When Security Becomes Immunity

Timothy Snyder recently described the United States under Donald Trump as engaged in “superpower suicide.” The phrase is harsh, but useful. It names a situation in which a state does not need to be defeated by an external enemy in order to lose the conditions of its own power. It can destroy those conditions from within.

Snyder should be valued here not as an oracle of American politics, and not because one must agree with every political judgment he makes. His importance lies elsewhere. He belongs to a rarer type of public intellectual: not merely a commentator of the present, but a historian of institutional degradation. Where many analysts follow the rhythm of scandal, election, personality, and tactical advantage, Snyder asks a more disturbing question: which conditions of public truth, legal continuity, responsibility, and political succession are being destroyed before collapse becomes visible? That kind of intelligence matters beyond the American case. It notices when institutions continue to exist but no longer perform their corrective function, when patriotism becomes a private shield, and when emergency begins to protect power instead of limiting it.

A superpower does not survive merely because it has aircraft carriers, intelligence agencies, universities, currencies, alliances, laboratories, and myths. It survives because these elements remain organized into a structure capable of producing public consequence over time. When that structure is converted into a private opportunity for oligarchs, loyalists, contractors, dynastic networks, and ideological performers, power does not simply decline. It changes its function.

The American case, in Snyder’s account, is not only a story of bad leadership. It is the conversion of state capacity into private spectacle and private gain. Alliances become props. War becomes theatre. Public office becomes a commercial platform. Institutions are not abolished overnight. They are hollowed out, intimidated, renamed, repurposed, and made available to those who profit from calling their own interests patriotic.

Israel is not America. The analogy must be handled carefully.

Israel is not committing “superpower suicide,” because Israel is not a superpower. It is a small state: armed, brilliant, wounded, inventive, exhausted, and surrounded by real enemies. Its danger is therefore different. Israel is not destroying imperial power. It risks damaging something more intimate: the political conditions under which a besieged state can still distinguish national survival from the survival of a government.

That distinction is now central.

No serious person can deny that Israel faces real enemies. Hamas is not an abstraction. Hezbollah is not a literary device. Iran is not an academic metaphor. October 7 was not a “context.” It was an act of mass murder, kidnapping, and sadistic political violence. A state has the duty to defend its citizens. Jewish history gives no moral dignity to helplessness.

But the existence of real enemies does not sanctify every action of a government. It does not transform every critic into a traitor. It does not turn every court into sabotage, every protest into weakness, every investigation into disloyalty, every journalist into an internal enemy, and every demand for accountability into a luxury that must wait until history becomes convenient.

History never becomes convenient. That is precisely why law exists.

The danger for Israel is not that emergency is false. The danger is that emergency becomes property.

Once emergency becomes property, it can be owned, managed, prolonged, narrated, monetized, and politically inherited. It becomes a resource. It protects the ruler from ordinary time. It turns delay into responsibility, evasion into prudence, opacity into national seriousness, and loyalty into the highest civic virtue.

At that point, a country may remain militarily active and rhetorically heroic while losing the conditions that make its future genuinely political.

This is where Snyder’s analysis helps us see Israel more clearly. In the American case, the pathology is the oligarchic privatization of imperial power. In the Israeli case, the danger is the political privatization of emergency.

These are not identical processes, but they belong to the same family of institutional self-consumption. In both cases, the state’s organs of continuity are turned against continuity itself. Courts, civil service, universities, armed forces, diplomacy, public trust, and constitutional restraint are no longer treated as the infrastructure of national survival. They are treated as obstacles to the will of those who claim to embody the nation.

This is the oldest trick of authoritarian politics. In Israel, however, it acquires a particular danger because the language of security is not artificial. It is grounded in blood, rockets, tunnels, funerals, hostages, and the memory of abandonment. That is what makes the abuse of this language so grave. It does not invent fear. It redirects real fear toward the preservation of power.

A democratic state under threat must act. But it must also preserve the distinction between the state and the government. The state is not the coalition. The army is not the prime minister. Security is not immunity. Patriotism is not obedience. Jewish survival is not a blank check issued to any man who knows how to wrap himself in catastrophe.

The collapse begins when these distinctions are treated as naïve.

One hears the argument again and again: not now, not during war, not while soldiers are fighting, not while enemies are watching, not while negotiations continue, not while classified matters are involved. There is always a reason to postpone accountability. Some reasons are real. Some are serious. But a democracy cannot live if accountability is always postponed until after the emergency, while the emergency is continuously extended by those who benefit from postponement.

This is not a legal technicality. It is the architecture of political life.

When a state can no longer ask whether its leaders are using emergency to protect the country or using the country’s emergency to protect themselves, the damage has already begun. The question itself becomes forbidden. And when the question becomes forbidden, the state begins to confuse silence with unity.

Israel does not need lessons in vulnerability. It knows vulnerability too well. What it needs, precisely because it is vulnerable, is a severe and unsentimental defense of its corrective institutions.

Courts are not decorations for peaceful times. Journalism is not a hobby for periods without rockets. Protest is not an imported weakness. Parliamentary scrutiny is not a gift to the enemy. These are the internal instruments by which a state prevents its own fear from being captured.

The enemy outside may want Israel weak, divided, isolated, and morally exhausted. But a government that attacks the very mechanisms by which Israel can correct itself also contributes to that exhaustion, even while speaking the language of national strength.

The most dangerous form of weakness is not hesitation. It is the inability to distinguish force from wisdom.

Snyder’s phrase, “superpower suicide,” captures the American tragedy of a state consuming the basis of its own strength. Israel requires another phrase: emergency capture. Or more sharply: the privatization of emergency.

A country does not cease to exist only when it is defeated. Sometimes it remains armed, mobilized, eloquent, defiant, and full of flags. Sometimes it continues to strike its enemies and invoke its dead. And yet, beneath the noise of survival, it begins to lose the distinction without which survival becomes merely biological: the distinction between a state defending its people and a government defending itself.

That distinction is not anti-Israel.

It is the condition under which Israel can still have a future worthy of the name.

Yochanan Schimmelpfennig