On destruction from within - Bernard Avishai:

‘Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s new coalition government, which was sworn in last week, is routinely referred to as “extreme right,” but this tortures the meaning of conservatism in a democracy. Thirty-two of the coalition’s members in the Knesset (out of a hundred and twenty parliamentary seats) are disciples of so-called religious parties, the political arms of theocratic communities. These parties, and factions of parties, can be divided into three groups: The largest alliance, with fourteen seats, is religious Zionism, whose forebears were preoccupied with preserving the rabbinic privileges afforded by the British Mandate in the new state of Israel—such as supervision over marriage, burial, conversion, and dietary laws, and state-supported religious schools—but which, since 1967, has been overtaken by the messianic claims of West Bank settlers. The Haredi, or ultra-Orthodox, with seven seats, represent self-segregating communities living mainly in and around Jerusalem. Shas, with eleven seats, are a populist, anti-élite party of Orthodox Mizrahi immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East, who tend to be poorer and less educated.
In recent years, the three groups have meshed ideologically into the “national camp,” adhering in particular to the ultranationalist, Greater Israel vision of the religious-Zionist alliance: prohibiting the surrender of Biblically promised land, and moving the state further toward Orthodox law. Indeed, the other, anchoring half of the government majority, Netanyahu’s Likud party, includes many rank-and-file members who also openly identify with religious Zionism. (The new minister of environmental protection, Idit Silman, is a former backbencher of a religious-Zionist party who jumped to the Likud last summer, abandoning the “change government” of Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett, thereby helping to bring it down.)’

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‘The coalition rushed to use its fresh majority to amend various laws and ordinances, including the nation’s Basic Law—a set of quasi-constitutional provisions that define government functions and guide the High Court of Justice, Israel’s Supreme Court. Alarmingly, Netanyahu agreed to appoint as national-security minister Itamar Ben Gvir, a lawyer and a settler zealot who is the leader of a religious-Zionist group called Jewish Power, and who has been charged more than fifty times by the justice system (he says he was exonerated forty-six times). He has been convicted for incitement to racism and support for a Jewish terrorist organization—a record that caused the army to refuse his induction. Ben Gvir also champions unrestricted Jewish prayer at the Temple Mount, the Haram al-Sharif, in Jerusalem. By precedent, the Islamic authorities who administer the Haram’s ancient mosques have allowed Jews to visit the Mount, but not to establish prayer groups there. The Border Police are routinely tasked with keeping order at the site. But, as of a Knesset vote last month, which changed the law governing the administration of the national police, the border force is now under the direct supervision of the national-security minister—Ben Gvir—rather than the independent commissioner of police. The coalition also changed Basic Law to remove the supervision of the civil administration in the occupied territories from the minister of defense, and created a minister in the defense ministry to do the job. It handed that post to another religious-Zionist leader of the settler movement, Bezalel Smotrich, who is also the designated finance minister.’

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‘The ultra-Orthodox parties have not been overlooked. The coalition commits to new Basic Law declaring that “Torah study is a fundamental principle in the heritage of the Jewish people.” An intent here is a general exemption from military service of Haredi students—who study the Torah and Talmud, but more than a quarter of whom do not study math, science, or English—an exemption that the High Court ruled against in 2017. (Only half of the Haredi men in Israel are employed; demographers project that, by the end of the decade, the Haredi will comprise sixteen per cent of the population.) In a speech to the Knesset, the outgoing Prime Minister, Yair Lapid, charged that the new government’s educational budgets will fund Haredi students at a higher rate than students in the secular state-education system. In fact, the ultra-Orthodox leader Moshe Gafni, the newly elected chair of the Knesset’s finance committee, suggested that, as in the days of King David, “half the people will study Torah and half will serve in the army.” Economists in the finance ministry project that ultra-Orthodox communities stand to gain almost six billion dollars in government spending, although, per capita, secular Israelis—most of whom do serve in the military—pay six times more in taxes than the ultra-Orthodox do.’

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‘The speed and the depth of these changes have shocked liberal Israelis, thousands of whom gathered outside the Knesset during the government’s swearing-in, chanting “Iran is already here.” They are not alone. More than a thousand former senior Israeli Air Force officers, including the former I.D.F. chief of staff Dan Halutz, delivered a letter to the country’s top jurists, stating that the government would “destroy” the democratic country for which they had fought. Four hundred leading entrepreneurs, managers, and investors sent Netanyahu a letter warning of “the devastating consequences for the economy in general, and the high-tech industry in particular, that may result from the legislative processes taking place in the Knesset.” Last Friday, the former Prime Minister Ehud Barak said that “this government is carrying out a coup in Israel before our eyes, with its racism, corruption, neutering of the justice system, politicization of the police, and undermining of the chain of command in the I.D.F.” The shock is worse because, out of more than four and a half million votes cast, Netanyahu’s bloc won just thirty thousand votes more than the opposition did, and only gained a majority in the Knesset because some opposition parties did not cross the four-seat threshold required for entering it.’

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‘In the weeks, possibly years, ahead, Netanyahu will posture as a vigilant statesman. Already, he is speaking about bringing Saudi Arabia into the Abraham Accords. The day after Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian President, visited Washington, Vladimir Putin, the Russian President, called Netanyahu to congratulate him on forming a government. Netanyahu is railing against the Iranian nuclear program and pledging to stop it. As the tensions in the occupied territories mount—Israeli occupation forces killed almost a hundred and fifty Palestinians in the West Bank in 2022—and Arab-Israeli communities feel increasingly estranged from this government’s version of the Jewish state, attacks on Jewish Israelis, particularly in the territories, will likely increase. (The Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research reports that seventy-two per cent of West Bank residents now favor forming paramilitary groups not under the command of the Palestinian Authority.) Any such attacks would, in turn, provoke media outrage in Israel and solicitations of ministerial action, normalizing the new government.
But this government is not normal. It is a turn in Israeli history, with dangerous consequences for Israeli liberals, Arab Israelis, Palestinians, and the region. Chaim Weizmann, a principal organizer of the Balfour Declaration, and Israel’s first President, warned in his memoirs of the “menace” of the rabbi who will “make a heavy bid for power by parading his religious convictions.” Weizmann continued, “It is useless to point out to such people that they transgress a fundamental principle which has been laid down by our sages: ‘Thou shalt not make of the Torah a crown to glory in, or a spade to dig with.’ ” They have made a spade of Netanyahu, too—as he has of them.’

Read the article here.

As was said by quite a few, the destruction will come from within. Israel will further alienate Jews in the diaspora, especially in the US, its leadership will fit in perfectly with the more or less bloodthirsty autocrat in the Middle-East, often with the help of their favorite organized religion.
Civil war will be just an incident or two away.

Yes , Israel started in Europe, Europe was already distant and by now it’s gone. Israel and Saudi-Arabia, more and more they belong to each other.

The world is too busy with other things and the world leaders count on the hope that many of the proposals of the new government will be just theater, the hope that Netanyahu will preserve the status quo. The opposition needless to say has no other plan than the status quo, but at least the opposition was not so keen on destroying Israel from within.

The warnings from the army and the business community are telling. But see Trump, probably they’ll hold their noses and continue as if nothing happened.