As the Biden administration and its allies try to secure an elusive cease-fire in the Gaza Strip, Israel appears to have gone rogue.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, came to Washington last week to give a defiant speech. Despite international condemnation, he vowed to continue the war against Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank, where Israel is killing and imprisoning scores of Palestinians each week, without any clear idea of its endgame.
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The assassinations of senior Hezbollah and Hamas figures abroad have now sharply raised the risks of a larger regional war as Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah prepare retaliation, analysts say.
But the deaths of Fouad Shukur, a senior Hezbollah commander, and Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas, will not change the strategic quandary Israel faces over how to end the war, govern Gaza or care for the civilians there. They are more likely to intensify the conflict than diminish it, making progress on a Gaza cease-fire even more difficult.
Israel says it does not want to occupy Gaza, but it has no other solution to provide order; Hamas refuses to surrender, despite the thousands of dead. While Washington sees a cease-fire followed by a regional deal as an answer, Netanyahu is contemptuous of the idea. He believes only force will compel Hamas to concede and restore Israel’s strategic deterrence toward Iran and its proxies, especially Hezbollah.
Absent a clear goal in the war, however, Netanyahu’s defiance is dividing Israel from its allies and the country itself. It has further shaken trust in his leadership. It is fueling suspicions that he is keeping the country at war to keep himself in power. It is intensifying a deep rift inside the society — about the fate of Israeli hostages, the conduct of the war and the rule of law — that is challenging the institutional bonds that hold Israel together.
“Israel’s international image continues to take hits since October — despite nine months of war, its military objectives are unmet, and its reputation socially and domestically is also damaged,” said Sanam Vakil, a Middle East analyst at Chatham House.
To form a government and stay in power, Netanyahu has empowered deeply religious, pro-settlement far-right politicians who oppose a Palestinian state of any kind. He has given powerful roles to Itamar Ben-Gvir, a convicted criminal, who now heads the police and is influential in how the West Bank is run, and to Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister.
Both men have moved to weaken the Palestinian Authority, support expanding settlements in the West and oppose any deal with Hamas — while putting their own followers into key positions in the Israeli bureaucracy.
They represent a populist revolt against the country’s traditional democratic ethos and institutions, including the army and the judiciary. Much like Donald Trump, Netanyahu, despite his long period in power, rides that anti-elitist wave, arguing that he is the only politician who can stand up to the United States and the United Nations and prevent a sovereign Palestine dominated by Hamas.
“We’re in a very dangerous process that can cast a shadow over the basic DNA of this country,” said Nahum Barnea, one of Israel’s most prominent journalists and commentators. “Cultural confrontation is fine, but not so fine with politicians who are messianic or radical populists and not only become part of the government but hold crucial posts there.”
The far-right politicians have an agenda, he said: “They want a real revolution in our regime and in our values.”
The most visible recent example came this week, when protesters massed outside two military bases to support soldiers who had been arrested on suspicion of torturing and sodomizing a Palestinian prisoner at Sde Teiman, a military jail.
Hundreds of protesters, including at least three far-right legislators from the ruling coalition and soldiers in uniform, gathered outside that jail and a second base where the men had been brought for interrogation. Dozens of protesters surged into both bases, brushing aside guards, while Ben-Gvir’s police forces arrived late and in small numbers.
Hours later, Netanyahu criticized the protests, but he also seemed to justify them, comparing them to the months of anti-government demonstrations against his effort to diminish the power of the judiciary and the Supreme Court in favor of parliament.
“State institutions are being challenged even by people in uniform,” said Natan Sachs, the Israeli American director of the Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings, a centrist research institution. “It’s a symptom of something very worrying, a challenge not just to the institutions but to the connective tissue of a society that has always been closely knit despite its fissures.”
“People are very much on edge,” said Shalom Lipner, a former prime ministerial aide from 1990 to 2016 and senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, also a centrist research institution. “And not just about how others look at Israel, but Israelis themselves are frightened about what this means for the country itself. If this is how we behave, how is this project sustainable?”
To be sure, while a sizable majority of Israelis want Netanyahu and his far-right coalition gone, a sizable majority also wants Hamas defeated and dismantled as the power in Gaza, to ensure that what happened on Oct. 7 can never happen again. There is widespread agreement that Israel must remain strong and has the right to attack its stated enemies.
But there is inevitable disagreement about the best way to attain a more lasting peace, with many fearing that an independent Palestinian state of the kind the Israeli elite had hoped to negotiate would be dominated by more extreme factions, like Hamas.
The revolt against the elites has been building for years. It was most visible in the proposed new law that would have diminished the power of the judiciary system and the Supreme Court in favor of parliament, which prompted nine months of street protests and highlighted the divisions in the country.
The Hamas attacks on Oct. 7 pulled the country together, even as they absorbed the shock of a massive failure of the intelligence services and the military, largely sacred institutions. But the long war has also pulled the country apart, with the far right trying to weaken key institutions and infiltrate them. Discipline in the army has also suffered.
And even as the army leadership tries to maintain its standards, Ben-Gvir and Smotrich label those who want to punish the abusers of Palestinian prisoners as traitors.
Although representing a minority, the two men have become the face of Israel to the world nearly as much as Netanyahu, his own image tainted by his political dependency on them and his toleration of their actions and excesses.
There has always been a tension between the rule of law and Israel’s security and counterterrorism operations, said Dahlia Scheindlin, an Israeli pollster and analyst.
“Israelis have become habituated to the idea that law is selective,” she said. “There are too many who are above the law, like the settlers, who are beyond the law, like the ultra-Orthodox and the security forces, and who are pushed out of the law, like the Palestinians and many Arab citizens of Israel, who are often under martial law.”
The protests at the military bases were the “closest I’ve ever experienced to state breakdown,” Scheindlin said, calling the internal divisions on display a victory for Hamas and Hezbollah.
There are many Israelis “who have no belief in diplomacy but think of Israeli security only in terms of preemption, intimidation and deterrence, and who think that they must always have the back of the military in the face of an implacable cruel enemy you’re always confronting,” said Bernard Avishai, an Israeli American analyst. “So anything you do to the enemy is justified.”
There were violent protests by settlers and the right against the army in 2005 over the forced withdrawal of Israelis from settlements in Gaza and the West Bank. But many Israelis point to a later controversial episode as the real turning point for the country.
In 2016, an Israeli soldier, Elor Azaria, killed an incapacitated Palestinian who had attacked an Israeli with a knife. Despite angry protests, he was convicted of manslaughter, but he served only half of his 18-month sentence. He was considered a hero by people on the right, while those on the left argued he deserved a harsher sentence.
Azaria has since supported soldiers accused of beating Palestinian prisoners and has been the target of sanctions imposed by the United States.
“After Azaria, the lines were drawn,” Avishai said. Settlers and those who favor force over diplomacy were mobilized against “the statists,” like the military chiefs and the current minister of defense, Yoav Gallant, “who feel that national morale is a function of the rule of law and that the army must observe international law,” he said.
The statist view is “disappearing under Netanyahu, and the cultural war is fundamental now,” he said. “A continuing war of attrition and preemption in Gaza and elsewhere is good for them politically.”
In the protests on Monday, he said, “for the first time you have violence between these two rival conceptions of Israel’s future.”
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