, which makes it inherently brittle in the long run.
This posture bleeds into the economy as well — the third gravest structural dilemma of this settler colony: an economy dependent on external subsidies, where high-tech innovation merely disguises structural dependence. Like the Soviet Union flaunting Baikonur while its foundations rotted, Israel’s glittering tech sector projects sovereignty but runs on Western subsidies. Its military industries and venture capital inflows are tethered to U.S. largesse, while its fiscal health is underwritten by the Pentagon and Wall Street. History shows how quickly this equation turns once costs outweigh benefits: the Soviets bled out in Afghanistan, the Americans cut their losses in Saigon, and today the same calculus looms over both Kiev and Tel Aviv. When the outpost consumes more than it yields, the patron’s loyalty evaporates.
Beneath all of this runs the demographic fuse. French Algeria did not collapse from military defeat but from the exhaustion of managing an unbridgeable divide: settlers and natives locked in perpetual conflict, a youth bulge radicalised by exclusion, and the militarisation of everyday life. Israel incubates a similar pattern — ultra-nationalists, secular liberals, migrants, minorities, and messianic settlers tearing in different directions while the Palestinian population doubles every generation. These fracture lines are not incidental; they are structural, and they ensure that Israel’s crisis is not a question of if, but of when.
Let us unpack this trajectory further. Israel’s veneer of invincibility masks a house of cards teetering on borrowed time, foreign largesse, and parked money. Its economy, propped up by $3.8–4.2 billion in annual U.S. military aid and $8.1–10.6 billion in venture capital in 2024, is a mirage of favouritism, with 78–93% of high-tech investments tied to Zionist-led U.S. funds like Greylock, Accel, Bessemer, Insight Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, and Sequoia. Yet the cracks are widening: Google’s dubious $23 billion acquisition of Wiz in 2024 doomed, Nvidia’s $30 billion AI campus was scrapped, SAP abandoned a $500 million R&D hub, Microsoft froze a $1.5 billion data centre, Amazon cancelled a $2 billion cloud centre, and Intel walked away from a $25 billion chip plant in 2025. These are the markers of a deeper tech exodus, compounded by the flight of more than 540,000 dual nationals since October 2023, including cultural figures like Quentin Tarantino who abruptly relocated from Tel Aviv in August 2025. Given that 69.5% of Israel’s GDP is in Services, employing 81.6% of the workforce, these are not minor dents in the start-up mirage but systemic ruptures.
The war’s cost, ballooning to $49–67 billion in 2024 (12.7% of GDP), has fuelled a 21–30% budget spike in 2025, while PTSD cripples 38,000 soldiers, with one in four reservists unfit for duty and ultra-Orthodox draft exemptions sparking riots. This deepens a demographic crisis where Israel’s 18–24-year-old cohort shrinks against a Palestinian population that multiplies every generation. Israel’s vaunted military tech — Iron Dome, Arrow, and Iron Beam, besides Popeye, Rampage, and Spice bombs, developed by Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), Rafael, and Elbit Systems — relies on 87–98% U.S. assistance, funding, and components. IAI’s $4.7 billion revenue and Elbit’s $5.6 billion in 2024 remain tethered to Pentagon contracts, while Elbit’s stock plummeted 15% in 2025 amid BDS boycott campaigns. This is not self-sufficiency but a U.S. and European outpost dressed up as innovation.
Meanwhile, the diamond trade funnels ~$1 billion yearly to military coffers via Ramat Gan, a hub for blood diamonds, with magnates like Dan Gertler linked to $12 million in Congolese conflict gems, according to UN reports, while FATF flagged the sector for laundering close to $220 million in 2024 alone. This is a manifestation of a rot festering at the societal level: a 2025 UN report documented ~1,600 cases of sexual violence in detention camps, 1,500 unresolved cases of paedophilia with little to no convictions, while domestic violence surged 38% among Israeli households amid economic strain, according to Haaretz. Israel’s own conservative Jerusalem Post reported that 100% of Thai and other foreign agricultural workers in Israel’s farming sector had been sexually assaulted — 654 out of 654 surveyed. None of them could file a complaint as it’d mean losing job and home. A marriage crisis compounds this, with ~50% of young Israelis delaying unions, fearing instability and emigration. This is not a thriving nation but a settler project haemorrhaging talent, legitimacy, and autonomy, chained to a waning U.S. empire and a high-tech illusion that collapses under scrutiny.
And when US protection becomes unreliable — and history shows all protectorates eventually outlive their utility — Israel’s internal factions (military, messianic, secular-liberal, settler) will fragment. This process is already visible. This state cannot project coherence under long-term asymmetric war where its narrative-magic of shock and awe cannot be applied; because its strength was never resilience, only dominance. The Iron Wall doctrine was designed for a century of superiority, not for an age of parity. Hence Israel may keep inventing doctrines — “Periphery”, “Begin”, “Dahiya”, MBAM (Campaign Between Wars / מערכה שבין המלחמות), “Firepower and Mobility”, “Ba’al HaBayit (Master of the House)” — but none can insulate it from the fact that siege cannot be permanent. Like all colonial anachronisms, it survives by manufacturing threat. Peace, paradoxically, is its existential threat, because peace unravels the racialised scaffolding it stands on.
This makes Zionism the ultimate parasite: prolonging itself by keeping its hosts in crisis. Yet every parasite reaches a point where the host either expels it or perishes with it. Apartheid fell when its Western patrons could no longer carry its moral and financial cost. The Crusaders fell when local societies became resilient. The Soviet Union fell when its economic and ideological contradictions outweighed its military power. By backing Zionism unconditionally, the West is not only underwriting Israel’s siege state, it is scripting its own decline.
The West’s Strategic Bind: Defending Its Own Parasite
Support for Israel is a structural reflex, not a moral failing of Western delusion. It may now sound like cliché, but it is direct realism: the Western order relies on Zionism not as a mere client, but as a permanent wedge in the Middle East. The cui bono points straight to the Western deep state. Amid all the noise, the signal is clear — Israel prevents strategic coherence in the Islamic world, justifies a permanent Western security presence, and triggers manageable conflicts that absorb regional energy.
But this logic, inherited from the post-WWII playbook, now works in reverse. Every Israeli escalation inflicts long-term damage to Western infrastructure. With absolute Zionist impunity reaching independence, NATO’s normative core undermines, the UN is neutralised, the alienation of the East and Global South deepens, and narrative control collapses under open-source visibility.
The West defends Zionism because abandoning it would unravel the illusions that stabilise its global command. But defending it accelerates the West’s own loss of credibility, coherence, and internal control. Every dollar sent to Israeli bombs, every veto cast at the UN, every justification spun on CNN or BBC, is a transaction in that very loss.
Again borrowing Toynbee’s language, the suicidal rigidity of the dominant minority is unfolding in real time: unable to adapt, the Western elite double down on a system that requires more force to achieve less effect.
And here is the deeper truth Western audiences need to hear: The longer the West backs Zionist apartheid unconditionally, the more inevitable regional collapse becomes.
Keep pushing this system — this double standard, this protection of genocide, this shielding of apartheid behind high-tech moral language — and you will break the Middle East beyond repair. But that collapse will not stop at Gaza. It will bleed first into Jordan, then into Sinai, Lebanon, and even the Gulf.
You think refugees broke Europe in 2015? Wait until the next wave comes not from Syria, but from Jordan which may combine Egypt as well.
You think Al-Qaida was the worst fallout? Wait until disillusioned Muslim youth — armed with high-tech tools and no faith in diplomacy — build decentralised resistance without leadership. That is not terrorism. That is entropy.
Since the beginning of Jewish Aliyah in the late 19th century, the Middle East has been in perpetual turmoil, now reaching a tipping point. The West can no longer manage or contain it. Every major war in the region since 1947 — Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria — has been tied directly to safeguarding the Zionist project. From propping up dictators to crushing democratic stirrings, no stone has been left unturned to prevent any parity with their Zionist colony. The project has cost the world at least 1.7 million lives, tens of millions more scarred, and left the Middle East in permanent paranoia and war. And while the Zionist project is breaking the region, it is beginning to break the very West that sustains it.
With the weight and density of growing dissent, some in the West are beginning to realise this civilisational suicidal path. The convergence of far-right nationalists with far-right Zionists may seem bizarre, but the physics of it is not. At home, Zionism aligns with US and European ethno-nationalists not because of ideology, but because of function: both enshrine identity as the basis of power.
Here’s the final twist: the more the West empowers Zionists, the more Zionists empower the Western far-right — from Trump to Le Pen to the next generation of ethno-nationalists. But this alignment will reactivate Europe’s oldest fault lines. Identity politics, if entrenched at the strategic level, will eventually dissolve the post-war European consensus. Zionism pushes Europe back to a pre-WWI posture: tribal, militarised, existentially insecure. And once that spiral begins, Jews in Europe will again be cast as the internal foreigner — after the migrants, after the Muslims. That is the historical cycle.
It is not a strategy. It is desperation. The end of ideological clarity. The elites have no plan — only momentum.
In the end, everyone loses: Muslims, Jews, and the West. Gaza is not just a siege — it is the litmus test of civilization’s future. It should never have been zero-sum — for a century muslim democrats have extended an arm of ideological peace to the West, but Zionism has ensured it becomes nothing else.
China and the Structural Alternative to the West
Now, this western suicidal rigidity and incoherence lead us to a changing East seeking hedging and alternates. This is where the current global order diverges from post-WWII and especially Cold War dynamics. The USSR offered ideological competition but lacked deep economic roots across the world and was culturally overstretched. China offers systemic alternatives — in trade, finance, infrastructure, digital systems, and strategic partnerships. It is not containment-proof; but it is absorption-resistant especially with no cultural or social agenda.
Where the USSR pushed the world into camps, China rewires it into zones of infrastructure-dependent interdependence. It does not need to fight the US directly. It only needs to offer others the ability to bypass it.
In this emerging world, the logic of absolute security — the core of Israel’s existence — becomes a liability. Israel cannot survive in a world where monopoly is no longer enforceable, and parity is not an existential threat but a default condition.
The United States: Global Power in Strategic Exhaustion
The only thing preventing the collapse of Israel so far has been the American vassalage. There’s a profound verse in Quran, in Aal ‘Imran (3:112), explaining that very phenomena:
They will be stricken with disgrace wherever they go, unless they are protected by a lifeline from Allah or from people. They have invited the displeasure of Allah and have been branded with misery for rejecting Allah’s revelations and murdering ˹His˺ prophets unjustly. This is ˹a fair reward˺ for their disobedience and violations.
That lifeline right now is the US, as it was Muslim rule once centuries ago. Now, the US remains powerful. But the capacity to enforce coherence has diminished in this nation who once sought justice and truth as the raison d’être and went to war over it. The US is overstretched militarily, internally polarised, and losing its monopoly over technological and narrative systems.
Its current strategic reflex — doubling down on old alliances, propping up failing clients, inflating minor victories — reflects imperial fatigue, not renewed strength.
The unconditional support for Israel is not a sustainable long-term strategy. It is short-term insulation from domestic blowback. But this insulation has strategic cost: alienating Muslim populations, energising resistance networks, impeding any eastern pivot to contain, sustain or win great power politics, and, perhaps most importantly, burn down global institutions designed to outlast empires.
The US will not disappear. But its capacity to dictate terms is fading. And its continued entanglement with Zionism will only accelerate that fade.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own. They do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of the South Asia Times.
