How chaos became the government’s most powerful political tool
Chaos, fear, and noise are the last things this government has left to sell. What looks like a string of failures, patronage appointments, and clashes with “extremists” has become a deliberate mode of operation, designed to undermine trust in the state’s institutions, inflame the public, and damage the country’s democratic character.
If you still have not understood this by now, it is time to face it: what we are seeing around us is not a sequence of accidents. This is not an incompetent government by chance, not merely a collection of miserable ministers who do not know how to govern – though that too is part of it – and not just another day of stupidity, incitement, violence, lies, corrupt appointments, or assaults on state institutions. It has long since ceased to be only failure. It is a method.
Chaos is the last product this government has left to market. After October 7, it can no longer wave the flag of security. With the deficit spiraling and the working and serving public buckling, it cannot offer the economy. After tearing us apart into tribes, camps, traitors, and loyalists, it cannot boast of social repair. When the justice system is suffocating under too many cases and too few judges, it cannot claim a “reform.” It has no Judaism to offer either – only a forceful, hollow, and violent messianism. And certainly not democracy, because everything that balances, supervises, criticizes, and restrains is, in its view, an enemy standing in the way of its attempt to turn Israel into a dictatorship.
That is why this government is selling disorder, fear, suspicion, and relentless noise. A sense of ending, of standing on the brink of civil war. A state in which every day brings something more insane than the day before, until we no longer know what to be shocked by first. The selection of a state comptroller through mafia-like methods, demands that Knesset members photograph themselves at the ballot box, a takeover of the police, pressure on the Shin Bet and the Mossad, and the appointment of unqualified people throughout Israel’s public administration. Everything is blending into one steaming mass.
Chaos as a Method
It looks like chaos, but beneath the noise there is a clear purpose: to normalize disruption. Because in a little while, there will be elections here. And in those elections, the State of Israel will have to rely on its institutions – on the Central Elections Committee, on the police, on the Shin Bet, on civil servants, on judges, and on the state comptroller as well. On the people meant to ensure that the last democratic process we have left is conducted with integrity, calm, professionalism, and public trust.
This is where the danger lies. Because if, for months and years, we are trained to believe that everything is suspect, that everything is fake, that everything is political, that every state institution is merely a tool in the hands of one camp or another, then on the day of reckoning, when someone decides to disrupt the elections, there will be no need for a blatant order from above. No television address announcing the end of democracy. It will be enough to sow a little more chaos. One more violent protest near the elections committee. One more attack on judges by a “small group” of ultra-Orthodox “extremists.”
When everything explodes, they will say to us: What do you want? It all came from below. The public is angry, citizens are worried, there are suspicions of fraud. That is exactly what a coup looks like in the modern age: not tanks in the streets, but fog. Not soldiers sealing off the Knesset, but inflamed citizens convinced that democracy was stolen from them before they even voted.
That is why the wild attack on the home, car, and family members of Justice Noam Sohlberg is not a marginal event. It is not merely another display of political violence by a group that has lost all restraint. Sohlberg is not only a justice on the Supreme Court. He is the chair of the Central Elections Committee. And that is the whole story.
Dictatorship Is Not Built in a Day
Whoever threatens Sohlberg is threatening the elections. Whoever damages his home is sending a message to everyone who will have to stand up to pressure on the day of truth. A mafia message: Be careful. You may be judges, civil servants, committee members, but you have homes, families, cars, neighbors. And we know how to reach you. Or at the very least, we know how to create chaos and the police, when the moment comes, will vanish – because the minister in charge of it, himself a convicted supporter of terrorism, has turned it into a failed militia.
Everything happening in Israel in recent months, and everything that will only intensify, is a method of operation by an organization seeking to intimidate the institutions of the state. And when ministers, Knesset members, government-appointed rabbis, media mouthpieces, and a prime minister who remains silent or fans the flames – each in turn – point to a target, it is no surprise that someone on the ground pulls the metaphorical trigger. That is how incitement works.
Dictatorship is not built in a day. It does not arrive with a giant sign reading, “As of today, there is no democracy.” It is built in stages, like boiling a frog in a pot. I described this in my recently published book, The Truth about the Lie. First, loyalists are appointed in place of professionals; then the courts are weakened and the free press is targeted so that no one can report fairly. Then the police, the Shin Bet, and the Mossad are polluted with political appointments. Then academia is erased. Along the way, there is an attempt to take over the Central Elections Committee directly or indirectly, through the appointment of a state comptroller of their own.
That is the stage we are in now. The state did not “go” in a single day. It is being stolen piece by piece, institution by institution, norm by norm. Once we were shocked by an improper appointment. Then we got used to it. Once we were shocked by threats against a judge. Then the house channel told us he “brought it on himself.” Once we were shocked by a prime minister appointing his own lawyer to the post responsible for state oversight. Today, we are already almost indifferent.
That indifference is their victory. A government with no achievements in any field, no future, and no vision beyond the survival of one man and the preservation of its alliance with the most extreme forces needs chaos. It lives on it and feeds on it. It must exhaust the public and wear it down, because only then can it continue its work of destroying the country.
This scenario is practical, imminent, dangerous, and directed entirely toward the coming elections, in which Netanyahu knows that if they are fair, he will lose and go home – or, worse, to prison.
Anyone who still believes there is a country here worth saving must understand this: the struggle is not over the next government or over an ideology. It is over the very possibility that democracy will still exist here, and in practice that there will still be a state – because chaos, the appointment of unqualified people to key posts, and more will inevitably lead to collapse.
I would turn to Netanyahu and warn him that he is driving us to the edge, to civil war and bloodshed, that he has already crossed every line and must stop before he destroys the country for good. The problem is that there is no one to talk to. So it is on us. Only we can stop the madness.
