Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday that Israel must become a "super Sparta" if it is to survive the growing global backlash over its genocidal assault on Gaza.
In a speech that appeared aimed at reinforcing a siege mentality, Netanyahu argued that Israel would need to become more economically self-sufficient as boycotts spread and international isolation deepens.
"We will increasingly need to adapt to an economy with autarkic characteristics," he said at a conference in Jerusalem, noting the creeping arms embargo that threatens to impede his government's ability to wage constant war.
In calling for self-sufficiency, he invoked the ancient Greek city-state famous for its penchant for war and mythologised by nineteenth-century Social Darwinists as a model for carrying out eugenics.
Ancient Greece's garrison state
Alongside Athens, Sparta was one of the most powerful Greek city-states.
A highly militarised society, it was composed of citizen-warriors known as Spartiates who ruled over vast numbers of slaves.
It remained in almost a constant state of war, fighting rival Greek states and the Persian Empire for control of the Peloponnese and northern Greece.
Its conquest and occupation of Messenia and Lakonia led to the enslavement of tens of thousands of people, known as helots.
Sparta's preeminence as a regional military power was partly sustained by its closed economy. It was also a system that bred fragility and ultimately contributed to its swift collapse.
A mythic role model for scientific racism
Sparta was re-imagined by 19th-century historians and eugenicists as a proto-racial state, where citizens were bred and trained for martial excellence and weakness was rooted out.
Proponents of scientific racism, such as the notoriously antisemitic British-German philosopher Houston Stewart Chamberlain and later Nazi racial theorists, cast Sparta as an example of "racial hygiene", pointing to myths about Spartans discarding weak infants and rooting out genetic inferiorities.
The Sparta of the Levant
Netanyahu's invocation of Sparta as a model for Israel's future emphasises not just the country's military strength, but places it in a lineage of societies defined by perpetual warfare, oligarchic rule and domination over a subjugated population.
The descent of Israel into a garrison state defined by war was predicted almost 80 years ago by Jewish political philosopher Hannah Arendt, who warned of the fascist proclivities of Revisionist Zionism.
Under an all-out war against the indigenous population, "the Palestinian Jews would degenerate into one of those small warrior tribes about whose possibilities and importance history has amply informed us since the days of Sparta", she wrote as the Nakba unfolded in 1948.