As newspapers including the New York Times and Haaretz have been reporting, foreign investors are withdrawing their money at an unprecedented rate, as Israeli entrepreneurs frantically transfer their money abroad. This flow of foreign capital was essential to Israel's self-styled brand of "Start-Up Nation" — a title it's in serious danger of losing.
Leo Bakman, president and founder of the Israeli Institute for Innovation, a nonprofit startup incubator, told Haaretz: "Investors are taking a step back and saying: 'First decide if you're a democracy or a dictatorship, and then we'll talk.'"
In light of its increasingly damaged international reputation, longtime critics of Israel's apartheid practices and supporters of Palestinian freedom are seeing significant wins. Barcelona recently became the first major city to officially cut ties with Israel until it improves its human rights record. There's no doubt that more and more cities, nations, and organizations will take similar courageous stands in the months and years ahead.
Nothing New
As pressure mounts globally and internally, the Israeli government is confronted with its destabilization and its status as a pariah state, and its sense of desperation is growing. Israel's own president, Isaac Herzog, stated recently that the country was "on the brink of constitutional and social collapse."
Israel's response to its own precarity is, of course, the massive settler attack on Huwara. It's the massacres the Israeli military has carried out in Jenin and Nablus. It is powerful members of government both implicitly and explicitly endorsing the murder of Palestinians by both settlers and the military. It is carrying out "the law of Palestinian elimination," the basis of Israel's settler-colonial project, as a daily practice. It is making Palestinians pay for simply existing.
This is not an exception or an aberration or a temporary escalation. This is Zionism.
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