Netanyahu’s ‘Sparta’ metaphor obscures Israel’s wartime economic reality

Even with boycotts, sanctions, and embargoes making life harder, Israel will continue trading, innovating, and exporting, at the same time as it develops greater self-reliance.

Israel needs to become super-Sparta, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday in a flourish of hyperbole that triggered, well, more hyperbole. And the loser was credibility.

The line came in the middle of a bruising fight with the Finance Ministry over how much money to sink into moving critical defense infrastructure underground – one of the sobering lessons of the current war. To dramatize his case, Netanyahu borrowed from antiquity.

“We are Athens and Sparta. But we’re going to be Athens and super-Sparta,” he said Tuesday in a speech at the Treasury. “There’s no choice; in the coming years, at least, we will have to deal with these attempts to isolate us.”

These lines were not delivered in a vacuum. For weeks, Defense and Finance officials have been arguing over billions in wartime spending: how much to restock missiles, whether to push through a multibillion-shekel plan to move bases and depots below ground, and how to do it without blowing through deficit limits already at their highest in decades.

The Defense Ministry says Iran’s missile barrage during June’s 12-Day War showed just how vulnerable Israel’s infrastructure is, and that burying it is vital. The Treasury counters that the budget is already stretched to the breaking point, and the army needs to tighten its belt before asking for more. Into this fight stepped the prime minister, armed with a classical metaphor to try to tip the scales.

Netanyahu’s super-Sparta imagery was meant to sway the folks in the Treasury – it was a sales pitch, not his aspirational philosophy. But it set off alarms.

As did another headline-grabbing line in the speech, using a word for national economic self-sufficiency and independence that sent many to their dictionary: “We will increasingly need to adapt to an economy with autarkic characteristics, the word I most hate.”

And why does he hate that word? Because it is the opposite of the free-market economy that he has long championed. Critics jumped on the phrase as if he were championing isolationism: He wasn’t. His point was not that Israel wants to close itself off, but that circumstances – embargo threats, sanctions, hostile suppliers – may leave it little choice but to rely more on itself.

AND HE went further. Netanyahu blamed two outside forces for tightening the noose: China and Qatar on the one hand, and growing Muslim minorities in Europe on the other.

The first, he said, are orchestrating an “influence campaign” against Israel through bots, digital propaganda, and online campaigns aimed at a kind of virtual blockade designed to weaken support in the West.

The second, he argued, is changing Europe’s political landscape and pushing governments toward tougher anti-Israel positions.

These weren’t throwaway lines. They were part of a larger picture: that Israel’s isolation is structural, not temporary. The combination of demographic change in Europe and deliberate influence campaigns from hostile states means Israel must prepare for a colder world and greater self-reliance.

The problem is that the way Netanyahu framed it sounded fatalistic.

By portraying China’s trolls, Qatar’s money, and Europe’s demographics as immovable facts, he made it seem as if isolation is inevitable.

Critics pounced. If the problem is a siege, they asked, where is the strategy to break it? Israel has faced propaganda and unfriendly demographics before, and found ways around them – through diplomacy, alliances, and trade. Naming the threat without outlining a solution came across less as defiance than as resignation, the acceptance of a fait accompli.

The reaction, predictably, was just as overheated.

Opposition head Yair Lapid called the speech “crazy.” Gadi Eisenkot, who announced a new political party on Tuesday, accused Netanyahu of paralysis. Industry leaders warned of economic doom, and social media was full of memes about Sparta’s eventual downfall and posts about an imminent dystopia.

Hyperbole begot hyperbole, and the conversation veered away from whether to bury critical infrastructure underground and expand defense production lines to whether Israel was about to wall itself off from the world.

Yet the underlying point is not controversial: reliance on foreign suppliers for basic munitions – even on the US – is a glaring strategic vulnerability.

October 7 and everything since has rammed that lesson home. Expanding local production of interceptors, armored vehicles and ammunition is, in the wake of the experience of the last two years, just good common sense. That was the case Netanyahu was trying to make. The problem was that he chose to use overheated rhetoric to make it.

WITHIN MINUTES of his speech, the Tel Aviv indices fell about two percent, treating words like “autarky” and “isolation” as signs of a looming crisis.

Netanyahu, who became aware of his words’ impact on the markets, scrambled to calm the waters. He issued a statement later in the day pointing to Israel’s strong shekel, shrinking deficit, record defense exports, and world-class R&D, a message he repeated during a press conference 24 hours later. It had an effect; the market steadied on Tuesday. Still, the tremor was a reminder that when a prime minister talks about Sparta and autarky, investors listen and act accordingly.

If much of the blowback was politically motivated and as overheated as the speech itself, one strand of the criticism does carry weight.

Describing the problem is not the same as offering a way out. Saying “we may be pushed into self-reliance” is true as a warning, but lacking as a policy. Leadership means expanding options: diversifying supply chains, stockpiling wisely, producing at home what is most critically needed, and at the same time doing the diplomatic legwork necessary to keep foreign markets open. By treating external pressures as walls that cannot be climbed, Netanyahu left himself open to the charge that he was diagnosing a siege rather than offering a plan to break through it.

This is why the Sparta metaphor fell short. It muddied the argument for greater self-reliance while conjuring an image of a militarized, insular state that is the opposite of how Israel likes to see itself.

The reality is less dramatic. Even with boycotts, sanctions, and embargoes making life harder, Israel will continue trading, innovating, and exporting, at the same time as it develops greater self-reliance.

Difficult, yes – but hardly impossible. That adaptability, that ability to adjust to new realities, has always defined the country. Unfortunately, that message was lost in all the hyperbole – both Netanyahu’s and that of his critics. At his press conference Tuesday evening, he tried to correct the impression left by his earlier comment. No, he made clear, Israel is not becoming Sparta.