(Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, left, and National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir in Israel’s parliament last year. Credit…Abir Sultan/EPA, via Shutterstock)

Radical forces in Israeli society have moved from the fringes to the mainstream and put Israel’s democracy in peril. Here are the takeaways from our investigation.

For decades, most Israelis have considered Palestinian terrorism the country’s biggest security concern. But there is another threat that may be even more destabilizing for Israel’s future as a democracy: Jewish terrorism and violence, and the failure to enforce the law against it.

Our yearslong investigation reveals how violent factions within the Israeli settler movement, protected and sometimes abetted by the government, have come to pose a grave threat to Palestinians in the occupied territories and to the State of Israel itself. Piecing together new documents, videos and over 100 interviews, we found a government shaken by an internal war — burying reports it commissioned, neutering investigations it assigned and silencing whistle-blowers, some of them senior officials.

It is a blunt account, told in some cases for the first time by Israeli officials, of how the occupation came to threaten the integrity of the country’s democracy.

Settlers Pursuing a Theocratic State Have Become Lawmakers

Officials told us that once fringe, sometimes criminal groups of settlers bent on pursuing a theocratic state have been allowed for decades to operate with few restraints. Since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government came to power in 2022, elements of that faction have taken power — driving the country’s policies, including in the war in Gaza.

The lawbreakers have become the law.

Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister and the official in Netanyahu’s government with oversight over the West Bank, was arrested in 2005 by the Shin Bet domestic security service for plotting road blockages to halt the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. He was released with no charges. Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s national security minister, had been convicted multiple times for supporting terrorist organizations and, in front of television cameras in 1995, vaguely threatened the life of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was murdered weeks later by an Israeli student.

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To the question “Is she still relevant?” her Celebration Tour, which concluded this month, is proof that she is. Madonna performed before the largest audience ever gathered to watch a female artist and staged the single biggest free stand-alone concert in history: 1.6 million people turned Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana Beach into a dance floor on May 4. According to Billboard, her six-month, 80-show tour grossed $225.4 million, making her the only woman in history to gross more than $100 million during each of six concert tours. (The only solo male in that category is Bruce Springsteen.)

But there’s so much more to her triumph than numbers. That a 65-year-old female pop star pulled off this tour and, despite our increasingly intolerant times, the performance was her most relentlessly and delightfully queer since 1990’s groundbreaking Blond Ambition Tour would be unimaginable, except that it was Madonna. The Celebration Tour proved that Madonna wasn’t afraid of drawing attention to her long career; she owned it proudly.

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From dawn till dusk, and dusk till dawn, she toils within the confines of an unjust patriarchal framework as a grandmother, mother, sister, lover, girlfriend, wife, partner, professional, worker and relationships in any other name. When misfortune strikes or accountability evades a man’s actions, the burden of blame often unjustly falls upon her shoulders. This societal phenomenon perpetuates the cycle of inequality, relegating women to the role of scapegoats for the failings of a system that thrives on their oppression. Whether it’s a trivial mishap or a grave error, the default response is to point fingers at the woman rather than addressing the root cause of the issue. This ingrained behaviour reflects not only a systemic imbalance of power but also a deep-seated reluctance to confront the inherent flaws within the patriarchal social, economic, political, religious, cultural, and family structure itself.

It becomes evident that the scapegoating of women worldwide serves to uphold the status quo, enabling men to avoid responsibility and perpetuate their dominance over women both in public and private sphere. This pattern of domestication of women is deeply entrenched in societal norms and expectations, making it challenging to dismantle without concerted effort and awareness. Furthermore, the consequences of this blame-shifting extend beyond individual interactions, shaping broader cultural attitudes and reinforcing gender stereotypes.

Blaming a woman’s cooking skills for a man’s stomach upset, faulting her attire and lifestyle for instances of rape, or holding her responsible for a man’s diminished libido based on her dress—all these instances underscore a disturbing pattern of shifting blame onto women for the shortcomings and misdeeds of men in society. This reflexive inclination to attribute fault to women, regardless of the circumstances, reflects a deep-seated bias ingrained within patriarchal structures.

When familial bonds falter due to the irresponsible and unaccountable behaviours of lazy, irresponsible men, it’s often she who bears the brunt of the blame, despite her potential role as a victim of such behaviours. This societal norm not only perpetuates injustice but also absolves men of their responsibility to introspect and address their actions. While she works tirelessly to sustain the household and support her family, the ingrained societal norm is to hold her accountable for any perceived failures or inadequacies, regardless of her actual culpability. This systemic bias not only undermines her efforts but also perpetuates a cycle of exploitation, inequality, and injustice.

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(A woman stands with an Israeli flag during a two-minute siren in memory of victims of the Holocaust, in Jerusalem, May 6. (Ohad Zwigenberg/AP)

Yuval Noah Harari is the author of “Sapiens,” “Homo Deus” and “Unstoppable Us” and a professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

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In recent years, however, Israel has been ruled by governments that turned their back on the moderate forms of Zionism. In particular, the coalition government established by Netanyahu in December 2022 has categorically rejected the two-state solution and the Palestinian right to self-determination, and instead embraced a bigoted one-state vision.

Like the anti-Israel demonstrators around the world, the Netanyahu coalition believes in the slogan “from the river to the sea.” In its own words, the founding principle of the Netanyahu coalition is that “the Jewish people has an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of Eretz Yisrael” — Eretz Yisrael is a Hebrew term referring to the entire territory between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. The Netanyahu coalition envisions a single state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, which would grant full rights only to Jewish citizens, partial rights to a limited number of Palestinian citizens and neither citizenship nor any rights to millions of oppressed Palestinian subjects. This is not just a vision. To a large extent, this is already the reality on the ground.

Some people argue that the Netanyahu coalition’s extremism is the inevitable fruit of Zionism. Yet this is akin to arguing that patriotism inevitably leads to extremism, and that anyone who begins by displaying the national flag at home must end by fomenting hate and violence. Such historical determinism is empirically unfounded and politically dangerous, since it grants extremists a monopoly over people’s national feelings. Patriotism isn’t bigotry. Patriotism is a feeling of love for one’s compatriots, grounded in a deep connection to a national culture and its evolving traditions — which prompts citizens to take care of one another, for example, by paying taxes and financing welfare services. In contrast, bigotry is a feeling of hate for foreigners and minorities, grounded in the conviction that we are superior to them.

In the immediate Israeli context, failing to separate patriotism from bigotry plays into Netanyahu’s hands and implies that there is no political alternative to the Netanyahu coalition. If Israeli patriotism requires hatred and persecution of non-Jews, then Israeli patriots must go on voting for Netanyahu. Netanyahu himself has been arguing for years that Israeli patriots must support him, but Zionist opposition parties still have a chance to displace him and lead Israel in a more tolerant and peaceful direction.

There is a lot at stake here, not just for Israel, but for Jews all over the world. If Netanyahu and his political allies cement their hold over Israel, it would spell the end of the historical bond between the Jewish people and ideas of universal justice, human rights, democracy and humanism. Judaism would instead make a covenant with bigotry, discrimination and violence. Jews in London and New York might wish to argue that they have nothing to do with Israel, and that what happens in the Middle East doesn’t represent the true spirit of Judaism. But they would be in an analogous situation to British and American communists in the 20th century, who tried in vain to argue that what Joseph Stalin was doing in the Soviet Union wasn’t really communism.

The main problem for non-Zionist Jews is that, unlike Buddhism or Protestantism, Judaism is a collectivist rather than individualistic religion, and building the state of Israel has been the most important collective enterprise of the modern Jewish people. If Israel is conquered by bigotry, it would become the face of Judaism worldwide.

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