Darkness over Israel

An internal struggle is starting to rip the family apart

When my daughters were young they would often fight, and sometimes the anger and emotions boiled over as they each set out to really hurt the other. Siblings do that. It was painful to watch and of course we interfered quickly to end the conflict, defuse the situation and calm everyone down. I had exactly the same feeling over the last few days seeing how Israel is tearing itself apart. To see how someone you love breaking up into pieces with not even a chance to compromise and reconcile creates a sort of hurt that is hard to describe. The core reason for that is that if you see the fight unfold in front of your eyes you know that the damage may be so deep that it risks becoming irreparable for quite some time. We have seen it recently in Hong Kong and in Ukraine. Neighbours become enemies, family members stop talking to each other and politicians don’t even bother to find some sort of joint route to travel together on for the good of all. It is ugly.

And in Israel’s case it seems we are crossing the rubicon in full force. Nethanyahu’s coalition rammed through a law that essentially is a first step in changing the constitutional structure of the state with a small and radical parliamentary majority, denying any tweaks that could have addressed some of the real concerns brought forward by the opposition. Worse, the more radical partners is his cabinet announced that this was only a first step and that more was coming, the next instalment came in yesterday with a proposal to equate military service to yeshiva (or bible studies) exempting a large and growing segment of the Israeli population from enlisting in the armed forces. The fear in Israel is now that the country is on a trajectory to become an ethno-religious authoritarian state, unchecked by an independent judiciary. It stands to be reasoned though that this is an overreaction and that things may not be as dramatic as they are being described right now.

To be clear, Israel needed an overhaul badly. Functioning without a written constitution and without a bi-cameral legislature in the end put too much power in the hands of the judiciary. To argue the courts were politicized is not entirely crazy. But Nethanyahu struck a devil’s bargain with his hardcore religious coalition partners who tolerated no watering down of the proposed legislation, no, they even threatened to pull the plug on the Nethanyahu’s coalition if the prime minister even considered such a thing. A diminished leader he became, still haunted by a potential prosecution and sentence for corruption and now weakened by a heart condition - a pacemaker was inserted the day before the key vote - is dragged along by a radical minority that will not let this golden opportunity go to waste. These are the only political friends Nethanyahu has left by the way, so his room to operate is quite limited. The men in control now appear to be justice minister Yariv Levin and the chair of the parliamentary legislative committee Simcha Rothman. The latter did a victory lap on Jerusalem’s famous market (the ‘shuk’) with a heavy security detail, a sort of ego tour usually the prerogative of presidents and political leaders.

It was not just the scenes from the massive protests and increasing police violence that underlined the seriousness of the situation. Joe Biden weighed in, Israel’s military reservists are now pulling out of their obligations in protest (drawing accusations of staging a coup), doctors threatened a strike, former politicians and celebrities chimed in, and of course the financial and tech markets are now adding a risk premium to doing business in Israel. And when capital starts to depart it will be more than discontent and despair that will be eating away at the functioning of a state. A state whose enemies, needless to say, now smell the opportunity to destabilize and possibly attack Israel, in particular Iran whose proxies in Lebanon are increasingly ready for action. So yes, the vote taken on Monday is not just a calculated grab at more power, it is turning out to be a radical gamble on the survival and continued existence of the state in its present form. And that is what is causing Israel’s cohesiveness as a society to begin to unravel, the very thing that over the past seventy-five years had made it such a successful nation.

However, we have been here before. Jews have ripped each other apart in ancient times and at its inception in 1948 a civil war was barely averted. In the 1950s the debate to accept reparations from Germany to compensate for the horrors of Holocaust erupted in mass protests and violence. It is too early to rank the current divisions and predict a ‘civil war’ as some are enthusiastically doing in order to create drama and get attention. Political machinations may yield unexpected results and an attack from the outside may unify the divided nation in very short order. It is not unreasonable to think that a roadmap to meaningful constitutional reform will emerge out of the chaos of the past few months. It just so happened that it started roughly with extreme conflict. And that is why the anguish and hurt are so palpable. But just like with siblings fighting, there will be a way out, most of times. It will just not be an easy one.

Photo: stormy clouds over Tel-Aviv, Israel, photo taken during my visit in February when the protests were already underway but when there was still hope for a reasonable compromise.