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Israel is deeply fractured. The schism has become bitter and heated as both sides see themselves to be in an existential war for the future of Israel. The language used has become so venomous (particularly in reserved channels in Hebrew) that calls for a coup and for civil war are far from uncommon.
Israel is nearing the precipice and the seemingly irreconcilable differences may soon erupt into civil unrest – as Uri Misgav writes this week, the “Israeli spring” is on its way.
The point here is that President Trump’s utilitarian and determinedly transactional style may work effectively in the secular western hemisphere, but with Israel (or Iran) Trump may find little or no traction amongst those with an alternative weltanschauung that expresses a fundamental different concept of morality, philosophy and epistemology, to the classic western deterrence paradigm of material ‘carrots and sticks’.
Indeed, the very attempt to impose deterrence – and to threaten ‘all hell breaking out’ if his injunctions are not followed – may produce the opposite to that which he seeks: i.e. it may trigger new conflicts and wars.
An angry plurality in Israel (led for now, by Netanyahu) have taken the reins of power after a long march through the institutions of Israeli society, and now have their sights focussed on dismantling the ‘Deep State’ within Israel. Equally, there is a furious push-back to this perceived take-over.
What exacerbates this societal fracture are two things: Firstly, it is ethno-cultural; and second it is ideological. The third component is the most explosive – Eschatology.
At the last national election in Israel, the ‘underclass’ finally broke the glass ceiling to win election and to take office. The Mizrahi (Jews from the Middle East and North Africa) have been long treated as the poorer, lower order in society.
The Ashkenazi (European, largely liberal-secular Jews) form much of the urban professional (and until recently) the security class. These are the élites whom the coalition of National Religious and Settler Movement displaced at the last election.
This present phase to a long struggle to power perhaps can be put at 2015. As Gadi Taub has recorded,
“It was then, Israel’s Supreme Court judges removed sovereignty itself—that is, the power of final decision over the whole realm of law and politics—from the elected branches of government and transferred it to themselves. One unelected branch of government officially holds power, against which there are neither checks, nor balances, by any counterforce”.
In the optic of the Right, the self-awarded power of Judicial Review, gave to the Court power, Taub writes,
“to prescribe the rules of the political game – and not just its concrete results”. “Law enforcement then became the huge investigative arm of the press. As was true of the “Russiagate” hoax, The Israel Police and State Attorney were not so much collecting evidence for a criminal trial as they were producing political dirt for leaks to the press”.
The ‘Deep State’ in Israel is a consuming point of contention for Netanyahu and his cabinet: In a speech at the Knesset this month – as one example – Netanyahu savaged the media, accusing news outlets of “full cooperation with the deep state” and of creating “scandals”. “The cooperation between the bureaucracy in the deep state and the media didn’t work in the United States, and it won’t work here”, he said.
Just to be clear, at the time of the last general election, the Supreme Court was composed of 15 Judges, all of whom were Ashkenazi, bar one Mizrahi.
Nevertheless, it would be wrong to see the war of the rival blocs as some arcane dispute about the usurpation of executive power – and a lost ‘separation of state powers’.
The struggle is rooted rather, in a profound ideological dispute about the future and character of the State of Israel. Will it be a messianic, Halacha state obedient to Revelation? Or, in essence, will there be a democratic, liberal, largely secular ‘state’. Israel is shredding itself on the blade of this debate.
The cultural component is that the Mizrahim (loosely defined) and the Right view the European liberal sphere as barely truly Jewish. Hence their determination that the Land of Israel should be wholly immersed in Jewishness.
It was the events of 7 October that absolutely crystalized this ideological struggle, which is the second key factor largely mirroring the general schism.
Israel’s classical security vision (dating from the Ben-Gurion era) was configured to provide an answer to the enduring Israeli dilemma: Israel cannot impose an end to conflict on its enemies, yet at the same time, it cannot maintain a large army in the long term.
Therefore, Israel – in this optic – had to rely on a reserve army that needed adequate security warning before any war occurred. Advance intelligence warning of coming war therefore, was a paramount requirement.
And that key presumption blew apart on 7 October.
The shock and sense of collapse arising from 7 Oct led many to think that the Hamas attack had irrevocably broken the Israeli concept of security – the policy of deterrence had failed and the proof of that was that Hamas was not deterred.
But here, we approach the crux of the Israeli internal war: What was destroyed on 7 Oct was not just the old security paradigm of the Labour Party and the old security elites. It did that; but what arose from its ashes was an alternative weltanschauung that expressed a fundamentally different concept in philosophy and epistemology to the classic deterrence paradigm:
“I was born in Israel; I grew up in Israel … I served in the IDF”, says Alon Mizrahi;
“I was exposed to it. I was indoctrinated this way, and for many years of my life I believed it. This represents a serious Jewish problem: It is not just [a matter of one mode of] Zionism … How can you teach your children – and this is almost universal – that everyone who is not Jewish wants to kill you. When you put yourself in this paranoia, you give yourself permission to do anything to everyone … It is not a good way to create a society. It is so dangerous”.
See here in the Times of Israel an account of a High School presentation (post-7 Oct) on the Morality of Wiping out Amalek: A student raises the question: “Why do we condemn Hamas for murdering innocent men, women, and children – if we are commanded to wipe out Amalek?”
“How can we have normality tomorrow”, Alon Mizrahi asks, “if this is who we are today”?
The National Religious Right is leading the charge for a radical change to the Israeli concept of security; they no longer believe in the classic Ben Gurion paradigm of deterrence – particularly in the wake of 7 October. Nor does the Right believe in reaching any settlement with the Palestinians – and absolutely does not want a bi-national state. In the concept of Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s security theory henceforth must include a continuous war against Palestinians – until they are expelled or eliminated.
The Old (Liberal) Establishment is outraged – as one of its members, David Agmon (former IDF Brigadier-General and former bureau chief to Netanyahu), articulated this week:
“I accuse you, Bezalel Smotrich, of destroying religious Zionism! You are leading us to a state of Halacha and Haredi Zionism, not religious Zionism … Not to mention the fact that you joined the terrorist Ben Gvir, who diverts lawbreakers, hillbilly boys, to continue breaking the law, who attacks the government, the judicial system, and the police under his responsibility. Netanyahu is not the solution. Netanyahu is the problem, he is the head of the snake. The protest should act against Netanyahu and his coalition. The protest should demand the overthrow of the malicious government”.
Netanyahu is in one sense secular; but in another, he embraces the Biblical mission of Greater Israel – with all its enemies annihilated. He is, (if you like a label) a neo-Jabotinskyist (his father was private secretary to Jabotinsky), and, in practice, exists in a relationship of mutual dependency with figures like Ben Gvir and Smotrich.
“What do these people want?”, asks Max Blumenthal; “What is their ultimate goal?”
“It is apocalypse”, warns Blumenthal, whose book Goliath traces the rise of Israel’s eschatological Right:
“They have an eschatology that is based on the Third Temple ideology – in which the Al-Aqsa Mosque will be destroyed and be replaced with a Third Temple and traditional Jewish ritual will be practiced”.
And in order to bring that about, they need a ‘Big War’.
Smotrich always has been frank about this: The project of ultimately removing all the Arabs from the ‘Land of Israel’ will require an emergency – a ‘big war’ – he has said.
The big question is: Do Trump and his team grasp any of this? For it has profound implications for Trump’s methodology of transactional deal-making. ‘Carrots and Sticks’ and secular rationality will carry little weight amongst those whose epistemology is quite different; those who take Revelation literally as ‘truth’, and who believe it commands complete obedience.
Trump says he wants to end the conflicts in the Middle East, and bring about a regional ‘peace’.
His secular, transactional approach to politics, however, is wholly unsuited to resolving eschatological conflict. His bravura style of threatening ‘all hell will break out’ if he doesn’t get his way will not work, when one or other party actually wants Armageddon.
“All hell break out”? ‘Bring it on’, might well be the response Trump gets.
