There are two ways to say “civil war” in Hebrew. The more accurate and technical translation of the term is milchemet ezrachim – a war of civilians or citizens. The other term, a more literal one, is milchemet achim – a war of brothers. That’s the one Israeli leaders have used in the past to warn of a possible civil war.
Menachem Begin famously said twice “there will not be a war of brothers”: once in November 1944, when the Haganah (pre-independence Jewish army) turned members of his Irgun underground militia over to the British Mandate police. And then again in June 1948, when the Irgun’s Altalena ship – which was carrying weapons and volunteers from Europe – was fired upon and destroyed by the Israel Defense Forces off the coast of Tel Aviv. This was due to David Ben-Gurion’s suspicion that they were part of an Irgun plan to carry out a military coup.
That moment, less than six weeks after Israel’s establishment, was the closest the country has ever come to civil war. On the night after the Altalena’s sinking, Begin broadcast on the Irgun’s radio channel: “We will not open fire. There will not be a war of brothers while the enemy is at the gate.” Begin refused the urgings of some of his fellow Irgun commanders to fight the government with arms. The Irgun accepted his orders, laid down its weapons and Begin, as leader of Herut and then Likud, went on to fight and lose eight elections, until winning and becoming prime minister 29 years later.
This week, it was the turn of Benny Gantz – until two weeks ago defense minister and now just the leader of another opposition party – to warn Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that if he went ahead with his government’s plan to eviscerate the Supreme Court, effectively ending Israeli democracy, “the responsibility for a war of brothers will rest with you.”
This is the bland and mild-mannered Benny Gantz who, nine days earlier, had admonished his opposition colleagues for heckling Netanyahu’s inaugural speech. Justice Minister Yariv Levin’s plan to overhaul the judicial system made him change his tune very quickly.
Since the sinking of the Altalena, there have been tense moments when armed groups sought to challenge the state’s authority, but it still didn’t come even close to civil war. There were stirrings of armed insurrection in nearly every decade of Israel’s existence. In the 1940s, it was the Altalena. In the ’50s there was Brith Kanaim (Covenant of Zealots), a religious underground that plotted to overthrow the secular government. There were also the riots against the Reparations Agreement with West Germany – led by Begin, who forgot for a moment his commitment to democracy and nearly stormed the Knesset.
Over a decade later, in 1967, a group of generals discussed taking over if Prime Minister Levi Eshkol wouldn’t give the order to launch a preemptive strike on Egypt. In the ’70s and ’80s, there was the settlers’ “Jewish underground” that carried out terror attacks against Palestinians and plotted to blow up the mosques on Temple Mount in the hope of derailing the pullback from Sinai, which was a condition of the peace agreement with Egypt.
There were yet more attacks by the far right in the ’90s to prevent the Oslo Accords – first murdering Palestinians and then an Israeli prime minister.
Each time, there were warnings of a war of brothers. But at no point since the sinking of the Altalena was Israel actually close to civil war. Not even after Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination in 1995.
When I heard Gantz’s warning this week, I remembered the last time I heard similar talk in Israel. It was in the months leading up to the disengagement from the Gaza Strip and the settlements of northern Samaria in the summer of 2005.
“It just won’t happen, the nation won’t let it happen,” was what you heard wherever you went in the settlements and during the anti-government protests at the time. Most left it at that: an amorphous promise that Ariel Sharon’s plan, supported by a majority of Israelis, would somehow be defeated.
There was those who went into more detail: dark mutterings of atrocities against Palestinians that would cause another intifada; a mass revolt in the IDF; sabotage of infrastructure that would see the country grind to a halt.
Some of that did happen. There were a couple of vigilante murders of Palestinians in the West Bank, a few dozen soldiers did refuse to carry out orders and some roads within Israel were blocked. One then-unknown activist, who is today Israel’s finance minister, was arrested on suspicion of planning arson attacks, but he was never indicted.
Ultimately, though, nothing came remotely close to an actual insurrection. Most of the settlers left either of their own accord or allowed themselves to be dragged from their homes. In the few locations where they actively resisted, it consisted mainly of paint-throwing and was over within a few hours.
I supported the disengagement, but can recognize that for the settlers and their supporters, it represented a terrible personal and ideological calamity, every bit as tragic as the one now facing Israelis who are convinced – rightly, in my opinion – that if the Levin plan is implemented in full, it will mean the end of Israeli democracy as we know it.
And I’m convinced that just like in the previous instances, we won’t come anywhere near civil war.
That is not because of our historic notions of “a war of brothers” being unthinkable. It has happened to other nations and it has happened repeatedly in Jewish history – as recently as 2,000 years ago. But for a civil war, you need a sufficiently powerful and sufficiently large group of people or party to take the risk of launching an armed uprising. Israel doesn’t have that.
The IDF’s tradition of obeying orders from the elected politicians is still strong and, anyway, both conceivable sides in a civil war are well represented throughout its ranks so it is hard to imagine the army taking sides.
Who else is there? The police are a disorganized rabble at the best of times, and the number of truly ideologically motivated settlers willing to risk something like that are small. They can bully their Palestinian neighbors, but a full-blown revolt is beyond them.
The pro-democracy forces in Israeli society will go on protest marches, but don’t have the stomach for anything more than some gentle tussling with the police. They have too much to lose.
The violent protests of the ultra-Orthodox community, like we saw during the COVID pandemic, are always rather amateurish and mainly symbolic.
Israeli Arabs certainly won’t go to war for a democracy that treats them at best as second-class citizens. Even in the rare cases where they have rioted in solidarity with their Palestinian siblings in the West Bank and Jerusalem, as happened in October 2000 and May 2021, these were always short-lived and limited outbursts of violence. They also have too much to lose.
And that’s the bottom line. For all Israel’s problems, life here is still too good, for all of Israeli communities, to risk a civil war. Losing what is left of Israel’s fragile and limited democracy will be a terrible blow for many, perhaps even most, Israelis – but it won’t be worth going to actual war for.
The overwhelming majority of Israelis will feel that they still stand to lose more than just their democracy. Especially since there’s no way of winning such a war.
Perhaps that equation will change in a post-democratic Israel in another generation – perhaps when another religious-nationalist government goes much further than the current one and threatens the way of life of secular Israelis. But at this point, losing the Supreme Court won’t make life harder for secular middle-class Israelis in any direct or immediate way. The most those Israelis will do for now, if the shaking pillars of democracy are toppled, is to disengage and continue enjoying life in the Tel Aviv bubble. Many will simply emigrate.
Benny Gantz is right. If there’s a civil war, a war of brothers, in Israel, it will largely be Netanyahu’s responsibility. But unless they live to 120, neither of them will probably be around when it finally happens.