A backlash over Israel’s onslaught

New incursion fuels genocide accusations and global outcry, deepening nation’s isolation

- By Nasi BuLos

AMIR LEVY Getty Images TANKS are shown Wednesday in southern Israel near the Gaza border. The military has also sent tanks into Gaza City's western areas.

Cascades of condemnation from friend and foe alike. An array of international organizations and rights groups leveling accusations of genocide and war crimes. Boycotts across a range of sectors and fields.

As Israel begins its ground offensive to occupy Gaza City, defying international and domestic pressure to negotiate a ceasefire with the militant group Hamas, it skirts ever closer to becoming a pariah state.

“Israel is entering diplomatic isolation. We will have to deal with a closed economy,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at a Finance Ministry conference Monday, giving a rare admission of the war's effect on Israel's international standing.

“We will have to be Athens and super-Sparta,” adapting to an “autarkic,” or self-sustaining, economy, he added. “We have no choice.”

Netanyahu engaged in damage control Tuesday, saying that he was talking specifically about Israel's defense industry and that the wider economy was “strong and innovative.” But by then his words had already spooked markets, spurring a sharp fall in the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and a raft of enraged statements from his political enemies.

“We are not Sparta—this vision as presented will make it difficult for us to survive in an evolving global world,” the Israel Business Forum, which represents the heads of around 200 of the Israeli economy’s largest companies, said in a statement. “We are marching towards a political, economic, and social abyss that will endanger our existence in Israel.”

Netanyahu has forged ahead with the ground operation despite repeated warnings from allies and adversaries that it would trigger a humanitarian catastrophe for the hundreds of thousands of people remaining in what was the enclave’s largest urban center.