Is Israel Veering Towards Civil War? (Dina Kraft- March 24, 2025)

Dina Kraft is a journalist, podcaster and the co-author of the New York Times bestseller, My Friend Anne Frank, together with Hannah Pick-Goslar. She lives in Tel Aviv where she's the Israel Correspondent of  The Christian Science Monitor and a creator of the podcast Groundwork, about activists working in Israel and Palestine. She was formerly the opinion editor of Haaretz English.

So much is happening these days. Sometimes it’s the snapshots that say the most.

A Jerusalem sky heavy with storm clouds looming over a group of anti-government protesters opposed to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to fire Ronen Bar, head of the Shin Bet. It’s another anti-democratic step they say in the government’s slide towards autocracy.  Israeli flags flap in the wind. In the foreground an older man in a black wool hat is being shoved by five border police.

A leaked quote: “Yesterday you accused me of treason. Today you are threatening to send me to jail. Tomorrow you will execute me,” Bar reportedly told government ministers, according to a Channel 12 report.

A tweet by Netanyahu liked by Elon Musk: “In America and in Israel, when a strong right-wing leader wins an election, the leftist Deep State weaponizes the justice system to thwart the people’s will. They won’t win in either place! We stand strong together.”

A text from my daughter while babysitting for our neighbors’ young children upstairs: “If there’s an azaka (Hebrew for air-raid siren) can one of you come help bring them down to the shelter?”

In the last week Israel resumed fighting with Hamas in Gaza, in a surprise air assault that has killed and wounded hundreds, shattering 42 days of a cease-fire, the beginning of relief in Gaza, the emotional return of some of the hostages to Israel. 

And if war resuming was not enough, the some 70 percent of Israelis who don’t support the government felt the gut punch of a resumption of its plan to overhaul the judiciary (code opponents say for a power grab to weaken the courts) and attempts to fire not just Bar but the attorney general too, accusing Gali Baharav-Miara of blocking its agenda.

Tens of thousands of protesters have been packing the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv for the past seven days straight, mass demonstrations of the likes not seen since before the war. On Saturday night in Tel Aviv over 100,000 marched through the streets.  They are back to chanting not just “Why are they still in Gaza?” referring to the remaining hostages and demanding a truce and a deal for all of them to be released from the Hamas tunnels under the rubble of Gaza, but also to chanting “Democracy! Democracy.”

Netanyahu appears indifferent to the sounds of protesters literally outside his home, on Gaza Street (yes, Gaza Street) near the official prime minister’s residence in Jerusalem. He is laser focused instead on pleasing the 68 members of his government, ensuring they will vote for the state budget Tuesday. Shoring up that solid government majority has meant assuring the ultra-Orthodox they will continue to be exempt from being conscripted into the army. It’s also featured welcoming back far-right Itamar Ben-Gvir to his job as national security minister along with his party back into the government.

Amid the government’s latest moves and the deep fracture they are creating – and at wartime no less – and the spiking police violence against demonstrators, former Supreme Court president Aharon Barak said he fears the country could be being pushed towards civil war.

Noting “the severe rift between Israelis and themselves,” he told Yediot Ahronot, the Israeli daily. “This rift is deteriorating and in the end, I fear, it will be like a train that goes off the tracks and plunges into a chasm causing a civil war.”

Shmuel Rosner, a political analyst and senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute, says of potential civil war, “We need to define it before we can say if [it is] close or remote. If we are talking about people putting up barricades in streets or taking out pistols, I don’t think we are close to that.”

One of the potential dangers is people regarding the police as Ben-Gvir’s militia rather than the government body intended to also protect them, he notes.

Those warning of civil war, Barak among them, are “not alarmists, but are raising the flag early… It’s important to say we [Israelis] are not that unique to assume that no such thing can happen in Israel,” he adds. 

As a measure of the growing sense of lawlessness, and the fear and uncertainty that accompany this moment, I offer another snapshot. This one from Monday evening. A post on Bluesky, a social media network, from Yuval Abraham, the Israeli co-director of the Oscar-winning documentary “No Other Land.”

It reads: “A group of settlers just lynched Hamdan Ballal, co-director of our film ‘No Other Land’. They beat him and he has injuries in his head and stomach, bleeding. Soldiers invaded the ambulance he called, and took him. No sign of him since.”