Personally I grew up around more horses and cattle, than people, so I tend to put culture in the context of nature, rather than trying to frame nature, aka, reality, within cultural frameworks.

For one thing, culture tends to see good and bad as some cosmic conflict between righteousness and evil, while in nature it is the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental, the 1/0 of sentience.

So while culture is the stories we tend the next generation, aka, the kids, to get them to behave and be part of the group, nature is some enormous computational process that doesn't always come up with the answers we want to hear.

While the Jewish tribal god became the centerpoint of Western Civ, Israel is not an organically connected society. Now it tried, with the kibbutzes, to build from the bottom up, village style, but as a nation, it is missing these 2000 years of civil evolution. Remember Ancient Israel was a monarchy. The Big Guy Rules. Like the religion.

There are centrifugal and centripetal forces in every society. The social energies pushing out, as the civil and cultural structures coalesce in. Israel has an obsessively centripetal religious core that has been excessively catered to, for various reasons, along with a very cosmopolitan population, essentially European in its assumptions. It was getting extremely evident these two sides were in serious conflict, before Oct 7th and it remains bubbling under the surface. This need to project out and stomp on Gaza has managed to push it under the surface, but the larger blowback from the rest of the planet is building, no matter what Uncle Sam says.

Our own economy has been hollowed out by excessive financialization and the doors and wheels are falling off the planes, because profit trumps quality. The accountants rule the engineers.

Not to mention Europe is itself melting into some self absorbed puddle.

I'm not on the other side, so to speak. My sense is there will be much opportunity in the West to start fresh, after the dust starts to settle. As I've told my daughter, since she was a kid, my generation is going to blow up the world, yours will have to put it back together again.

As such, I see Israel as simply one of the dominos that is going to fall. I would put it in line behind Ukraine.

There doesn't seem to be any plan, beyond that larger war, which would leave it a smoking ruin. If not radioactive. How long can it remain in the current limbo, beating on the Palestinians to distract the domestic audience, but running up a serious bill with the rest of the world?

The future is a continuation of the past, until it becomes a reaction to it.

The pendulum swings back.