At a time when Israel appears to be in a geopolitical expansion in the region and the world with its involvement in political, military and security alliances and agreements, its internal reality does not correspond to that.
In recent months, Israel has witnessed a steady increase in the issuance of warnings of the exacerbation of the dangers facing it, and it was remarkable to recall historical events centuries ago, in which it witnessed the fall of the Jewish "kingdoms" at the time, and to warn against its recurrence.
Prior to these statements, in May 2021, a book was published by the Israeli writer, Aryeh Shavit, entitled “A Third House: From People to Tribes to People,” in which he analyzes the failures of Israel during more than seventy years of its establishment, and discusses the most important threat I exist for it, which is to confront internal conflicts and disputes, and how to re-gather Israel on one vision, given that it is the last chance for the Jewish people (1).
The paper examines the reason for calling this discourse - about collapse and demise - in Israel recently to warn of the end of the "state", which came on the tongues of many of its leaders, and what this means, especially at this time when several threats against Israel converged at the same time, And at a time when the internal division of the state has reached an advanced stage, without repeated elections being able to resolve or end it, and may even have exacerbated it.
Warnings and concerns
In a similar period of time, the Israeli media was filled with a number of warnings issued by the most prominent leaders of the state, from various levels: political, military and journalistic, and they agreed that they are experiencing decisive moments, and are about to reach the same fate as previous Jewish states.
Resigned Prime Minister Naftali Bennett (right) and Defense Minister Benny Gantz (European)
The resigned Prime Minister, Naftali Bennett, assured the Israelis, “The state stands before a real test and a historical crossroads: either the continuation of work, or a return to chaos, because it is witnessing today an unprecedented situation that is close to collapse, and once again we are all facing a fateful moment. Israel has disintegrated twice in The former is due to internal conflicts, the first when she was 77 years old, the second 80 years old, and we are now living in our third era, and as it approaches the eighth decade, Israel is reaching one of the most difficult moments of decadence it has ever known” (2).
Bennett’s speech came on June 3, 2022, through a 27-page appeal he addressed to the Israeli society on the occasion of the one-year anniversary of the formation of his government, warning that the state faces the risk of collapse and collapse due to the lack of harmony between its components on the one hand, and on the other hand due to the efforts of the right-wing opposition to bring down the government. .
Defense Minister Benny Gantz warned that "there is concern about the future of Israel due to its loss of sovereignty in the Negev and the Galilee, and the possibility of losing them in the end, due to the growing demographic weight of the Palestinians, and their manifestations of their attachment to the national identity, and that it may shrink geographically to extend only between the cities of Hadera, south of Haifa, and Ghadera." south of Tel Aviv" (3).
Gantz's warning came in a closed session, in early May 2022, to the parliamentary bloc of his "Blue and White" party, reinforcing the prevailing fears among Israeli decision makers of what they consider the demographic threat, due to the gradual increase in the number of Palestinians 48, according to the Israeli Bureau of Statistics, which revealed that their number reached 2 million as of May 2022, which is more than a fifth of Israel's population of 9 million (4).
Also, these Palestinians inside Israel still retain their national identity, which was demonstrated by the May 2021 uprising coinciding with the events of Al-Aqsa Mosque, Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood and the Gaza war, when large-scale clashes erupted between Palestinians and Jews in a number of Palestinian Arab cities, the most important of which were the cities of Lod and Acre. , prompting the Israeli police and army to conduct an exercise in May 2022 that simulates similar confrontations in the future (5).
Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak expressed in a newspaper article his fears of the imminent demise of Israel before the 80th anniversary of its founding (Reuters)
In a newspaper article, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak expressed his fears of the imminent demise of Israel before the 80th anniversary of its founding, citing "Jewish history, which states that the Jews have not been in a state for more than 80 years except in two exceptional periods, the period of King David and the period of The Hasmonean, and both periods were the beginning of their disintegration in the eighth decade, and the experience of the current Hebrew Zionist state is the third, about to enter its eighth decade, and I fear that his curse will descend upon it as it did in the previous one, because the storm is possessing us, and the blatant disregard for the warnings of the Talmud” (6).
According to Jewish beliefs, their first kingdom was established between 586-516 BC, and the Hasmonean era lasted between 140-37 BC, and therefore Israel's transcendence of the eighth decade seems to contradict the tradition of Jewish history.
In the same article, Barak recalled examples from the peoples of the world who were afflicted by the “eighth decade curse”;
The United States erupted in a civil war in the eighth decade, and Italy turned into a fascist state during it, and Germany became a Nazi state, which caused its defeat and division, and in the eighth decade of the communist revolution, the Soviet Union disintegrated and collapsed.
As for Tamir Pardo, the former head of the Mossad, he stressed in a lecture at Netanya College that “while there has been much talk about the great threats that hover over Israel, the greatest threat is represented by us, the Israelis, with the emergence of the self-destruction mechanism that has been perfected in recent years, just like The days of the destruction of the Second Temple, which requires us to stop this catastrophic path before the point of no return, because Israel is self-destructive. It is true that it is rich and affordable, but it is torn and bleeding, and the dangers do not pass, and after a while the self-annihilation mechanism of mutual hatred will work” (7).
Benjamin Netanyahu
As for the former Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, he preceded all of these, saying in 2017: “I will strive to make Israel reach its 100th birthday, because the question of our existence is not implicitly understood, nor is it self-evident. History teaches us that no state has been built for the Jewish people for more than 80 years.” (8).
These statements and warnings combine one common denominator: the fear of Israel’s fall, its collapse, and its failure to reach its 80th year, whether for internal internal reasons related to the lack of harmony between its components, its poor government performance, the possibility of the decline of the Jewish majority in the country, or external factors related to the growing security risks and military threats that surrounds the country from all sides.
The Israeli political arena has not experienced such warnings for decades, but its prevailing pattern has been characterized by praising the state’s strength, immunity, immunity, and its ability to overcome its internal and external problems, which raises question marks about its issuance, successively, by various political and military circles, simultaneously, and the nature of its motives. .
These statements issued by the leaders of the state have met with a wide echo among the Israelis, especially in the press and media circles, and some of them expressed their support for these fears, and even went far in explaining them, and trying to explain them, until the writer, Yigal Ben-Nun, went to say: “More of the The Israelis are showing signs of anxiety indicating despair, and many of them are applying for foreign citizenship, out of concern for the future of their children, because some of them say out loud: that Israel will not exist for a long time, and that its establishment from the ground up was a failed adventure, and therefore they live in a pessimistic situation, and they are urging themselves and others to flee before disaster strikes” (9).
inner fears
With the entry of Ariel Sharon, the "King of the Kings of Israel" into his last coma, in late 2005, Shimon Peres, who died in 2016, soon followed him. From then on, Israeli talk began about the end of the era of the first founders.
(European)
The Israelis’ warnings of a bleak future awaiting their state coincided with the dilemma they have been discussing for nearly two decades, called “the absence of the founding generation.” Shimon Peres, who died in 2016, soon followed, and since then Israeli talk about the end of the era of the first founders began.
The list begins and does not end with a list of the most important founders of the state, such as: David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Dayan, Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Shamir, who placed the interests of the state as a high priority.
And those who came after them from the second generation who “did not pay in the capital” and did not witness its foundational wars, to make his stay in power an exclusive priority, even if it was at the expense of the state, and during their reign corruption, bribery and nepotism spread, such as Ehud Barak, Ehud Olmert, Benjamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman and Naftali Bennett.
Although the period that followed Sharon’s absence witnessed a state of deterioration and deterioration in the system of government in Israel, Olmert succeeded him as prime minister, and soon faced accusations of corruption, for which he spent a year and a half in prison in 2016, after being convicted of receiving bribes when he headed the Jerusalem municipality between 1993-2003(10).
He was followed by Netanyahu, who spent twelve consecutive years in power, between 2009-2021, marked by many political and military failures;
He fought four wars on Gaza in 2008, 2012, 2014, and 2021, without succeeding in eliminating the Palestinian resistance. During his reign, the latter bombed the city of Jerusalem in the last two wars, and Iran approached the borders of Israel, and is on the verge of acquiring a nuclear weapon.
A poll by the Israeli “Fannels Politics” institute in 2017, revealed that the majority of Israelis, by 60%, believe in Netanyahu’s corruption (11), and despite this, he has been the sole leader of the state throughout this period.
In addition to these political and military failures, a poll by the Israeli “Fannels Politics” Institute in 2017, revealed that the majority of Israelis, by 60%, believe in Netanyahu’s corruption. (11) Despite this, he has been the sole leader of the state throughout this period, and has surpassed Ben Gurion in the number of years in power. And breaking the record for the longest tenure of an Israeli prime minister, reaching 13 years, or 19% of Israel's history (12).
It is worth noting that the fall of Netanyahu, in June 2021, was at the hands of an eight-party coalition, which formed a government headed by Naftali Bennett with a slim majority of 61 Knesset seats out of 120, and the coalition was distributed among 19 members from the right, 13 from the left and 25 from the center. and 4 Arab deputies (13).
The second fear
The beginnings of its use in this way go back to the assassination of the late Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, in November 1995, by a right-wing activist, and since that time no Israeli government has lived its legal period of four years;
Shimon Peres took over the transitional government from Rabin's assassination until his loss in the March 1996 elections, and after Netanyahu won the elections, he remained prime minister until 1999, then elections were held in which Ehud Barak won and became prime minister until 2001, until Ariel Sharon took his first government until 2003, then headed his second government until 2005, and when he entered his last coma, he led the government, Ehud Olmert, until 2009, and since that time Netanyahu led the political scene until 2021, until Naftali Bennett came and headed his government for one year, when he resigned at the end of June 2022, This is the shortest period in the history of Israeli governments (15).
Thus, the political and partisan arena appeared in a state of slack, confusion and unprecedented deterioration, and witnessed an escalation in talk about the dangers of division and civil war, and witnessed the arrival of threatening messages to the family of the resigned Prime Minister, Bennett, with an envelope and bullets inside, in a reminder of what happened to the Rabin era (16) ).
Returning to the internal division and its causes that led the Israeli political life to stagnation and obstruction, perhaps one of the most important reasons is the inability of any of the successive governments for a quarter of a century to create a state of harmony between its various components, as well as a vision of unifying it, as the number of coalition parties in each government has increased. After the governments of the first four decades were limited to a limited number of coalition parties, however, recent years have witnessed a proliferation of government coalition parties whose orientations and ideologies differed, and none of them lasted for four whole years.
The Israeli governmental political crisis reached its climax in 2019;
The country witnessed four early electoral rounds, because none of the winning parties after each round did not get 61 Knesset members, making them able to form a government, even with a slim majority.
The elections took place in April 2019, then in September 2019, and after that in March 2020, as well as in March 2021, and Israel will witness new fifth elections in November 2022 (17).
This path shows the fragmentation of the Israeli political community;
The disputes are no longer confined to the dispute between Labor and Likud only, or between the right and the left. Rather, the matter has worsened and expanded to include differences between the right and the extreme right, between religious and secular people, between Easterners and Westerners, between Arabs and Jews, as well as the division over the relationship of religion and the state.
External concerns
The warnings were not limited to Israeli decision makers, but were preceded by the most famous strategic expert in Israel, Professor Yehezekiel Dror, member of the “Vinograd” Committee to investigate the Second Lebanon War, and a former adviser to the Ministry of Defense, who published in 2009 a book entitled “Israel’s Security and Political Orientations,” He spoke about the expected bad scenarios for Israel and the dangers surrounding it, and raised question marks about the future of the state.
Among the external dangers that Dror assumed would occur are the outbreak of a devastating war with Hezbollah, the simultaneous implementation of multiple missile attacks towards Israel, its exposure to chemical and biological attacks, the emergence of powerful armed militias that threaten it, and its exposure to a fierce information attack that disrupts its information systems, and the growing calls to establish One country for two peoples
Dror’s warnings indicate that the fear for Israel of external dangers is on the rise instead of declining, specifically in recent years, and is caused by the fear of the performance of the political and military levels together, which is the first fear, and is confirmed by the successive operational and combat failures, taking into account the difference between two stages;
A stage that includes the first four decades in which Israel witnessed military "achievements", especially the wars of 1948, 1956, 1967, 1982, against the Palestinians and Arabs, and included the occupation of Palestinian and Arab lands in a few days.
In contrast, what happened in the last three decades of military setbacks and operational failures, one after the other.
These failures were represented in the outbreak of the two Palestinian intifadas, 1987 and 2000, the withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000, and its recurrence from the Gaza Strip in 2005, leading to the setbacks of the Second Lebanon War in 2006, and ending with the last four wars in Gaza:
These failures prompted General Yitzhak Brik, the former commissioner of soldiers’ complaints and commander of military colleges, to assert in an “anatomical” article about the army’s most prominent problems, that “despite its accumulated military equipment, and its non-stop preparations for fighting confrontations on more than one front, a disaster awaits it.” In light of the decline in the public’s confidence in its operational capabilities, the low level of its human capital, and the inability of military technology to compensate for the decline in the combat capabilities of its soldiers, which helped spread the state of frustration that is spreading and expanding within the corridors of the army, in conjunction with the threats facing Israel”(19) ).
While the Israel Democracy Institute revealed, in its poll, the results of which were published in October 2021, that the decline in Israelis’ confidence in their army reached the lowest percentage since 2008 and reached 78% (20).
The second fear
in this context is the return and continuation of the "Palestinian resistance";
Where the Israelis believed that they got rid of the Palestinian resistance once and for all, after the Israeli army, in 1982, invaded Beirut in the First Lebanon War, and got rid of the threat of the Palestine Liberation Organization after a bloody fight that lasted for several months, especially since the latter was targeting the settlements Northern Katyusha.
Today, the same army, after four decades, sees the Palestinian resistance in Gaza slowly transforming from cells and "gangs" into a semi-regular army, bombing the Israeli home front with rockets and missiles, and imposing a "curfew."
The third fear
It is concentrated in the northern front;
Where the Israelis feel more pressure and anxiety, although their army destroyed Lebanon from one end to the other during the second war in 2006, and restrained Hezbollah from firing missiles towards the northern settlements for sixteen years, but the latter has accumulated its strength, and it has - as Israel believes - A project of precision missiles that threatens its entire internal front, from Eilat to Ras al-Naqoura, and expects that it will use all its missile arsenal against it in the event of any further war between the two sides, especially since its causes are increasing, and may include Lebanon and Syria together this time (22).
To this same front were added other dangers;
After the Israeli-Syrian border has experienced calmness for more than four decades since the ceasefire after the October 1973 war, the Syrian crisis since 2011 has caused a renewed security threat from the Golan, through armed groups affiliated with Iran, and has become a source of threat to Israel ;
Which means the emergence of a war front that was not considered by the military establishment before (23).
The fourth fear
is from the eastern front, specifically from Iran;
As Israel fears that Tehran will enter the nuclear club and possess the bomb, which has increased the dose of pessimistic Israeli warnings against targeting the state in its existence, especially since the Israeli classification of the Iranian threat reaches the “existential” level;
Because it is not related to air missiles or land invasions, but rather to nuclear threats capable of eliminating the state, and in this context the term “annihilation” was recalled, and what happened in the “Holocaust” during World War II (24).
When talking about the Iranian threat, the Israelis remember what their first leaders did against similar nuclear projects, although their threat was much less than it is today with Iran. Menachem Begin, the late prime minister, destroyed the Iraqi Tammuz reactor in 1981, and Olmert did not hesitate to attack Deir Al-Zour Al-Syrian in 2007(25).
Today, questions are being asked in Israel as to why governments and the army did not abort the Iranian nuclear project from its very beginnings.
Even the sure time that Israel resolved to attack Iran in 2010 did not succeed, because its politicians, Netanyahu and Barak, were unable to persuade its military to attack (especially the army chief, Gabi Ashkenazi, the head of the Mossad, Meir Dagan, the Shin Bet, Yuval Diskin, and Military Intelligence, Amos). Yadlin)(26), and the result facing the Israelis today, according to the statements of their leaders, is that Iran is a few weeks or months away from acquiring the bomb, due to “hesitation, helplessness and fear.”
The fifth fear
is political, the most prominent, and is represented by the failure to reach a final solution to the conflict with the Palestinians, which requires the Israelis to pay the price of withdrawing from Palestinian lands, and is the subject of Israeli division, which prompted Israel to the theory of “conflict management, not its solution,” and this resulted in the continuation of "The bleeding wound in the Israeli flank" without end.
It should be noted that, during the signing of the 1993 Oslo Accords, Rabin and Peres tried to turn the page on the conflict with the Palestinians, through the two-state solution, but the Israeli right decided to “liquidate” this solution by “liquidating” Rabin physically in 1995, and since that time the Palestinian cause has entered the gate of freezing, and the gate has not been frozen. Any prime minister would dare, or did not even want, to pay the price of ending the conflict with the Palestinians, especially with the possibility of losing party seats in the right-wing camp (27).
Signing of the Oslo Accords
The irony is that the Israelis, despite their refusal to pay the entitlements of the two-state solution with the Palestinians, they fear that a more difficult solution will be achieved for them, which is the bi-national one-state solution, which practically means, as they see it, the end of the “Zionist” project and the elimination of the dream of the Jewish state, because the establishment of one state. For all its citizens” and not only for the Jews in all of historical Palestine, the Palestinians in it will be the numerical majority (28).
As for the sixth fear,
it is about losing the support and sponsorship of the American ally for Israel in the region, especially after its relative decline recently, especially after the two terms of former President Barack Obama, between 2008-2016, and the consequent decline in support for Israel among the Democratic Party and steadily (29), An opinion poll conducted by the American University of Maryland showed that less than 1% of supporters of the American Democratic Party see Israel as one of the largest allies of the United States, and only 0.5% of them consider it the closest ally (30).
On a related issue, the value of Israel declined among the Diaspora’s Jews, particularly those residing in the United States, which ignited red lights in Tel Aviv and prompted it to try to rectify the damage caused by its relations with them due to the decline in Israel’s priority to them, and considering the United States their first and last homeland after they received Israel in previous years has been treated as second-class, and they are annoyed at seeing them only as a source of financial support and Jewish immigration (31).
Reflections and meanings
Repeating such words and discourses on the tongues of Israeli decision makers on a frequent basis increases the Israeli concern about the realization of this fate that is being warned about, and will push governments to allocate the largest part of their policies to internal issues, in order to repair the faults that have befallen the state at the expense of paying attention to external risks.
This focus will steadily increase in conjunction with the continuation of the political and constitutional crisis in Israel, which has led to the resignation of Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, the assumption of his deputy, Yair Lapid, the reins of government, and the announcement of the organization of the fifth elections in November 2022. This does not necessarily mean closing This crisis is over, because the majority of Israeli opinion polls conducted in recent days do not give any of the winning parties in the upcoming elections the ability to provide 61 Knesset members to form a parliamentary safety net that any government needs (32).
This means the continuation of the internal political stalemate and the failure to form a stable government with a strong parliamentary majority, to put on its agenda confronting external threats and not satisfying a party here or a Knesset member there;
This means that instability continues, as it has in recent years.
When talking about the repercussions of this discourse towards foreign fears, the state of uncertainty about the possibility of one of the possible confrontations erupting in any of the fronts surrounding Israel, makes them more tense and anxious, and less reassured about the state's ability to confront these dangers, both because of its lack of time and focus on the outside. internally, or because of the state of discrepancy between the political, security and military decision-making components, towards dealing with each external threat separately.
At the same time, it is difficult to consider these repeated statements and warnings as an internal affair, because external parties, enemies and friends among them, are following this new discourse on Israel.
The enemies consider it to be an enhancement of their estimations or perhaps their “predictions” of metaphysical religious dimensions that they embrace, and it will push them to increase their confrontation with Israel and pressure it more to hasten this fate. In this way, these forces will seek to increase their military capabilities and weapons capabilities, and the initiative to engage in combat confrontations that drain Israel.
As for Israel's friends, they will see the speech as a source of concern, even though they consider it a major regional power in the region. Therefore, the issuance of these fears and from within Israel over its fate and future raises questions about the validity of relying on it.
Noting that the Israeli discourse of fear over fate coincides with the increase in the rates of Arab-Israeli normalization, in terms of the continuation of mutual visits and the signing of agreements in various fields, in addition to the frequent talk about the imminent establishment of a regional security alliance that includes Israel and a number of Arab countries in the region. 33).
From this perspective, it is not excluded that the movement that Israel is making regionally to try to integrate itself into the region’s systems may come in an attempt to reduce the losses resulting from these fears expressed by its leaders, and to restore the broken image that resulted from the growing and succession of warnings and warnings of what may await it in the the future.
Conclusion
It is not expected that these Israeli warnings will stop as long as the conditions that prompted its emergence to the surface still exist, both internally and externally. Rather, they may increase with the passage of time, especially if the Israeli division remains vertical and vertical, on the one hand, and the threats of hostile forces against Israel increase, on the other.
It is difficult to conclude that Israel goes to this discourse voluntarily, that is, it talks about its fears out of an intellectual luxury or a purely cultural debate. Rather, the motive to raise such existential questions stems from real subjective fears, which feel that there is an imminent danger to the state, which may cause by its collapse.
This means that Israel may have entered a phase of aspiration to protect its survival at best, and work to migrate what it sees as the reasons for its annihilation, which may delay its aspiration for further regional and international expansion.
Undoubtedly, the reinforcement of these fears pushes Israel to remain in a state of permanent military alert, whether in preparation for the next battle, or to wage this battle, and to give each confrontation the character of an “existential battle”, a desire on the part of the state to mobilize all Israeli components behind the army, on the one hand, On the other hand, postponing the internal disputes that may confuse the Israeli arena and distract it from the external battle.
The last note here is that the warnings and fears of the collapse of the state are issued by leadership elites from the first row - and go beyond the game of political polarization and partisan bidding - which confirms their seriousness and the seriousness of their owners, and lends credibility to fears of the possibility of the state falling into the trap of internal war.