On destruction - Anita Shapira in Haaretz:

‘The contradiction between admiration of defiance and readiness for self-sacrifice, and acceptance of realpolitik, has been a feature of the Zionist movement from its inception down to the present day. Zionism was established as a secular movement by people who had come into contact with general education and with the winds of nationalism that were blowing in 19th-century Europe. But the Zionist myth of returning to the land of the forefathers is inextricably bound up with the Jewish tradition, which is religious in character. The tension between Zionism as a movement anchored in the modern world, and Judaism, which constitutes the justification for the very existence of the liberation movement, is a source of duality that has been embedded in Zionism since its inception.’

(…)

‘Theodor Herzl and those of his generation hoped that Zionism would recast the image of the Jew from that of a swindler and parasite to a person of honor and courage, a state builder, a settler of barren land. Indeed, the Jews proved that they are capable of working the soil, settling a land and fighting courageously. They demonstrated creativity and persistence, skill and extraordinary devotion, thereby showing the world a new, different Jew: bold, a person of the intellect but also a person of action. But what about the establishment of a sustainable state entity? On the face of it, the state, having already existed for 75 years, has proved that it can withstand crises. But will we cross the 75-year hurdle?’

(…)

‘Secularism was fitting for the spirit of the time, in which the power of religion was tending to wane across the world. The Haredim (ultra-Orthodox Jews) were a small, weak minority in Israel. Before World War II, they had been fierce opponents of Zionism. But now, with a Jewish state about to come into existence, they looked for a way to join the Jewish commonalty. David Ben-Gurion wished to present a uniform Jewish front to the United Nations General Assembly on the eve of the partition vote. Accordingly, he signed the status quo agreement, which gave the religious population control over matters of marriage and divorce. The Agudat Yisrael movement, from which only smoldering embers remained after the Holocaust, was granted the right to have 400 yeshiva students, a remnant of the past, exempted from military service. In the spirit of progress, the assessment of Ben-Gurion and his associates was that religion was in regression and that the Haredim were akin to an enclave from the past that would ultimately disappear.’

(…)

‘The judicial system emerged through a process of trial and error. It wasn’t an orderly process in which the great minds of the nation convened and decided on a legal system, the separation of powers and the relations between the three branches of government, in the way that the American Constitution was framed, or the French constitutions, which were rewritten a number of times. To some extent, Israel resembled Britain, where custom and precedent are a substitute for an orderly constitution.’

(…)

‘Settlement amid a population that doesn’t want the insatiable neighbors who have moved in next door, and who are forced to live with them against their will, is a source of profound moral perversion, the creation of a society that sees itself as the owner of the place by virtue of divine promises made thousands of years ago, and that cannot stand up to a rational test. Never before was self-perception of being the “chosen people” applied so literally as it is in Judea and Samaria. When a religious cabinet minister says that the Temple Mount is the property of the Jewish nation, because King David bought it from Araunah the Jebusite, it sounds like a nutty anecdote, but when the nutty anecdote and others like it become the basis for acts of dispossession and fraud, for shattering the boundaries between permitted and forbidden by virtue of divine license – violence then becomes a conventional norm, incitement a standard form of expression, and corruption justified if it benefits the settlement project.’

(…)

‘In the state’s early decades, the Haredim had one positive trait: They were politically moderate, a remnant from the Diaspora, where Jews made efforts not to rile the goyim. Those days are past. They are now a racist population, for the most part, who are contemptuous of anyone who doesn’t study Torah as they do. Their attitudes toward women, LGBTQ people and Arabs reveal a sensibility that is both racist and discriminatory.
The crisis in Israel today revolves on the axis of religious vs. secular, messianists vs. democrats. This is the first time in Israel’s history that there has been a monolithic government, one that incorporates the most extreme national and religious fringes, has no moderating elements, and in which the prime minister is dependent on every fragment of an extreme party and does all he can to placate it so that his government will not fall apart. The justice minister is occupying the country with an attempt to enact a series of legal reforms that, if passed, will mean the loss of the judicial branch’s independence and the subordination of the legislative branch to the executive branch. These “reforms” are aimed at validating corruption, preventing the courts from intervening in cases of infringement of human rights and at effectively eliminating the equality of the country’s citizens before the law. The only mitigating factor in this hallucinatory situation is the protest movement, which is bringing out more people over a longer period than any similar movement in Israel’s history.’

(…)

‘In this regard, the truth should be told: The protest is being fueled by the nation’s elites – the economic elite, the military elite, the academic elite. When the people from high-tech, the pilots and all the former heads of the Shin Bet security service and the Mossad, former governors of the Bank of Israel and most of the country’s economics and science professors join together in opposing what is known euphemistically as the “judicial reform,” when investments from abroad are halted, and there’s concern about Israel’s credit rating being downgraded – what we see are effects of strength that is not quantitative but qualitative.’

(…)

‘The historian Josephus describes how the Zealots burned the storerooms of food during the Roman siege of Jerusalem. Are those correct who refer to the present coalition as the “government of the destruction of the ‘Third Temple’”? Have the Jews not developed the gene for statehood, the necessary wisdom to find the compromise, so that again we are watching the unfolding of a historic drama in which the extremists take over and annihilate everything their predecessors built?’

Read the article here.
Needless to say, there is no such a thing as a gene for statehood.
But Messianic Zionism is a bigger threat to Israel than Iran. Unfortunately, this article doesn’t speak about the effects of more than fifty years of occupation and therefor a situation that very well could be described as de-facto apartheid.

Also, Israel is not an island, the hunger for another authoritarian adventure can be found in all parts of the world, from the US to Germany, from Austria to the Netherlands.

The difference is that Israel is at war in one way or another with most of its neighbors. And the combination of severe nationalism combined with severe religious tendencies. That could become a lethal cocktail. Or rather: it’s already a lethal cocktail.