Netanyahu’s Challenge to Team Israel
Israel, the saying goes, is not a state with an army. Rather it is an army with a state.
The extraordinary influence and power that Israel’s security system—its military and intelligence institutions and associated political parties -- has exercised from the earliest days of the 20th century is now being challenged in a historic confrontation with a new coalition, long nurtured by the very political-security system it is now defying. This coalition is led by an embattled Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and an uneasy but so far disciplined mix of religious messianists and political delinquents who believe that Israel’s occupation and settlement throughout the West Bank is an act of divine redemption that Israel’s “deep state” is obstructing.
Israel’s military establishment and the political party – Labor -- established to reflect and represent its interests, has always played an outsized role in national security affairs. And it has also commanded the heights of the country’s political and even economic leadership.
Soldiers from Moshe Dayan to Yigal Alon, Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak tread a well-worn path from military to political service and leadership, establishing a solid and unified foundation that enabled Israel to defeat its enemies and achieve lasting political and security victories. This consensus, what one could well call “Team Israel” -- was responsible for many of Israel strategic achievements over the years.
But it also has to share unintended authorship of the revolution challenging its authority now exploding throughout the country.
Menachem Begin’s 1977 victory was the first major indication of the seismic political consequences of the Greater Israel project resulting from Israel’s June 1967 victory. The vested power and authority of the ruling Labor establishment were now being successfully challenged by Begin’s Likud Party--long excluded from political power –which, in league with a new generation of messianic “pioneers” of the “Bloc of the Faithful”, promised to advance the annexationist policies inaugurated with great if insufficient success by Labor.
This was an era of transition. Begin was the agent of a new political coalition allied with Moshe Dayan and Yigal Yadin, scions of the establishment that Israel’s rightwing was now undermining. A new generation of military leaders, notably Ariel Sharon, viewed the Begin’s Likud – and its ever-popular support for unbridled settlement of “Judea and Samaria” -- as a surer path to political power than the well-trod route once championed by Labor.
As yet there was no irreconcilable break with the past. To win Dayan’s support after his startling 1977 victory, Begin agreed not to formally annex the West Bank. Throughout the 1980s Team Israel collaborated with Israel’s annexationist right wing. The settlement of Judea and Samaria proceeded and grew – from 10,000 in 1977 to 100,000 on the eve of Oslo in 1992.
Rabin’s historic albeit tentative demarche towards the Palestinians aimed at establishing the foundations for Israel’s wide-ranging settlement and security interests in the West Bank, a policy considered untenable and indeed treasonous by his rightwing opponents. Their growing power was manifested by Rabin’s failure to evacuate settlers in Hebron after the Goldstein massacre of in 1994 and Rabin’s subsequent assassination by a perpetrator who today is lionized by the newly energized forces now contesting for power.
The stars of this new coalition feature personalities from the most extreme wing of the messianic Bloc of the Faithful, and a political hooligan whom the Israeli army itself found too radical to draft.
Bezalel Smotrich and Ben Gvir are the two public faces of this extraordinary transformation. Minister of finance Smotrich is a resident of Keddumim, a settlement affiliated with the messianic Bloc of the Faithful settlement movement established in the 1970s with the support of then defense minister Shimon Peres. He is a child of this worldview, which believes Israel is on the path to redemption paved by settlement and occupation and that Palestinians are obstructing the laws of Providence.
Itamar Ben Gvir comes from another strain of Israeli radicalism, this one symbolized by Meir Kahane and his accolade Baruch Goldstein, perpetrator of the Hebron massacre, whose portrait once graced his home.
Gvir’s Politics were so toxic that he was refused entry into the IDF at age 18 -- a foundational rite of passage for young Israeli men. The rejection of Ben Gvir once put him outside the circle of acceptable political behavior in Israel, and his recent appointment as security minister is an extraordinary example of how such behavior has been normalized. The presence of a figure such as Ben Gvir suggests that the inmates are indeed running the asylum that is Israel today.
This alienation from the IDF– the holy of holies in Israel’s national culture – and indeed from mainstream Israeli life itself -- is real evidence of the chasm now growing in Israel’s national life and the challenge that custodians of the old embattled order –centered in the security establishment -- now feel compelled to challenge.
Yet it is not at all surprising that the massive protests that have rocked Israel from almost a year have consciously refrained from challenging the very policies of occupation and settlement that are at the heart of the new coalition’s popularity and energy.
https://sites.google.com/view/israel-elephant-in-the-room/home
Indeed, opposition to policies of occupation and settlement have all but disappeared from Israel’s national political dialogue -- the lasting, troubled legacy of Team Israel.
As a consequence, the current public campaign against Netanyahu’s policies towards is tempered, and it can be argued, undermined by a fear of antagonizing the numerous de facto annexationists in its own ranks.
Netanyahu’s opponents are mistaken if they continue to believe in a deluxe occupation – that’s is, one that gives free rein to settlements and the prerogatives of occupation without empowering those forces in Israel who are determined to destroy the ruling institutions that are the last obstacles to its wide ranging political, cultural, and security agenda.
Given the extraordinary power historically wielded by the security establishment, it is little wonder that the major and most effective opposition to these developments is coming from leading members of the deep state – Israel’s security establishment – the heart and soul of the old order now being challenged.
The power of the security establishment and its central role in Israel’s national life is being challenged to be sure. Like the masses of Israelis who have protested for months across the country, it is far from conceding defeat.
And it still retains considerable power. Witness the stillborn firing of minister of defense Yoav Gallant, a former chief of staff of the IDF last spring. Netanyahu, to the dismay of his radical allies, is still not prepared to break completely with the military, even when they issue public manifestos against him. Gallant’s reprieve postponed, but certainly did not resolve, the day of reckoning.
Consider as well the recent observations of former Mossad director Tamar Prado. He has called for Netanyahu to resign and stand trial on charges of engaging in a coup, and accused the Israeli government of overseeing an apartheid state in the occupied territories.
Tamar’s apartheid charge is especially noteworthy, given the reluctance of protesters to add the occupation of the West Bank to Netanyahu’s list of faults. The charge of apartheid by one of its primary institutional parents reveals the extraordinary depth of concern among those committed to Team Israel.
This growing circle of protests and declarations by military leaders, current and former, attest to the revolutionary stakes of the contest now being played out in every Israeli venue.
When advised that a military leader warned that protesting reserve pilots were “worsening damage to the army’s readiness,”
Netanyahu reportedly replied, “It looks like the army is running the country.”
Israel has long been an army with a state. Yet if the likes of Smotrich, Ben Gvir and, it appears, Netanyahu himself have anything to say about it, the days of Team Israel are numbered.
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