Talk of a civil war in Israel shows a fundamental crisis

‘Pro-democracy’ protest at the end of February in Jerusalem, Israel (Picture: Wikicommons/ Hanay)

Civil war—that’s the possible future that Israeli newspapers now fret about as Israel’s society and political system plunges deeper into crisis. And it’s not just the papers. A survey published in February by think tank The Israeli Democracy Institute found a third of people thought a violent civil war is likely to break out.

Among those polled who had joined recent “pro-democracy” protests, more than half thought it was likely. No Israeli group has yet talked of taking up arms against their own right wing government. But hundreds of reservists in Israel’s military—long-time proud volunteers in the oppression of Palestinians—now say they may no longer willingly serve its new right wing government.

The fact that Israel’s media can even write seriously that civil war may happen is revealing.  The crisis is so deep—so fundamental—that they can’t envisage how it could be overcome without the state tearing itself violently apart. For once, the war they fear isn’t an uprising of Palestinians.

It’s an internal crisis among those who have run and upheld Israel’s apartheid regime for 76 years, and now find themselves at a crossroads. Throughout the period since 1948, Israel has pretended to be a bastion of liberal Western democracy besieged by hateful, backward Arabs that wanted to destroy it. The wars and endless occupation were said to be a sad but noble necessity. 

Israel’s right wing government took office in December with a mission to unshackle its soldiers and settlers so that they might unleash even greater violence against Palestinians. To do so, it wants to overhaul Israel’s legal system to stop the supreme court from being able to overturn its decisions. Handily for prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who’s facing charges of corruption, the changes would also allow him to stay on even if he’s convicted.

The government and its supporters see this as necessary to protect Israel’s apartheid system. But it would also mean trashing a pillar of how Israel would like the world to see it, and how it probably sees itself.  That’s the claim that Israel is a normal democratic state.

Palestinians know this has always been a lie. Ever since Israel was founded they’ve lived under a system that denies them equal rights and authorises the theft of their land. This is at the heart of the contradiction in Israel’s claim to be both a Jewish and a democratic state.

Establishing Israel as a Jewish state meant colonising Palestine with the support of the British Empire, denying the rights of the Palestinians who lived there, and forcing them from the land. Maintaining it has meant keeping them marginalised and excluded ever since, gradually dispossessing them of ever more land. There can’t be any democracy in a state whose existence depends on those racist principles.

Snatching away a cloak of legitimacy from an apartheid system 

For most of Israel’s history the state’s fundamental contradiction didn’t much trouble its governments. The claim of democracy gave them a veneer of legitimacy. It even allowed them to justify their occupation of Palestine, their obsessive military spending funded by the US, and the wars it carries out on the US’s behalf.

But as Israel’s grip on Palestinian land has tightened, it’s been faced with an existential dilemma. Accepting the Palestinians who live there as equal citizens would threaten Israel’s existence as a Jewish state. That’s something that the “liberal” and “left” parties who once dominated Israeli politics could never accept. But they have no solution to the problem of the occupation.

They’re not willing to end the occupation of east Jerusalem and the West Bank. Nor will they give up the settlements there where hundreds of thousands of their citizens now live. But neither are they willing to abandon the pretence of being a democracy. And they cling to the false promise of a two-state solution—the lie that they will one day give Palestinians a state of their own. 

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The Israeli right does have a solution—but it means casting off Israel’s democratic facade. The Israeli right is much better suited to maintaining Israel’s apartheid system. They’re much more open and determined in their desire to seize all Palestinian land, and in their hatred of Palestinian people.

So as the problem of the occupation grew over the years, so too has the popularity of the Israeli right. Binyamin Netanyahu has become Israel’s longest-serving prime minister by riding that tide. In 2015, he won re-election by warning of the “threat” posed by Arab voters voting “in droves”.

Having done that, he went on in 2018 to pass a new “basic law”—fundamental legislation that acts as Israel’s constitution. This said openly that only Jewish people have “an exclusive right to self determination” there. It was designed to entrench into law the apartheid system that had for decades been an unspoken reality. 

But it also meant admitting openly, for the first time, that Israel was not a democracy for Palestinians. Now, propped up by parties even further to his right, Netanyahu’s government wants to go further. What the US, Israel’s “centrists,” and the soldiers refusing to serve really fear is that in doing so, they’ll cast off the “democratic” identity. 

With it goes the cloak of legitimacy for the apartheid system. The alternative is a single, secular state in all of Palestine, with equal democratic rights for all of its citizens. But Israel’s defenders of “democracy” would rather envisage civil war before they countenance that.