Netanyahu’s Concrete State

Netanyahu’s Concrete State: How Israel Learns to Live With Impunity

Benjamin Netanyahu’s political survival has required more than coalition discipline, media warfare, or ordinary electoral strategy. It has required something deeper: a change in the physics of Israeli statehood.

The state must remain strong outwardly, but become weak inwardly. It must be able to strike enemies, mobilize soldiers, invoke emergency, and speak in the language of national survival. But when the same state is asked to investigate power, restrain ministers, protect the independence of the courts, defend the attorney general, scrutinize the security services, or establish a full commission of inquiry into October 7, its force begins to disappear.

That is now the central danger.

Netanyahu does not need a failed state. He needs a selective state: strong against Hamas, Iran, and Hezbollah, but hesitant before his own coalition; aggressive toward external enemies, but paralyzed before internal accountability; capable of war, but increasingly incapable of self-interrogation.

This is no longer ordinary political struggle. It is the cementing of the political field.

Cementing does not mean that one politician wants to win elections. Every politician wants to win elections. Cementing begins when power tries to reshape the field itself so that every real alternative is weakened in advance, delegitimized, or presented as a threat to the nation. In such a system, the opposition still exists, but as a suspect body. Courts still exist, but as obstacles. The attorney general still exists, but as a political enemy. The media still exist, but under regulatory pressure. The police still exist, but increasingly under political influence. Society still protests, but over time it learns that protest can be absorbed, delayed, exhausted, and ground down.

In this sense, Netanyahu is not only governing Israel. He is trying to alter the very conditions under which Israel can hold its own government accountable.

The most recent and dangerous signal came when the government moved to defy a Supreme Court ruling concerning Israel’s media regulator. Formally, the dispute concerns the Second Authority for Television and Radio. Politically, however, it concerns something much deeper: whether a ruling of the Supreme Court remains a binding decision of the state, or whether it becomes merely an opinion that the government may accept or reject according to its own interest.

When a government begins to say that it does not recognize the decision of the court, this is no longer a legal disagreement. It is an attempt to shift the constitutional nerve of the state. Law ceases to be a limit on power and becomes another arena of political war.

This is precisely how democracy can decay without a dramatic final scene. It does not always disappear through tanks in the streets, banned parties, and closed newspapers. Sometimes it dies through resolutions, appointments, committees, transfers of authority, personal attacks, procedural exceptions, and the daily habituation of citizens to the idea that the rule of law is a luxury for calmer times.

Netanyahu and his coalition are producing impunity not through one grand coup, but through a series of seemingly separate operations. First, weaken the Supreme Court. Then attack the attorney general. Then subordinate the mechanisms that investigate police misconduct. Then challenge the independence of the security services, especially when their work may reach the prime minister’s own circle. Then prevent a full independent commission of inquiry into October 7. Then present the opposition as dangerous, naive, dependent on Arabs, leftist, anti-national, or incapable of defending Israel.

This is how impunity is produced: not as the absence of law, but as its controlled paralysis.

The attempt to remove Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara was one of the central elements of this mechanism. In the Israeli system, the attorney general is not merely a bureaucrat. She is one of the last institutional safeguards capable of telling the government: this is not allowed. That is exactly why she became a target. A government that wants to act without real resistance cannot tolerate an institution capable of legal refusal.

The same logic appeared in the confrontation over Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar. This was not merely a personal conflict or a normal loss of confidence. It raised a fundamental question: is the head of a security service loyal to the state, or to the prime minister? When security services begin to be treated as extensions of a leader’s personal will, the state stops being a state and becomes a protective arrangement.

Even more alarming is the attempt to gain political control over the mechanisms that investigate police misconduct. If the justice minister gains decisive influence over the unit responsible for investigating abuses by police officers, power is not only controlling the law. It begins to control the control of coercive force itself. That is a different level of political danger. The police may still wear the uniform of the state, but their institutional breathing begins to depend on the coalition center.

In the background stands Itamar Ben-Gvir and the broader normalization of force-politics. This is not an accidental supplement to Netanyahu’s rule. It is a functional element of the entire construction. Netanyahu needs radical partners because without them he loses power. They need Netanyahu because through him they gain access to the machinery of the state. What emerges is a system of mutual blackmail: the prime minister is hostage to extremists, the extremists are beneficiaries of the prime minister, and the state becomes their shared spoil.

The most dramatic point remains October 7. A state that suffered such a catastrophe should be compelled to truth. Not revenge, not propaganda, not a symbolic ritual of responsibility, but institutional truth. Who failed? Who ignored warnings? Who was occupied with war against the courts while the state’s security was cracking? Who bears political responsibility for a system that failed to protect its citizens?

Netanyahu does not want a full reckoning because such a reckoning would have to pass through his own rule. That is why a commission of inquiry becomes a threat. Not because Israel does not need truth. Precisely because it does.

Here one sees the full perversity of the current situation. The greater the catastrophe, the greater the need to control its interpretation. The power that should be investigated tries to manage the conditions of investigation. It is as if the accused wished to write the court’s rules, select the judges, approve the witnesses, and then announce that all of this is being done in the name of the people.

The production of impunity also requires the pacification of society. Not always brutal pacification. More often affective, moral, and cognitive pacification. Israeli society has been overloaded beyond measure in recent years: the judicial overhaul, mass protests, October 7, the war in Gaza, the hostages, bereavement, mobilization, fear of Iran, internal conflict, tension between secular Israelis and the ultra-Orthodox, settler violence, international isolation, and the constant language of existential threat.

A society in such a condition can be neutralized more easily. Not because it is stupid. Precisely because it is exhausted, wounded, and held in a permanent state of alarm. When every day is presented as a struggle for survival, the question of responsibility begins to sound like betrayal. When every critic of the government can be described as assisting the enemy, the control of power becomes suspect. When every independent institution is named part of a “deep state,” the citizen is asked to believe that the only true source of democracy is the leader.

This language is not simply imported from American Trumpism, although the resemblance is obvious. It has been translated into Israel’s own fractures: the attack on “rule by judges,” the hatred of “leftist elites,” the suspicion of prosecutors, the branding of legal oversight as sabotage, the portrayal of Arab political participation as illegitimate, and the use of permanent emergency to silence institutional doubt.

The American vocabulary of the “deep state” becomes especially dangerous in Israel because it attaches itself to real historical wounds: war, terrorism, Jewish vulnerability, religious fear, ethnic division, and the trauma of October 7. It does not arrive as a foreign slogan. It becomes a local instrument. It teaches citizens to see the court not as a constitutional safeguard, but as an enemy of the people; the attorney general not as a defender of legality, but as an obstacle to elected power; the opposition not as a democratic alternative, but as a national danger.

This inversion is fraudulent. Institutions of oversight do not exist in order to take power away from the people. They exist so that the people are not imprisoned by their own government.

Especially dangerous is the attack on the opposition through the delegitimization of any possible majority that would require the participation or support of Arab citizens of Israel. In this way Netanyahu is not merely fighting an opponent. He is trying to narrow the definition of a legitimate majority. If an opposing government can be declared politically impure in advance because it rests on Arab parties or Arab votes, then elections cease to be a normal procedure of alternation. They become a ritual in which only one side has the full right to rule.

This is one of the most dangerous forms of cementing the political field. One does not need to falsify elections if one has already persuaded a large part of society that the victory of the opponent would itself be morally illegitimate.

Netanyahu understands power not as service to the state, but as the continuous postponement of accountability. Every crisis is absorbed into a larger crisis. Every question of responsibility is covered by a question of security. Every institution of oversight is called an obstacle. Every alternative is presented as a risk. Every opponent becomes not merely a competitor, but a threat.

This is how political concrete works: it prevents the future from entering the system.

The tragedy is not that Netanyahu attacks the state from outside. He attacks it from the place where the state was supposed to defend itself: security, emergency, Jewish continuity, and national survival. He does not abolish the state. He wants a state that acts with full force against enemies, but loses its force when facing him.

That is the core of the present danger. Netanyahu does not need a weak state. He needs a selective state: strong outward, weak inward; aggressive toward enemies, hesitant toward power; capable of war, incapable of self-interrogation.

Israel today needs exactly the opposite. It needs to recover the capacity for accountability. It needs a state strong not only against Hamas, Iran, or Hezbollah, but also against its own prime minister. A state that can strike its enemies but cannot interrogate its own government is not a strong state. It is a state intimidated by its own coalition.

That is why the struggle over the courts, the media, the attorney general, the police, Shin Bet, and a state commission of inquiry is not technical. It is a struggle over whether Israel will remain a state, or become a personal survival system for one man and his political hostages.

The greatest lie of the current government is the claim that criticism of Netanyahu is an attack on Israel. The opposite is true. Today, criticism of Netanyahu may be one of the necessary conditions for saving Israeli statehood.

But the more painful question is whether Israeli society still cares enough to demand this. Not whether there are brave Israelis. There are. Not whether there are protests. There are. Not whether families, reservists, jurists, journalists, and citizens continue to resist. They do. The question is whether the society as a whole can still transform exhaustion into judgment, grief into institutional truth, and fear into democratic self-defense.

A society can be defeated without surrendering. It can be pacified by overload, by emergency, by endless mobilization, by the moral blackmail of security, and by the slow poisoning of public language. That is the danger now. Not silence, but fatigue. Not consent, but depletion.

Israel does not need another savior. It does not need a prime minister who places himself between society and truth. It does not need a coalition that turns security into immunity, religion into blackmail, and democracy into a plebiscite of loyalty.

Israel needs a state capable of saying to its own government: enough.

Without that, October 7 will not become the beginning of truth. It will become another foundation of impunity.

And a state that builds its future on impunity does not secure its history. It buries it in concrete.

Yochanan Schimmelpfennig