This Is How It Ends

So here we are now. After more than 75 years of fending off threats to its survival, decades of facing isolation in the Middle East then signing successful peace treaties with enemies, through savage wars – some successful, some miserable catastrophes – and hurtful peace processes, from the hyperinflation of the 1980s through to the tech boom that started in the 1990s. It all ends with a Member of the Knesset, Hanoch Milwidsky, essentially saying that it’s just okay to insert a rod into a prisoner’s rectum.

Spare me the pontification about America in Abu Ghraib or the idea that Israel isn’t in surrounded by Sweden and Switzerland. And spare me the idea that the international world is now being unfair to Israel. Torture of any kind is appalling, illegal, and unacceptable. The reports from Sde Teiman, which have been trickling in for the last few months, are beyond horrific. You don’t need to be a mealy-mouthed liberal, some deranged self-radicalised de facto Hamasnik in some posh American campus or some leftoid who writes for the Electronic Intifada to see that rape, torture, and even the deaths of prisoners under such conditions requires swift and harsh punishment on perpetrators. And that this is all the consequence of what Yeshayahu Leibowitz prophetically declared all those decades ago: that the occupation will become Israel, the country will lose its moral fabric, and that a culture of dehumanisation and incitement that spreads to the highest political echelons will one day lead to atrocities beyond belief.

The Israeli far-right isn’t a secret society to cover itself in a veil. It has always been vocal about its intentions. Their more moderate folk argue that the only solution is that Palestinians live as third-rate citizens without civil rights, in a state of utter servitude. In fact, as represented in government, the real far-right wishes for their virtual annihilation and eviction. And they have proven more pervasive in Israel’s society and institutions than ever before.

You have to draw a straight line between the following incidents in the last few decades and what is happening now. First, we have the incitement against a sitting Prime Minister, comparing him to Hitler. No, this isn’t Netanyahu: this is the man Bibi himself incited against, Yitzhak Rabin. A future National Security Minister is one of those who is interested in his assassination, having stolen the crest from Rabin’s Cadillac. And then the deed is done: Yigal Amir assassinates Rabin, and after a shambolic Shimon Peres premiership, Bibi is elected. There is no effort to crack down on the what Rabin warned was a messianic tumour – one that would, indeed end up killing him. The peace process rises and falls, and then there’s the Gaza Disengagement. Some right-wing folks now incite Ariel Sharon’s death. One individual, a future Finance Minister, is involved in a plot to blow up Ayalon Highway. But all this while, they are deemed a lunatic and irrelevant fringe.

All this while, the right-wing is becoming more and more messianic, racist, dehumanising, and even exterminations in its rhetoric. Hamas’s murder spree on 7 October seems to vindicate everything they are saying, even if the entire opposite is true (it was the consequence of a system where the government deliberately ignored the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the need to displace Hamas through a concerted strategy for a political process, not the policy of peaceniks). With the Prime Minister weaker than ever, the political structure of Israel is bifurcated:(1) Bibi and the hasbaristas will stage Israel’s international campaign, one that fails on basically every account; (2) the war cabinet will strategise, but ends up proving entirely divided and utterly incapable of working out anything more than a couple of tactics here and there; and (3) Israel’s far-right will basically run the country in the meantime.

In all this, the far-right has been gaining institutional ascendancy as well. In the past, few senior leaders in the IDF were messianic sycophants: Ben-Gvir himself was banned from service. But now, not only does Ben-Gvir begin arming settlers, but the IDF has a growing number of senior officers who are from this messianic far-right. And this is obvious from the conduct of the war in Gaza. A few days ago, we hear that the IDF blows up a water reservoir in Rafah. Is that supposed to be a military target? Of course not. I don’t need to hear the excuses of a hasbarista or some lazy far-right apologia: it’s bad enough that the IDF has to investigate (though unfortunately, I doubt it will come to much). The far-right gains traction in the media, with toxic racism from anchors of Channel 14 ‘News’ and even media perceived to be left-wing, like Channel 13 (whose ‘Arab Affairs Correspondents’ are often full of incitement themselves).

This situation has gotten so bad that arguably, Israel is no longer really a state. A state is an entity that must exercise a monopoly over the use of force. I have been careful not to engage in the politics of doom-mongering, believing some to be hysterical when they declared an imminent end of days. Turns out I was quite wrong. Arguably since Rabin’s assassination, a crackdown on the emergent far-right should have been in order. This did not happen. Instead, we saw it metastasise to the point where the rule of law no longer applies to them. They are free from the state’s grasp. The rule of law is essentially dead: amid a judicial coup, we hear routine rumours that it’s only a matter of time before the Attorney-General is replaced by some right-wing crony. A corrupt Prime Minister needs to somehow manage this functional anarchy to hold his coalition together. The supine, inept President – a man utterly devoid of responsibility and incapable of doing anything but giving into the far-right despite having himself led the Israeli centre-left not too long ago – despite having the powerful bully’s pulpit, does absolutely nothing about it.

And in all this, we have a morally corrupt commentariat whose only response is: well America has committed war crimes! Don’t lecture us! Don’t pontificate! Beyond increasingly irrelevant banal platitudes, they have absolutely nothing to offer. They lose sight of the fact that to the far-right, it is perfectly moral to perpetrate war crimes of any nature, because Palestinians aren’t human beings. We get ever more outrageous briefings from those who declare themselves to be ‘liberals’ who, with American accents, declare that while they support a two-state solution, the only path forward is to starve Gaza into submission. Any illusion of checks and balances is dead. Outside those branded as ‘traitors’ at Haaretz, +972 Magazine, Yesh Din, and the other left-wing New Israel Fund-sponsored enemies within are declared ‘chickens for KFC’ (or whatever absurd catchphrase the admittedly rhetorically-gifted Bibi came up with).

So, in a very real way, as we watch members of the coalition attempting to burst into prisons with armed mobs and distributing guns to West Bank settlers, the idea Israel may be drifting into a civil war has become more and more mainstream. But in just as real a way, there is no need for a civil war. The far-right has already won: settler violence goes unpunished, the institutions of the state are simply incapable of prosecuting extremists, and former terror-convicted activists now run entire ministries. It’s not just that the inmates are running the asylum. In a very real way, the State of Israel as we know it no longer really exists. It’s just a mirage that is becoming more elusive by the day. And that once-vaunted statement that Israel is the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’ is coming undone, in no small part by those who parrot that phrase every day. Israel may still have its glitzy Tel Aviv skyscrapers and world-class educational establishments, but for all intents and purposes, this is how it ends.

For Israeli politicians and people, it is long past a time for choosing. Someone needs to connect the dots and understand you cannot just separate the judicial coup and lawlessness from the appalling practices of the occupation: settler violence akin to pogroms that go un-prosecuted, rising racist and messianic rhetoric, the evisceration of the rule of law both in the occupied territories and in Israel proper. It’s not just intellectually lazy, but it is a fundamental misdiagnosis of the problem. Forget the cries that Israel may become a leper state (it’s already sliding hard in that direction). This is a matter of Israel’s own survival as a functional entity. I have always been a ‘liberal Zionist’ (though I have problems with the phrase for more reasons than one); none of that has changed. A state cannot go on occupying another people without the occupation utterly destroying said state. In a very real way, liberal Zionism is as much at war with Ben-Gvir and his ilk as it is with Hamas, if not more so, because the far-right is quickly dismantling the state from within.

The question is, will Israel’s politicians really grasp the existential threat it now faces? The window is closing fast; the sun will, at some point, have to set. But rather than telling the sun that it is a left-wing foreign-sponsored NGO, it is time for a moral regeneration and reinvention, which cannot happen without a serious reckoning with how bad things have gotten.