In September 2025, at a Finance Ministry conference in Jerusalem, Benjamin Netanyahu declared that Israel was entering a period of diplomatic and economic isolation, and needed to become what he called a “Super-Sparta.” By this time, much of the international community had already turned against Israel due to its actions in Gaza and elsewhere, even as most world leaders continued to support it, directly or tacitly. Those trends have only intensified since. Israel subsequently expanded its bombing campaign in Lebanon and, in conjunction with the United States, launched a new one against Iran.
Two years into the war in Gaza, Israel appeared to be losing the support of many of its most ardent backers. Netanyahu himself, along with other Israeli officials and military personnel, was officially the subject of arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Likewise, boycotts of the country’s cultural and academic institutions were gathering momentum—a predictable development given Israel’s conduct in the war. What Netanyahu was implying with his “Sparta” reference was that Israel was besieged from all sides, and instead of merely complaining about it, the country needed to adapt to, and even embrace, that isolation—combining autarky, self-reliance, and domestic arms production to survive. “We have no choice,” Netanyahu said, “at least in the coming years,” as Israel confronted mounting international pressure, arms embargoes, and the fallout from Gaza. In this framing, the “Super-Sparta” narrative not only reshapes domestic perception—his primary goal in this instance—but also signals a deliberate reorientation away from international interdependence toward a logic of managed isolation.
Five decades of Netanyahu’s involvement in public life have shown any attentive observer that nothing he says should ever be taken at face value. The son of one of Israel’s most famous historians, Ben-Zion Netanyahu—known for his epic studies of the Spanish Reconquista and his ultra-nationalistic views—the younger Netanyahu is himself something of a historian, if a uniquely poor and peculiar one, serving up revisionist or sometimes outright fabricated history in the service of his political agenda. One particularly egregious but characteristic example came in an October 2015 speech at the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem, where he flirted with Holocaust denial by claiming, falsely, that the Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler had no intention of killing European Jews en masse until he received the idea for the Final Solution from the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini—when in fact the Nazi genocide was already well under way by the time the two men met in 1941.
This was consistent with Netanyahu’s longstanding effort to rehabilitate and valorize actual fascists and antisemites across Europe and the West as “Friends of Israel,” while casting the Palestinians and their leaders as the real Nazis. Netanyahu’s favorite analogy has long been the comparison between Iran and Nazi Germany: for years he repeatedly likened any Western diplomatic accommodation with Iran—including the U.S.-Iran nuclear deal of 2015—to the appeasement of Hitler in 1938. But when he invoked Sparta, he was doing something more specific: not merely using, or misusing, the past to frame the present in ways that justified his politics, mobilized emotion, protected his own position, and stigmatized dissent—things he has always done—but doing so through the vehicle of a sustained historical analogy. Sparta, in this telling, becomes a flattering parable for the nation: a small warrior society, admired and feared but unloved, standing alone against a hostile world bent on its destruction. It is an analogy designed to instruct Israelis on how they should understand their place in history, and how they should interpret the world’s reaction to Israel’s conduct: expect isolation and condemnation, but remain heroic and steadfast—and, of course, keep Netanyahu in power.
None of what Netanyahu said has much to do with the actual Sparta of history. One of the most important city-states of ancient Greece, Sparta was certainly insular and conservative, and its political culture was obsessively eccentric and militaristic. Sparta is famous in popular culture—and among those who know little about ancient Greek history—for its military prowess and martial valor, as depicted in films such as 300. But the real Sparta is quite different from the metaphorical Sparta of Netanyahu’s speech. With some effort, one can identify points of resemblance with modern Israel, though none of them are what Netanyahu wished to convey. Like today’s Israel, ancient Sparta was not a liberal democracy—though unlike Israel, it made no claim to be one and possessed none of the institutions that give the Israeli ethno-state its liberal-democratic exterior.
Somewhat like Israel today, Sparta was ruled by an oligarchy and governed by a small elite whose authority was rarely challenged. In a way that recalls Israel’s theocratic characteristics, Sparta’s laws were essentially fixed and handed down across generations for centuries—just as Halakhic Orthodox law governs significant aspects of Jewish life in Israel today, dictating which holidays must be observed and imposing religious frameworks on a population that is far from uniformly devout. As in Israel, at least for most Jewish Israelis, Spartan boys were raised primarily to be soldiers, and the rest of society existed to sustain that militaristic ideal. The helot comparison is perhaps the most pointed of all: Sparta maintained a large population in a condition of permanent, institutionalized subjugation, subjected to routine violence and denied any path to civic participation—a parallel that requires little elaboration for anyone familiar with conditions in Gaza or the occupied West Bank.
Beyond these points, however, Sparta had little in common with Israel—and a political personality like Netanyahu would have deeply offended Spartan sensibilities, reminding them of precisely what they most despised in certain Athenian politicians. The Spartans did not cultivate narratives of permanent victimhood to justify atrocities or deflect personal accountability. Perhaps more significantly, Sparta entered major conflicts only alongside allies, driven primarily by fear of external powers—first Persia’s invasion of Greek lands and more seriously, the perceived threat of Athenian imperial domination.
Netanyahu’s reference thus works only by stripping Sparta of its actual historical context and repurposing it for contemporary political ends. That is precisely the point. The analogy does not illuminate Israeli reality; it reframes it in ways that serve a Prime Minister clinging to power. More broadly, it allows a state that maintains Jewish supremacy in law and practice to imagine itself as a misunderstood warrior society—noble, embattled, and unappreciated. It enables large parts of the Israeli public, at least those who still attend to Netanyahu’s political messaging, to inhabit a delusion of dignity and valor even as they support, ignore, deny, or celebrate the ongoing violent treatment of Palestinians. These individuals view themselves simultaneously as all-powerful and perpetually victimized.
The Sparta analogy is only the latest iteration of a recurring pattern, though it also represents something of a departure in Israeli political culture. That culture is built on a dense architecture of historical references drawn from Jewish history, or with some connection to it—some ancient, some modern, most of them wildly anachronistic—presented as tools of self-understanding but functioning in practice as instruments of political persuasion, and often as straightforward propaganda. The right question is not whether these analogies are accurate—they almost never are—but what work they are doing. What kinds of political behavior, moral reasoning and civic emotion do they make possible? And what realities do they obscure?
Some of the oldest and most familiar analogies in Israeli political culture are drawn from antiquity, though from a considerably closer historical home than Sparta, which has no place in Jewish history. Masada, where the last fighters of the Jewish revolt against Rome made their final stand; the Maccabees, Jewish religious rebels against the Hellenistic rulers of Judea; David and Goliath—these stories form the backbone of national mythology, but they also function continuously as analogies with the present. Israeli schoolchildren learn about them not as distant accounts of long-vanished societies with their own internal logics and practically no connection to the Israel or Palestine of today, but as chapters in an ongoing narrative that culminates naturally in the modern Zionist state, with its current distinctly right-wing character.
The political purpose is transparent: these analogies sanctify the present by projecting it backward onto origin stories from mythic antiquity. They naturalize the existence of a militarized nation-state by anchoring it in timeless heroism and existential struggle. The central idea is always that Israel is the weaker party, defending itself against a ruthless and overwhelming enemy. Every generation brings a new adversary intent on destroying us—so children are taught. This is partly why Netanyahu, a pork-eating secular man, cannot stop invoking Amalek—the ancient biblical enemy that the Israelites were supposedly commanded by God to exterminate—whenever he authorizes carpet bombing of Gaza City or Tehran.
Taken together, these analogies operate not as interpretive tools or educational material but as political techniques. They simplify, distort, and mythologize. They collapse reality into a series of fables that always point toward the same conclusion: Israel is eternally defending itself; Israel is eternally the victim; Israel is eternally justified. This is not unique to Israel, of course. Schoolchildren virtually everywhere study history in a broadly similar register—focused on national heroes, shaped by a mythic view of the past designed to produce loyal subjects of the nation. The teaching of history in modern states did not begin as an attempt to encourage critical thinking about the past, as academic practitioners like to tell their students today; it began as a mechanism for transmitting the dominant narrative of national origin. This is as true in France, China, Russia, and the United States as it is in Israel.
All national political cultures are driven substantially by the force of these inculcated narratives and the hold they exercise over their societies. The complex relationships that exist today between Japan and China, or between India and Pakistan, are incomprehensible without an understanding of how deeply historical memory shapes geopolitical instincts and political decision-making. But even within this broader context, Israel is distinctive: its modern politics is so intimately intertwined with essentially mythological accounts of the distant past, and so many people live or die—or conduct savage arguments online—based on the refusal, even among the most secular and liberal members of the public, to distinguish between mythology and history.
We can understand why politicians like Netanyahu communicate through historical analogy. But why do these analogies resonate with the media and with parts of the public? There are genuine reasons why they are so frequently invoked and why some of them land so effectively. They tend to offer a double illusion of comfort: the illusion that by looking backward we can know what lies ahead, and the illusion that the outcome will be the one we desire—because we reach for analogies not to test our thinking but to confirm it. We choose our historical precedents the way a lawyer chooses precedents: not to find the truth, but to win the argument. All historical thinking is rooted in the present—there is no escaping that—but analogies in the public sphere are often little more than political statements in historical costume. They are born of wishful thinking about outcomes and sustained by the fantasy that history can be made to predict the future. Netanyahu’s invocation of Sparta—which promises that the country will emerge triumphant from its trials—is one example among many.
The further back these analogies reach into the past, the more abstract their distortions tend to be. But the closer they approach the present, the more dangerous they become—and none carry more political charge, or do more damage, than those drawn from World War II. Nowhere are these distortions more vivid than in such analogies, which carry a special resonance—not only in Israel but across many countries, with the difference that those other countries actually fought in the war, won or lost it, or were devastated by it. Here the political uses of analogy grow sharper and their emotional power deeper. The Nazi genocide of Europe’s Jews is historically connected to the founding of the State of Israel, and the Holocaust is both commemorated in Israel and serves as the foundational rationale not only for Israel’s existence but for its conduct in the present. Outside Israel, and especially in Western Europe, support for the country—even in the face of its worst actions—derives in part from ongoing guilt over the Holocaust, even though Israel is not itself the victim of the Holocaust, and Israel does not represent European Jewry of the pre-war era, nor Jews in general.
It should also be said that many European politicians and media figures, particularly those who promote Islamophobic and xenophobic politics, support what Israel does not out of guilt—which they are incapable of feeling—but out of identification. The analogy at work is that Israel is under attack from Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, or the global left in the way that Jews in Europe were under attack from the Nazis. The fact that Israel’s most ardent European supporters include parties and movements that are the direct spiritual and political descendants of the fascist and antisemitic traditions that murdered millions of Jews two generations ago—among them figures such as Viktor Orbán in Hungary, whose political movement has rehabilitated wartime collaborators, or the post-fascist parties now in government in Italy—is an irony entirely lost on much of the Israeli public, and one that serves only to underscore how manipulative and inverted the analogy is. This narrative fuses historical trauma with contemporary policy, offering moral exoneration for almost anything Israel does.
But the analogy is precisely backwards. In practice, it is Israel that behaves like an ultranationalist state persecuting—and killing—a minority population under its control, while insisting on its own innocence and perpetual vulnerability. The simultaneous sense of moral supremacy and political victimhood is one of the most dangerous combinations in politics, as the twentieth century has, or should have, taught us.
Up to this point, we have focused on historical analogies as manipulation—uses and abuses of history in the service of nationalist narratives, promoted by a willing and profitable media. But the other side of this phenomenon deserves equal attention. Historical analogies also have a democratic function: they can serve as tools through which the public pushes back against abuses of power. It is natural—and at times necessary and even admirable—to invoke historical analogies when taking moral and political stands about the world we inhabit. When a national leader is transparently venal, autocratic, or rapacious, we instinctively reach for precedents, whether from our own national history or from the histories of other societies. When armed authorities attack minority communities, or when the state unleashes violence against those demanding justice, historical parallels can help us express collective outrage and situate the moment within a longer arc of power and resistance.
Analogies in such contexts are not pedantic exercises or mere manipulation; they are efforts to stir the public conscience, to convey alarm, to signal that the present crisis bears an uncomfortable resemblance to past injustices that demanded action. This is why, for example, the way Immigration and Customs Enforcement—ICE, the federal immigration enforcement agency established in 2003 in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks—has been deployed in recent years against immigrant populations in the United States has inspired historical comparisons with European fascism, the Ku Klux Klan, and the McCarthyite witch hunts. These were periods when minorities, or those deemed subversive, were hounded and criminalized by the state. At their best, such analogies sustain a form of intellectual solidarity—linking present crises to past experiences in ways that invite reflection rather than foreclose it.
Analogies will never be perfectly accurate. Every historical event is shaped by its own context, its own contingencies, its own irreducible particularities—and genocides differ from one another, just as fascisms can differ while remaining fascisms. Good historians generally teach that history does not repeat itself; it is always different, even when the present recalls the past. But accuracy is not the purpose of these analogies. Their force lies in their capacity to direct moral attention toward precedents that resonate with the dilemmas of the present.
Because political culture is today too often degraded by sensationalist media, disfigured by racism and class contempt, and shaped by leaders who thrive on dishonesty, we are subjected constantly to frivolous, crude, or offensive analogies that collapse under the slightest scrutiny. But this should not discredit the practice of historical analogy altogether. On the contrary: the moments when analogies ring true—when they expose a pattern that cannot be ignored—are precisely the moments when they are most powerful, and most unsettling.
Our conclusion should therefore be not that historical analogies should be discarded, but that we must scrutinize what work they are doing. When analogies help us identify the structural patterns of power, violence, and oppression, they can be genuinely illuminating. When they function instead as vehicles of delusion—obscuring far more than they reveal, turning living people into props in a national myth, or inducing populations to accept their own subjugation or the brutalization of others—they must be identified, challenged, and resisted.
There is also a broader question of sustainability that the Sparta analogy, like all flattering analogies, conveniently avoids. Sparta itself is instructive here: the very society Netanyahu invokes as a model of endurance collapsed within decades of its greatest military triumph, undone by demographic decline, the unresolvable tension of a subjugated helot population, and an inability to adapt to a changing world. Can a modern state, deeply embedded in global economic and political systems, sustain a model built on long-term isolation, militarization, and the permanent subjugation of another people? The histories of states built on such foundations strongly suggests that the answer is no. They tend to generate the very instabilities they claim to be defending against. Whether Israel’s current model can endure is highly doubtful—and the analogy of Sparta, properly understood, offers its regime no comfort whatsoever. If anything, it points in precisely the opposite direction.
As a historian, I want to restate a simple point that often gets lost in the noise: historical analogies are not history. They are rhetorical devices—powerful ones, capable of clarifying moral stakes and illuminating structural dynamics—but they are only one tool among the many that historical thinking provides, and a tool that is frequently misused. We should remain alert to those who deploy them and attentive to their motives. Analogies are political statements dressed in historical clothing; they are not a substitute for historical analysis, comparison, or explanation. They do not predict the future. At their best, they serve as starting points for inquiry—sparks capable of igniting a deeper engagement with the past. They can provoke debate, unsettle complacency, and open new avenues of understanding—but only if we treat them as invitations to think rather than shortcuts to judgment.
Netanyahu’s analogy between Israel and Sparta shows us what history, when deployed manipulatively, does: it serves power at the expense of truth, and sometimes at the expense of human lives. History, practiced in good faith, can deepen our understanding of the present. But it asks something of us in return: that we refuse its weaponization, resist those who would bend it to their purposes, and remain willing—always—to follow the evidence wherever it leads, however uncomfortable the destination.
