We’re watching Israel self-destruct — at the hands of its own leaders and citizens

Columnist
Dan Perry
December 7, 2024

TEL AVIV — My wife met four friends for lunch the other day, and returned with the following report: All four, successful and prosperous Israeli women in their 50s, were considering emigration. One had a professorship potentially awaiting in the Netherlands. Another has already bought a property in Greece. The U.S. and U.K. were possible destinations for the other two.

None of them want to leave Israel, she explained. All are patriotic and proud. But they simply cannot fathom living out their days with a front-row seat to what they have concluded is the slow, steady self-destruction of the Israel that they love.

That is the version of Israel they grew up in, the Israel that lives in the imagination of most American Jews. It is the Israel that was led by Moshe Dayan, Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres. Whose cultural icons were the deeply humanistic authors A.B. Yehoshua and Amos Oz — or fictional characters like the Zionist officer Ari Ben Canaan, whom Paul Newman played in Exodus. Its modern champions are tech wizards responsible for an astounding proportion of the digital era’s innovations.

I’ll call that Israel the “liberal” Israel, although “modern,” “moderate” and “mostly secular” are equally accurate. Democratic. Some people might simply use the word “sane.”

There have always been odd aspects to this Israel — like religious control over marriage and divorce; tolerance of settlement madness in the occupied West Bank; and a pronounced militarist streak. But since the country’s 1948 founding, and despite existential threats from its neighbors, Israel for many decades managed to remain, at its core, a liberal democracy that took seriously the rule of law and had rational government systems whose procedures and outcomes were similar to what you’d find in many European nations. This Israel, in 2022, had a per capita GDP pushing $50,000, higher than the United Kingdom, Germany or France.

But that Israel, which my wife’s friends treasure, is under relentless assault from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the right-wing extremists upon whom his political survival depends. It is ironic that Netanyahu, the most Americanized leader Israel has ever had, is also the person most responsible for the possibility that Israel will mutate into a country that bears no resemblance to the United States, and which would be inhospitable to the vast majority of U.S. Jews.

Three paths to disaster

I was born into a nascent Israel in 1963, some three years after my parents fled Romania. I remember the 1967 War; the panic and the euphoria both seared my mind as a little kid. Soon after we moved to Pennsylvania, but I came back to Israel as an adult, leading the Israel bureau and later the Middle East region for The Associated Press. I have lived in Tel Aviv full time since 2018.

My wife’s family moved to Israel from Romania when she was a baby, and she has pretty much spent her life here, save for our foreign-correspondent stints in London, San Juan, and Bucharest. We both served in the Israel Defense Forces, as did our two daughters. So we are not bystanders to the country’s potential self-implosion.

How did Israel change from the Jewish democracy of our families’ dreams into a potentially authoritarian state on the road to something that might be called apartheid? Why would anyone seek this transformation? Is it a bug in the operating system of human nature? Or a feature of Judaism? Perhaps a plague of the Middle East?

My reading of the situation is that Israel, having drawn in Jews from all over the world, is a microcosm of all the world’s wonder — and all the world’s craziness.

The country’s different “tribes” want different things. Three of its fastest-growing tribes are core to Netanyahu’s coalition, and seek to remake the country in three somewhat different ways. No analogy is perfect, but I see these three models: A fake democracy run by an authoritarian figure with vast power, as in Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdogan; a theocracy, as in Iran; and a dominant ethnic group running roughshod over others, as in Vladimir Putin’s dystopian Russia.

Netanyahu himself may not want Israel to actually resemble any of the three. But many of his supporters want it to incorporate various elements of each, and that’s the direction of travel. The prime minister has repeatedly proven that he cares about little except clinging to power. If this goes on, at some point soon, a return to sanity will be not just difficult, but perhaps impossible.

A toxic, fanatical ferment

Each of the three nightmarish scenarios sought by Netanyahu’s coalition partners maps onto a distinct tribe of Israeli society. And each is driven by fanaticism, grievance or a toxic combination of the two.

Interest in the authoritarian component, which I compare to Turkey, comes from Netanyahu’s Likud Party and many of its supporters. Netanyahu took what was once a mainstream political movement that attracted qualified conservative candidates, and transformed it into a mafia-like personality cult whose leadership roster includes many people with criminal records.

The drive toward the theological component, which I liken to the hated mullahs of Iran, stems from Israel’s Haredim. Shortly after the country’s creation in 1948, its founding leader, David Ben-Gurion, struck a deal to exempt some 400 men engaged in full-time Torah study from mandatory military service. Likud’s first prime minister, Menachem Begin, entered his own pact with these insular Orthodox Jews in 1977, when they accounted for perhaps 4% of the country’s population, and the government removed a cap on the number of exemptions.

Now, the Haredim make up about a sixth of the population; projections suggest it will be a third in 25 years. They want the military exemption — which has until now been implemented through informal arrangements — permanently enshrined in law. They also want adults who study in seminaries instead of working to continue receiving government subsidies; for their community’s schools to be free of requirements regarding the teaching of math, science and English; and for the wider society to ignore their marginalization of women and intolerance of LGBTQ+ rights.

Haredi leaders also want to eviscerate the country’s secular court system, governed as it is by principles of justice and equity; religious courts are all they require.

The third group is the far-right elements of the former National Religious movement, the backbone of the settlement enterprise in the West Bank and those now agitating to resettle Gaza. If they have a patron saint, it is the U.S.-born Rabbi Meir Kahane, a radical whose signature ideology was expulsion of the Palestinians and whose overt racism was until recently overwhelmingly rejected in Israel.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, Netanyahu’s minister of national security, just last month marked the anniversary of Kahane’s death by visiting the late rabbi’s grave with a group of far-right activists. He and the equally heinous finance minister Bezalel Smotrich proffer a vision of Jewish supremacy in which Israel rules over the West Bank and Gaza but does not give citizenship or other rights to the more than 5 million Palestinians who live there. Some are openly promoting policies of so-called “voluntary” expulsion of these Palestinian residents, which the former Likud defense minister, Moshe Yaalon, last weekend denounced as “ethnic cleansing.”

Their constituents occasionally maraud and pillage in Palestinian towns and villages. The Netanyahu government does all it can to look the other way. The courts, which aim to stem this criminality and bristle at efforts to legitimize it, are the enemy of this rabble as well.

That’s why, in the 10 months between Netanyahu’s return to power in December 2022 and the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre that sparked the current war in Gaza, the government set about neutering the courts.

The proposed judicial overhaul called for the government to appoint puppet judges, and also would grant it the right to overturn said judges’ decisions should they forget to act like puppets. It sought to defang various civil service gatekeepers as well as the free media; make it vastly easier to ban Arab parties from the Knesset; and strengthen the parallel (and hitherto mostly toothless) religious court system.

If executed, it would perpetuate the rule of the Netanyahu coalition beyond his lifetime. It could be fairly termed regime change.

‘But why are they so mean?’

For Israelis of the old liberal school, the genuine rage at the system fueling the so-called judicial “reformers” is shocking — as is their loyalty to politicians for whom Israel’s long-term well-being is at best a collateral concern. They seem, too, to delight in the pain felt by people like my wife’s lunch partners.

The reforms were initially sidelined by a massive protest movement — the largest the country has ever known, with hundreds of thousands pouring into the streets every Saturday night for months.

Pilots threatened that they would shun reserve training if the judicial overhaul went through. Economists warned that tech investments would dry up. The heads of the security establishment repeatedly warned that this level of social schism was inviting attack.

That attack came on Oct. 7.

Netanyahu is a clever politician. He went into war mode, declaring that any accounting for the intelligence and tactical failures that allowed Hamas terrorists to breach the Gaza border fence and rape, murder and kidnap Israelis must wait until after Israel declared victory. He then engineered a strategy in Gaza that cannot yield such a victory — a sort of forever war, since there are always more Hamas militants to target.

Meanwhile, he refuses to even discuss Gaza’s future — which can only feasibly be either a disastrous long-term Israeli military occupation, or a return of control to the Palestinian Authority, which Hamas expelled in 2007.

The remaining 101 hostages taken on Oct. 7, many of whom are presumed dead, have been essentially abandoned while the tragedy grinds on. The Palestinian death toll is enormous; displacement and destruction even more widespread; starvation and other public-health crises loom. While Hamas is certainly to blame for sparking this war, with callous disregard for its impact on Gaza’s civilians, Netanyahu is obviously complicit. They are among history’s most twisted bedfellows.

Now Netanyahu’s assault on democracy, briefly put off by the war, is making a tentative return.

There is once more talk of changing the system of appointing judges. Netanyahu’s cabinet has decided to boycott the liberal Haaretz newspaper, calling it aligned with Israel’s enemies — a dirty move right out of the authoritarian playbook. Coalition members are promoting a new bill to either privatize or disband Israel’s public broadcaster, clearly because it does real journalism that is sometimes critical of the government. Some Netanyahu allies are agitating to fire the independent-minded attorney-general, who drives the religious factions mad by blocking some of the government’s sabotage.

An Israeli friend of mine, a 40-something tech executive who has been living for years in London, watched with horror a turbulent recent hearing of the Knesset’s Constitution, Law and Justice Committee regarding the selection of judges. MK Simcha Rothman, who heads the committee, seemed to be having the time of his life, his glee and disdain for the Israel of yore unmistakable. “But why are they so mean?” she asked of the Netanyahu acolytes running the proceedings.

I put that question to another friend, Eytan, a 59-year-old sociology professor who has bought a refuge in Cyprus, where many thousands of Israelis have already settled in the past year. “They think demography is on their side,” he told me. “They think they’re going to win, and that’s why they’re so mean. They do all this because they can.”

Who will fight for a lost cause?

Human beings can tolerate almost anything if they think that it might eventually stop. But there is a sense among Israelis who oppose Netanyahu and his coalition that the situation is hopeless — that it is not a political pendulum that might someday swing back. It increasingly appears to be a case of demographic destiny: The religious sectors, Haredi and settler alike, have way more children than the secular and liberal tribes, and they are obsessive about preventing attrition from their ranks.

The Haredim in particular, with seven children on average per family, are doubling their proportion of the population every generation. Unless this changes, they will be the majority in less than half a century. Given their lack of military service and low workforce participation, a majority-Haredi Israel would be an impoverished country that might not be able to defend itself from the surrounding Arab states.

Israel’s current greatness is what makes this all so heartbreaking. Heartbreak is an unbearable form of suffering — and that is my wife’s lunch companions are making plans to leave.

Data on exactly how many people are thinking the same is spotty — but everyone who lives here knows the phenomenon is widespread, and potentially snowballing. Official state figures reported by The Jerusalem Post show that 40,600 Israelis left the country in the first seven months of 2024, an unprecedented rise of about 2,200 more departures per month than in 2023, which itself marked a bump up.

Beneath those numbers are many troubling indicators gauging sentiment and intention.

For example, a July 2024 survey revealed that a whopping 62% of Israelis are considering relocating abroad, with most people citing security concerns and political instability as their reasons. A 2023 survey by the Jewish People Policy Institute revealed that approximately 37% of Israelis either hold or plan to acquire a foreign passport.

And there is considerable anecdotal evidence of Israelis like Eytan buying properties in neighboring countries, or as far away as Portugal. Real estate experts in Cyprus say that Israelis are the second-largest group of property buyers in recent years, behind Russian investors.

“At the moment, 7 out of 10 clients are Israeli buyers in Larnaca,” a coastal city in southern Cyprus, said Kyriakos Vasileiou, the real estate agent who sold Eytan the apartment he bought there earlier this year. He said the reason was “the situation, with the war” — plus outrageous house prices in Israel.

This is a drama in a country where emigration is still referred to as yerida, Hebrew for “going down” — and the opposite of making aliyah, or “going up,” the idealized term for moving here as a Jew.

I’ve had innumerable conversations with people who would not be quoted because of the stigma that still attaches to those even considering departure. They’ve made clear that part of what is pushing them away is fear of military service under an entrenched government that is viewed as having violated the basic covenant of fighting only wars that are widely supported by the citizenry.

Simply put, many liberal Israelis cannot stomach sending their children to guard illegal West Bank settlements overflowing with Haredi Jews who refuse to put on uniforms themselves.

As a result, many successful Israelis I know with young children are trying to come up with contingencies for evading the draft notices that will arrive when the kids turn 17. This is not about cowardice in the current war; Israel’s youth have been quite brave and their families willing to sacrifice. This is about not wanting to fight for a lost cause, amid the frustrating sense that the collapse will have been self-inflicted.

A two-state solution — but not the one you’re thinking of

The three groups with which Netanyahu has made his devil’s bargain — the would-be authoritarians, the Haredim and the radical settlers — in themselves do not add up to a majority of the country. But there are other groups that push Netanyahu over the hump, especially Israelis with roots in countries like Morocco, Egypt, Yemen, Iraq and Algeria. These Mizrahi Jews tend to be more traditional, more concerned with security, and socially conservative.

But when the economic disaster that will inevitably derive from the political changes under Netanyahu really hits, they may wake up. When growth grinds to a halt; when investment dries up; when the burden of supporting the exploding Haredi sector starts being truly felt in their own wallets. This awakening might, of course, arrive too late. Convincing them to think more clearly is the urgent challenge.

Meanwhile, in their desperation to hold onto the “sane Israel,” some speak of partitioning the country in two. Borrowing a concept from ancient times, they speak of a modern “Israel” along the overwhelmingly secular and liberal coast, from the Tel Aviv metro area north to Haifa, and a separate entity called “Judea.”

The second state would have Jerusalem as its heart, plus the less populated areas of the Galilee in the north, the Negev in the south, and the West Bank Jewish settlements. As far as the liberals of “Israel” would be concerned, the religious fanatics and nationalists of “Judea” would be left to fight the Palestinians in the West Bank to their heart’s content, with their own resources.

The name “Judea” harkens back to a split in the ancient Jewish kingdoms around the 11th century B.C.E. It makes some geographic and demographic sense, given where the people live, a little like Red and Blue America. But Zionism did not contemplate two homelands, and the practical challenges of dividing up the military and defending the rump coastal state are probably too great.

For Eytan, my wife’s friends and myriad others, it may make more sense to just leave than to watch Israel careen toward suicide.

The perils of a binational future

Alongside the demographic and economic doom portended by Haredi population growth, Israel’s intransigence regarding the Palestinians could lead to its self-destruction.

Israel’s continued occupation of the West Bank and the expansion of settlements there are pushing the country toward a de facto one-state solution, which is no solution at all if you care about the future of any sort of Jewish state.

Some 3 million Palestinians currently live in what Netanyahu and his allies refer to as “Judea and Samaria,” the biblical names for the territory west of the Jordan River. They have neither citizenship nor voting rights in Israel.

Some 500,000 Israeli settlers live in the same territory, enjoying not just Israeli citizenship and voting rights, but access to Israeli schools and other public services. When these settlers and Palestinians clash, they are prosecuted by different justice systems.

This reality already undermines Israel’s democratic principles. If Netanyahu, backed by a future President Donald Trump, goes further and annexes the West Bank without giving its Palestinian residents citizenship, it would cement an apartheid-like system — and risk Israel losing the dwindling support it has internationally. The likely trick of only annexing specific areas where Jews live, creating an impossible non-contiguous map for a never-to-be Palestinian state, will fool no one.

That one-state option is obviously unsustainable. But granting Israeli citizenship to West Bank Palestinians would erode the Jewish majority. And the Jewish majority would be eliminated altogether if Gaza’s 2 million residents are included, and totally overwhelmed if Palestinians living abroad were granted the right of return. Israel would effectively become Palestine, and the Jewish exodus likely accelerate exponentially. That is, to anyone who can count and think two steps ahead, the end of Zionism.

That’s why, for all its problems, the only sustainable path forward for Zionism is a two-state solution: Israel and a sovereign Palestinian state coexisting side by side. To preserve that possibility, settlement expansion must stop and a partition be imposed. Without some version of this, the Zionist dream of a Jewish and democratic state is dead.

In search of a tipping point

Solving Israel’s challenges may be beyond what a badly divided democratic society can achieve. They rather tend toward paralysis.

Netanyahu’s right-religious coalition by definition opposes any action to head off the twin dangers of the Palestinians and the Haredim; the two-pronged suicide is actually its defining project, despite the illogic of it all.

And it may well play out even if the current coalition falls, as polls show it would if elections were held today. The question is whether a successor government — even if it were from the moderate camp — would actually take the decisive and difficult steps that are needed to derail the current dynamic.

These include cutting Israel off from the West Bank and Gaza, even without a possibly unattainable peace treaty with the Palestinians, and cutting off the flow of funds that enables Haredim to continue having large families and men who neither serve in the military nor enter the workforce.

If Israel continues on its current path, I see a terrible few decades ahead.

For starters, a world that is already deeply concerned about the Netanyahu government’s prosecution of its war in Gaza could actually start to sanction Israel and Israelis, making travel abroad, business partnerships and academic collaborations uncomfortable or impossible. With Europe such a situation is already imminent; with the U.S., it may take another generation. But eventually, international powers will force Israel to extend citizenship and voting rights to Palestinians who live in the cities and villages between the settlements — or suffer devastating divestment, as South Africa did in the 1980s.

What’s more likely is a tipping point will come at which the liberal Jews will flee en masse, rushing to sell their (currently overpriced) properties before the market collapses altogether. That’s how markets work.

Reason to hope

I think modern Israel can still be saved. Doing so will require prying masses of working-class voters away from the Netanyahu coalition by making them understand where this is headed. Some people say that if this doesn’t happen in the next election, scheduled for October 2026, they’re getting out. My best guess is that Israel could still afford two more election cycles — but certainly no more than that.

I see the tipping point as being five to 10 years down the road. It can be forestalled if the Netanyahu coalition is decisively defeated, and drastic action taken.

But what is clear to me is that there is no way that modern and democratic Israel, as currently constituted, survives if versions of the right wing-religious coalition are still in power at the end of the decade. The so-called “Startup Nation” — whose tech-savvy protagonists are the most mobile of all — will become a fading memory. Without the pilots and the entrepreneurs and the professors and the kibbutzniks, and with Jews overall consigned to minority status in the territory they foolishly insisted on controlling, Zionism will be indefensible.

Israel, in this scenario, would not live to see its 100th birthday in 2048. It would be the third time in history when an attempt at Jewish sovereignty did not make that milestone. It will have been undone by fanatical nationalism and a mutation of religion, not by enemy hands.

The Jews would become an overwhelmingly diasporic people once more. Many will likely intermarry, and many of their descendants, perhaps, lose their Jewish identities. A century hence, the Orthodox may be left as the main expression of Judaism.

I understand well that by stating clearly what is going on, I’m giving succor to Israel’s enemies. What I am describing is not so different from what the late Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said years ago — that Israel is like a spider web that will be easily swept away by the winds. I have no wish to prove Nasrallah right, or to give his remaining followers headwind. But I have concluded the false Messiahs of the Netanyahu coalition must be defeated, or they will drag Israel off a cliff.

To huge swaths of Israeli and American Jews — including my family — that would be a tragedy. Would my wife and I leave ourselves? I have lifelong ties to this country, and she can hardly imagine another permanent home. At least one of our daughters very much wants to stay, and is not inclined to let “politics” affect her life.

So I intend to do what little I might to save the place from itself. But should such efforts fail, it will be because the Jewish people gathered here have proved incapable of not making catastrophically stupid choices. On a philosophical level, that’s a legitimate outcome.

The world will go on (until it doesn’t), and the Zionist story will serve as yet another cautionary tale that choices carry consequences. Mistakes exact a price, and if enough mistakes are piled on top of each other, sometimes it is fatal.

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