"Netanyahu is leading us into a civil war"

Israeli racism has blinded many to a truth they already spoke themselves

In recent years, as Israeli protests raged against Benjamin Netanyahu, corruption, and the erosion of the judiciary in order to have him cleared of that corruption, it was often lamented among Israelis, and some quarters of their and Western media, that Netanyahu was leading the country towards civil war.

War, for all its evil and its sin, at least has an honesty to it that is clarifying. The philosopher Carl von Clausewitz famously referred to war as “politics by other means”, and those words are certainly accurate to the current moment, as the Israelis returned yesterday to massacres in Gaza and the West Bank.

Benjamin Netanyahu has always by and large understood this relationship between war and politics, even if Israeli society— heavily propagandised and never the most perceptive— has not. Facing mounting unpopularity, and that same corruption scandal that briefly forced him from office, in 2021 Netanyahu escalated and escalated — in Jerusalem and in Gaza — with aggression after aggression until the war of May 2021 eventually gave him enough political theatre to distract from his own unpopularity and wrongdoing.

Though the Israelis then killed 256 Palestinians in Gaza, wounding and displacing thousands more, that war was not enough to prevent Netanyahu narrowly losing an election the following month, albeit to a volatile coalition that held for barely a year. Netanyahu duly returned in 2022, together with the more extreme, further-right, alliance of settlers and religious fanatics with which he now governs and wages increasing violence against Palestinians.

In some respects, this trajectory towards increasing violence — a cause and effect of constant electoral turbulence — is evidence of the unsuitability of the democratic model to the Israeli state in Palestine (certainly while that “democracy” excludes almost all non-Jews from voting). There is a good case to be made that the transactionalism and cheap promises that thrive in such a weak “democracy” leaves a system unsuited to a place so precariously-balanced, unjust, and brutal as Israeli society. The volatility of Israeli politics internally and Israeli violence externally are both inevitable consequences of this unsuitability between a reality and its system. That being said, it is important to stress also that this violence is not - it is right now impossible to deny— external.

Palestinians often remarked that, while its rallies were awash with the blue and white of Israeli flags, any pro-Palestinian protest, and Palestinian democratic expression, was all-but invisible, and even unwelcome, at those demonstrations that in recent years purported to save “Israeli democracy”.

Even if some Israelis at those protests might have harboured markedly less-hateful views of Palestinians than other Israelis, Palestinian presence at these protests themselves was generally regarded as a political liability; something that detracted from the patriotic veneer of the “Israeli democracy” people felt they were campaigning for. To these people and as always, Palestinians and their grievances—though actually far greater and more material than the Israeli ones— were in fact lesser than those who merely coveted their anyway-unearned “democracy” accolade, and so the Palestinians could wait at the door.

It is by this same insistence, whereby Israeli brains, long-corroded by racism, have learned to un-see the Palestinians they live beside, that Israeli centrists (“moderates” feels a term too far-fetched for a society so rooted in violent extremism) could fail to notice that they are now in the very civil war they recently prophecised, but do not in fact realise as much. In some respects the sprawl of labels — as Israelis and their Western narrators struggle to decide if they are in a war with Palestinians, or with Hamas, or with Gaza — is a confession of the Israeli failure to see clearly what is happening. The Israeli assumption is that right now is an intermission, and the “civil war” they spoke of metaphorically will come afterwards, when they take out their rage with Netanyahu at the ballot box, and “go to war” to “save” their institutions.

Just as the Israelis did not successfully perceive — or event want — Palestinians in their protests for democracy, nor do they envisage Palestinians in what they imagined their civil war to look like, because that term by definition presupposes that a war’s belligerents are of the same country; an equality that Zionism refuses.

The bleakly amusing irony then is that the Israelis are clearly, to all watching from outside, engaged in something that very obviously resembles everything that you would expect from a civil war. Meanwhile, the Israelis themselves, stuck inside the dystopia they have created, and with their heads conditioned by generations of racism, presume rather that this is just a conflict with Palestine, or with Hamas, or with Gaza. They presume that, with the tension of war released, this will be followed by some sort of banal contest of elections and judiciary and supreme court; to them the “civil war” is not conflict in which tens of thousands of lives are lost, but only a metaphor for a prosaic tussle between the institutions and civil society of a state.

You could reason that if the Israelis genuinely wanted to be a real country, rather than a colonial outpost practising extreme violence in some effort to restore some lost sense of Jewish self, they might even embrace the idea that this was indeed the formative moment of their state; the civil war out of which a country often begins. Alas, it seems not yet to be so, and so it goes, at risk of repetition, that the Israelis exist now in a civil war they cannot see, while presuming that after it will come a “civil war” that is in fact only a turn of phrase.

War is, once again, and for all its evil and its sin, honest. In the case of Palestine, it is currently declaring loudly the truth that many have long asserted: there is only one country between the River and the Sea. That country is quite clearly in a state of civil war, and from this war there must be built a real country, one that will work for all who live in it.