Israel’s Greatest Threat Right Now Is Its War Within

Artículo
World Politics Review, 14.11.2024
Yair Wallach, historiador y profesor en estudios israelíes (U. de Londres)

Over the course of 2024, and especially since July, Israel has demonstrated its clear military advantage over its regional rivals. Israel's devastating campaign in Gaza has reduced Hamas from the organized militia it was on Oct. 7, 2023, into a loose and ineffective guerrilla force, while killing tens of thousands, displacing millions and turning Gaza itself to rubble. In Lebanon, the leaders of Hezbollah, who believed they had established a stable status quo of deterrence with Israel, have mostly been killed and the organization's military ability has been severely degraded, with wide swathes of southern Lebanon and neighborhoods in Beirut and elsewhere having also been leveled.

Israel's brutal response to Hamas' Oct. 7 attack has demonstrated that for the foreseeable future, it cannot be defeated-let alone destroyed-by military force. But Israel has not won this war.

Just as Israel's military advantage did not prevent the huge blow of Oct. 7, it is also insufficient to decide the ongoing war of attrition between Israel and "the axis of resistance" in Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq and Iran. Daily barrages of rockets and missiles continue to cause damage, kill Israeli soldiers and citizens, and severely disrupt the Israeli economy. And even if cease-fires in Gaza and southern Lebanon are reached soon, they are unlikely to restore the relative stability Israel enjoyed between 2006 and 2023.

Since 2009, mostly under Netanyahu's rule, Israel has rejected meaningful negotiations toward Palestinian statehood and instead pursued the "management" of the conflict vis-à-vis the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza. And for a long time, that approach seemed to be working. Military escalations that killed thousands of Palestinians in 2014 and 2021 did not severely affect Israeli citizens. Israel's economy was booming throughout much of this period, during which normalized relations were established with key Arab states. It appeared that Israel could maintain the Palestinians indefinitely under occupation and siege, while Israeli citizens enjoyed security and prosperity.

That illusion ended on Oct. 7. Since Hamas' attack, Israel has been locked in a war without a clear end in sight, facing growing international isolation and unprecedented economic strain.

And yet Israel's real existential challenge lies within. The deep fissures within Israeli society had already been apparent before Oct. 7. Indeed, over the course of the preceding years, longstanding tensions were inflamed and transformed into real crisis. In 2021, a comic sketch from a popular Israeli TV satire show calling for a civil war to finally "sort things out" went viral, capturing the growing sense that a violent confrontation within Jewish Israeli society was no longer unthinkable. Like elsewhere in the world these days, those fault lines were defined around a controversial populist leader: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

In 2022, after the country's fifth election in less than four years, Netanyahu finally secured a solid majority and formed the most right-wing government in Israel's history. He soon launched a wide-ranging judicial overhaul-branded as judicial "reform"-that would have effectively disarmed Israel's judiciary as an independent branch of power. This "judicial coup" met with unprecedented resistance that surprised even its organizers. Hundreds of thousands of protesters poured into the streets every weekend for months on end. Thousands of officers in elite military units-including air force pilots-threatened to withdraw from military reserve duty, which Israeli officers who served in the military are expected to undertake until the age of 45.

The protests were led by the educated, largely secular, Jewish Israeli middle classes, who typically identify as political centrists. They stood against the key building blocs of Netanyahu's government coalition: Likud and its hard-right nationalist allies, religious settlers and ultra-Orthodox Jews, known as Haredim, all of which harbor deep resentment against Israel's "liberal elites."

Among some Israeli centrists, there is a growing realization that it is impossible to separate the government's increasing authoritarianism from the right wing's anti-Palestinian agenda.

The protesters feared that Netanyahu's government was steering Israel toward an authoritarian model, eroding individual freedoms and imposing a fundamentalist version of Judaism on the public sphere. At the same time, protest leaders were reluctant to engage in any discussion over Palestinian rights, with some even hostile to the idea. As a result, they shied away from defending equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel and tried hard to avoid questions regarding Israel's 56-year military rule over the occupied territories and the ongoing construction of settlements in the West Bank. The protests were about defending Israeli democracy, primarily for its Jewish citizens.

Despite the protests' initial success in blocking the constitutional changes needed to push through the judicial overhaul, the Netanyahu government did not abandon its agenda. Nor did the devastating military failure on Oct. 7 lead to the government's collapse, as many assumed it would. To the contrary, after an initial shock, Netanyahu's coalition came back more forcefully in 2024. And it has maintained a surprising level of cohesion, with its different elements-the ultra-nationalists, the religious settlers and the Haredim-having coalesced around a political program of authoritarianism, Jewish supremacy and settlements expansion. Minister for National Security Itamar Ben Gvir-who emerged from the ultra-rightwing Jewish supremacist Kahanist movement-has consolidated his grip on the police and transformed it into a political tool to shut down dissent. And the government has now launched an anti-democratic legislative blitz, with new laws that threaten to fire, disenfranchise and deport "terrorism sympathizers," a term aimed primarily against Palestinian citizens of Israel, although it could be expanded to Jewish Israeli leftists.

Initially, the war in Gaza itself enjoyed near universal support among the Jewish Israeli public. There has been hardly any dissent in response to the devastation of Gaza and its civilian population. At the same time, however, the Netanyahu government has remained widely unpopular. Opinion polls have consistently shown that most Israelis-at least 60 percent last month-do not trust Netanyahu, whom they hold responsible for the Oct. 7 attack and for failing to secure the release of the hostages still held by Hamas in Gaza. If early elections were called, the coalition parties would fall far short of a majority.

And yet, the opposition has been unable to translate this public anger and anguish into an effective campaign that would force the government out.

Among some centrists, there is a growing realization that it is impossible to separate the government's increasing authoritarianism from the right wing's anti-Palestinian agenda, which includes settler violence and annexation in the West Bank, and plans to replace the displaced Palestinian population in Gaza with Jewish Israeli settlements.

Perhaps the closest the country has come to a civil war was in July 2024, when an armed mob stormed two Israeli military bases in an attempt to release soldiers suspected of having sexually assaulted Palestinian prisoners being held there. The police were conspicuously absent at the time of the incident, underscoring the deep mistrust between Shin Bet-the country's internal security service that remains in the hands of the national security establishment-and the police under Ben Gvir's control.

Perhaps the most explosive issue for Netanyahu's government coalition is the exemption of Haredim from military conscription. For the Haredim, the draft exemption is a key component of the social and political architecture that provides them with a state-funded autonomous enclave. Ending it, they fear, would lead to the collapse of this ecosystem. The large number of Haredim men exempted from military service has long been a cause for resentment among other groups of Jewish Israelis. After Oct. 7, however, it became a pressing concern, as the Israeli military is struggling to find the human resources it now requires for operations in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon.

According to Haaretz, a third of reservists have served more than 150 days of active duty since Oct. 7. Their absence for long months puts enormous strain on their families as well as on their businesses and those of their employers. Even when the war ends, Israel will continue to require a much larger standing army than it had on Oct. 6, 2023. In such an environment, the continuation of Haredi exemption, and the state subsidies they receive, elicits growing anger-even among the government's hardcore supporters: the religious nationalists who themselves serve in large numbers in the military.

Netanyahu's attempts to placate the Haredim and reach a "compromise" that leaves things as they are have so far been foiled by the Supreme Court and the attorney general, as well as by internal dissent within the coalition. This remains the key issue that could lead to the implosion of the government.

All other things being equal, however, the coalition's various blocs have no interest in early elections-or in ending the war. While the fighting is raging and rockets are falling, the government has found it relatively easy to stave off public anger. That is widely expected to change when a cease-fire is reached. However, even with Gaza in ruins and Hamas severely weakened, Netanyahu has resisted pressure from the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden to end the war. President-elect Donald Trump has stated numerous times his desire to see the war end, but it is unclear if this would translate into greater pressure on Israel when he takes office in January 2025.

Even if new elections are announced, however, it is unclear if Israel's slide toward authoritarianism will be reversed soon. The radical right remains the most organized and strategic driving force of Israeli politics. Israel's centrists are increasingly alarmed over the country's future, but have failed to coalesce around a positive agenda, beyond driving Netanyahu out. As a result, even as Israel demonstrates its military dominance against its armed enemies across the region, it continues to cultivate an even greater existential threat within.

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