‘The Country’s Already Been Destroyed’

Eran Schwartz looks like a fighter pilot. The 40-something appeared last week on the Israeli television show Ofira and Berkowitz—a black V-neck T-shirt over his trim, athletic chest; his black hair cut short—to defend his decision to end his service in the air-force reserves. “We’re not the ones who tore up the social contract,” he said. “We swore to serve a state that is Jewish and democratic. And if Netanyahu is going to end Israel’s being a liberal democracy, it’s the country that violated the contract, not us.”

Member of the Knesset Matan Kahana, another pilot on the show, agreed with Schwartz that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was dragging the country to “the destruction of the Third Temple.” He insisted, though, that the pilots were wrong to end their service, “because that’s Judgment Day weaponry.” And he warned of the consequences: “Refusal to serve will destroy the army; it will rip the country apart.”

[Natan Sachs: Israel on the brink]

“And the country isn’t already being ripped apart?” Ofira Asayag, one of the hosts, shot back. “The country’s already been destroyed.”

In that one line, Asayag captured precisely what millions of Israelis are feeling. The political crisis in Israel is no longer about being in favor of the judicial reform the Netanyahu government pledged to enact, or about opposing it. It is no longer about law; it is about the almost complete erosion of any trust millions of citizens have in the government. It is about the sense here that something deep, sacred to many, has broken, the feeling that, as Asayag put it, “the country’s already been destroyed.”

Later in the show, she asked Schwartz the tough question his stand provokes: “If there’s an emergency, if we’re attacked, are you or are you not getting in a plane?” Schwartz dodged. Asayag saw him squirming, heard his voice cracking, stared him in the eye, and asked him a question Israelis hardly ever ask a fighter pilot: “Why are you crying?”

“I’m not crying,” Schwartz replied.

But that wasn’t entirely true, he acknowledged a moment later. “I’m thinking of my grandfather,” he added. “He was one of the builders of this country … There was an unwritten contract between all of us, that we are all one people, and that we are at war here for one reason—to be secure in our own land. That is what Benjamin Netanyahu is destroying. He’s leading us to the destruction of the Third Temple, and now my grandfather, with whom I can no longer speak—I have to explain to him that I’m not serving this country? It’s breaking me inside … My heart is broken.”

Israel has become a country of broken hearts, a nation of people paralyzed with disbelief that matters have come to this. Reservists, a crucial component of the fighting readiness of the Israel Defense Forces, have dropped out of voluntary service by the thousands, to the derision of some and the adulation of others. They served in air-force squadrons, cyberwarfare units, the medical corps, special-operations formations akin to the Navy SEALs—there is hardly an elite unit that has not been hit. Both Herzi Halevi, the IDF chief of staff, and Yoav Gallant, the defense minister—a member of Netanyahu’s governing coalition—have been strikingly blunt in noting that the IDF’s fighting capabilities may well have already been badly dented.

[Yossi Klein Halevi: Netanyahu’s betrayal of a democracy is a betrayal of Israel]

Nor is it clear that the army can be healed. If Israel chooses to withdraw from parts of the West Bank or is forced to do so, will religious soldiers—who now account for a significant majority of officers, and who are largely opposed to territorial compromise—obey the orders? Despite their disagreement with the government’s policy, they did obey during the 2005 disengagement from Gaza. But if the opponents of judicial reform are now refusing to serve, other groups might one day do the same. Does a country that has been at war since its founding still have a functioning army? The answer is far from obvious.

Critics of the protest movement that has filled Israel’s streets week after week make two simple claims. First, they say, it has long been clear that Israel needs some manner of judicial reform. Second, they remind those who will listen, this government was democratically elected. And some of those who ran (though, notably, not Netanyahu) were direct about their intentions if elected. So what the protests amount to, these critics claim, is the privileged class that founded the country—tech entrepreneurs, pilots, doctors, professors, judges, finance workers—being sore losers after their electoral defeat. Israel’s demographic makeup has changed radically since the country’s founding; the descendants of the founders are now a minority, and they might as well get used to it.

Many of the protesters acknowledged the need for judicial reform, but insisted that Netanyahu’s proposal went too far. Centrist academics agreed with them. More ominous, the protest movement made clear to everyone that millions of Israelis were frightened by the proposed changes. Slow it down, they begged. Let’s have a national conversation, or a constitutional convention, as was suggested by Netta Barak-Corren, a highly regarded Hebrew University law professor.

But those pressing for far-reaching and immediate reform—including Justice Minister Yariv Levin and Simcha Rothman, the chair of the Knesset Committee on Constitution, Law, and Justice—would have none of it. They told Netanyahu that if he hesitated, they would bring down his government.

[Read: From this hill, you can see the next Intifada]

As the fateful vote was unfolding in the Knesset on Monday, Israelis were captivated by the image of Netanyahu sandwiched between Gallant, who was pleading for compromise, and Levin, who warned that he would tear down the government. The old Benjamin Netanyahu, master operator and manipulator, had withered. He’d appointed Levin acting prime minister while he had a minor heart procedure earlier in the week. Netanyahu was out of sedation, Israelis quipped, but Levin was still running the government—right into the abyss, using his parliamentary majority to thumb his nose at all the elites who make Israel an economic, technological, academic, cultural, and military power. He ignored everyone who begged him to show some restraint, shredding the last pretense of a social contract.

Almost every assumption Israelis shared about how they might live together has now been torn asunder. Netanyahu brought the ultra-Orthodox parties into his government, as he has always done in the past. The Haredim, as they are known in Hebrew, are convenient coalition partners. They have no interest in foreign policy or most domestic issues; even holding on to settlements is hardly a major concern for them. They consistently make but two demands of whatever government they join, whether left, center, or right: They want government funding for their school system, and they want a continuation of the policy initiated by David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, exempting young Haredi men from military service. Haredi schools teach little math or English, leaving their graduates utterly unprepared to enter the workforce, and exempting young Haredi men from military service so that they can continue studying in yeshivot further limits their exposure to secular society.

Ben-Gurion made the deal in Israel’s early years because he assumed that the Haredim would be an anomaly in a modern, Jewish state, a vestige of pre-Holocaust European Jewry that would soon die off and disappear. But Ben-Gurion got that entirely wrong. The Haredim now constitute a massive economic and political force in Israel. Whereas 400 exemptions from military service were given each year in Ben-Gurion’s time, by 2010, the number of Haredim excused from military service through the same arrangement had reached 62,500 annually—an increase of 15,000 percent, while Israel’s overall population had grown only 1,200 percent.

Israel’s previous government, headed by Naftali Bennett for a year and Yair Lapid for a shorter period, required Haredi schools that receive government funding to begin teaching basic secular studies. The Israeli public still took umbrage at Haredim not serving in the army, but seemed slightly assuaged by what appeared to be progress.

[Jeffrey Goldberg: The man who could end the Netanyahu era]

So when Netanyahu reached a coalition deal with the ultra-Orthodox parties to again exempt their schools from offering secular studies and promised to pass a law permanently exempting their young men from military service, the unhappy but long-standing tolerance snapped. Protesters decrying the proposed judicial reform chanted about “equality.” Everyone understood they meant not only equality of rights, but equality of obligations. The protesters said they were done paying for the Haredim and protecting them. “They’re sucking our blood,” one TV commentator said. She was roundly criticized and forced to apologize, even as many privately applauded the sentiment.

Rage at the ultra-Orthodox was compounded when Netanyahu tried to appoint Member of the Knesset Aryeh Deri, the leader of a Haredi party, to the position of finance minister. Deri was jailed after a 2000 conviction for taking bribes, was convicted of tax evasion a decade later, and then resigned from politics as part of a plea deal. Netanyahu is himself a defendant in several serious cases, but contends that as long as he is prime minister, he cannot be sent to jail. His plan to rehabilitate Deri’s career stoked outrage not only at the prime minister, who seemed to drop every norm for the sake of his own freedom, but at the Haredim as well.

Yedidia Stern, a former dean of the law school at Bar Ilan University and head of the Israel Democracy Institute, is now president of the Jewish People Policy Institute. He is widely regarded as one of Israel’s leading jurisprudential figures, and is also known to have a soft spot for the Haredim, for whose way of life he has great admiration. But, as he later told me, Stern went to see Deri at his home in March, as the brouhaha was unfolding. “You’re about to make thousands of Haredi children hungry,” Stern told him. Deri looked puzzled. “You’re in power now,” Stern explained. “But the left or the center is going to come back into power, now, in half a year, in a year, or maybe longer. But sooner or later, it is bound to happen. And when it does, the new government will not care one whit how hungry your children are, that their only hot meal a day comes from their school. The voters are going to completely turn off the spigot of government funding, and your community is going to sink even lower into poverty.”

Deri, Stern told me, stared at him in silence for a long moment. It was clear, Stern recalled, that Deri had suddenly understood.

Two weeks ago, Housing Minister Yitzhak Goldknopf, also a Haredi, responded to rumors that Netanyahu was going to drop the elimination of judicial review, by far the most controversial element of the judicial-reform package, from his legislative agenda. The Haredim see ending judicial review, a step that would prevent the Israeli Supreme Court from overriding a law permanently granting Haredi men military exemptions, as crucial. Goldknopf told reporters that ending judicial review was “a necessary condition” for the government’s survival.

What Goldknopf had inadvertently done was signal to the hundreds of thousands of protesters in the streets that the notion that ending judicial review was about fixing a broken judicial system was mere pretense. The actual agenda was ending the court’s ability to block the government’s capitulation to the Haredim. Rage exploded again.

A few days later, though, Yated Ne’eman, a leading Haredi newspaper, seemed to back down. It reiterated its longtime stance that “democracy is fundamentally foreign to us” and that the Haredim are in exile in Israel no less than they were before the state existed. Still, it said, it would be unwise for Haredim to take a stand in the conflict. The editorial was a signal that many Haredim now fear they have overreached, and seek to avoid becoming collateral damage to the anger now sweeping across Israel.

Some observers, leading American Jewish philanthropists among them, have tenaciously held on to the hope that the Haredi world can slowly be opened. Even among the Haredim themselves, there are those who hope that the Haredi establishment will be punished for the role it has been playing in Israeli politics for decades.

Esty Shushan, the eldest of 12 brothers and sisters, is herself the mother of just four. That alone makes her a rebel within the Haredi world. She is a poet, a filmmaker, and the head of Nivcharot, an organization seeking to get Haredi women elected to the Knesset.

But she and her colleagues, she acknowledges, are a fringe group. The rabbis at the helm have no interest in women politicians, no tolerance for Haredi feminists, and, despite the disaster that secular illiteracy is for a younger Haredi generation, no interest in opening the community to the Western world. True, she admits, the younger generation manages to get information from the outside world even on “kosher” phones (which block most of the internet), because they have WhatsApp. Yet even with that flow of information, which her generation did not have when they were young, the power of the establishment shows no signs of cracking.

Shushan was asked in a recent interview what that younger generation needs to know. That the money the Haredim just won from the government is not going to get to the children who need it, she replied. It will go instead to a select group of leaders who could not be less interested in what will serve the needs of their flock.

Can a firebrand like Shushan engender a renewed conversation inside the Haredi community? She now has more than 20 young women working with her, she says, which is astonishing growth from where her organization was a decade ago, when she started it. But she’s a woman. She’s a feminist. She’s a filmmaker. She’s outside the norm in every way, marginalized with no obvious avenue for making a difference. The Haredi world will hurtle on into a collision with the rest of Israeli society, she fears—even though everyone would benefit from changing course.

Even Israel’s intellectual right has been shaken by the tsunami of rage reshaping the Jewish state. Assaf Sagiv (with whom I used to work at the Shalem Center) is widely regarded as Israel’s preeminent conservative public intellectual. But Sagiv has broken with the government (which he repeatedly says he hopes will fall) and with most of his former colleagues. On social media, he has been spewing vitriol deriding the government, its members of the Knesset, and its supporters.

Why? “Conservatism is a cooling ethos,” Sagiv said in a lengthy interview with Haaretz, Israel’s flagship left-leaning newspaper. “It’s a movement that also prefers compromise over disputes. Religious Zionism was once a conciliatory, bridging force,” but those days are behind us.

[From the October 1930 issue: Zionism in Palestine]

How did the Israeli right go so wrong? Sagiv says that the brand of conservatism at the heart of Israel’s coalition is a direct import of populist American conservatism. But that, Sagiv said, is the last thing Israel needs: “American conservatism gives us a peephole into the future, and it doesn’t bode well. The Republican Party is a political, moral and cultural disaster zone.”

“The Israeli right is now positioning itself behind a program that is no less than a constitutional coup,” Sagiv told the newspaper. What should Israelis expect if the plan is put into play? “The dismantlement of the state’s institutions … splitting the spoils between party bosses who are battling one another for power and resources, loss of public security, looting of the public coffers and deterioration into general lawlessness.”

Sagiv’s prediction is now being tested. The Knesset passed the first plank of the judicial-reform package late Monday. Almost immediately, renewed protests erupted across Israel. The police, worried that people were about to scale the security fences of the heavily guarded Knesset, called in reinforcements. In Tel Aviv, thousands of protesters blocked the Ayalon, the city’s main highway, shutting it in both directions for hours.

Later that night, the police had had enough. They brought in water cannons to soak the protesters, and mounted officers rode their horses directly into the crowd. Israelis went to sleep with images of violence and utter bedlam playing on their television screens.

When they awakened the following morning, many were stunned to see that several of the country’s newspapers had printed identical front pages: Nothing but black, top to bottom, and the words “A dark day for Israeli democracy.”

Later that morning, leading news outlets announced that United Torah Judaism, one of the key Haredi parties, was submitting a Basic Law—a piece of legislation with constitutional status—that would declare, once and for all, that Haredi men who study Torah would be considered to have served the country. Netanyahu’s Likud put a stop to the move, this time at least, but the mere mention of the proposal gave Israelis a taste of what the future was likely to hold.

[Read: ‘Netanyahu is playing fire with the democrats’]

Every news outlet, it seemed, was trying to make sense of what had just happened. Would the opposition ask the Supreme Court to overturn the law that had been passed the previous night? It appears that it will, and most knowledgeable observers believe that there is a good chance the court will intervene. But what if the government then says that it does not recognize the court’s authority?

David Barnea, the director of the Mossad, told a group of his concerned operatives what would happen if it suddenly became unclear who was in charge of the country, Israel’s Channel 12 reported. “If things come to a constitutional crisis,” he assured them, “I will be on the right side”—intimating that he would side with the court against the government.

What that would look like is difficult to imagine. The security establishment against the government? The government denying the Supreme Court’s authority? The tacit agreements that have held Israel together for 75 years are unraveling at an unimaginable pace.

Where does that leave us? The truth is that no one knows. Which made it hard to disagree when, the morning after the Knesset vote, former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert gave voice to our worst fears. Israel, he said, “is heading into civil war.”