There is a perfect political storm engulfing Israel

Sharing the platform that day as guests were three of the region’s greatest authors. Israeli literary giants Amos Oz and David Grossman were joined by one of the finest chroniclers of Palestinian life, hopes and fears, the wonderful Raja Shehadeh.

The only figure missing that day was that other great Palestinian writer, Edward Said, who sadly by then was suffering from the cancer that prevented him from attending and almost a year to the month later would take his life.

Today, only Grossman and Shehadeh are still alive and continuing to write about the travails that continue to grip the region that is their home.

This past week I found myself wondering what all four men collectively would make of the current crises facing both Israelis and Palestinians today were it possible to reconvene that discussion and debate of two decades ago.

On Tuesday, as part of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s (above) judicial review, his government passed into law the first planned change by removing Israel’s Supreme Court’s power to cancel government decisions it deems unreasonable.

Addressing one of the latest anti-government rallies that have gripped Israel, Grossman spoke to huge numbers of Israelis in Tel Aviv just before the law came into force.

“Now is the dark hour. Now is the moment to stand up and cry out: This land is in our souls. What happens in it today, will determine who it will be and who we and our children will become,” Grossman told the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who have taken to the streets in recent weeks.

“If so many Israelis feel like strangers in their own country, obviously something is going wrong,” Grossman went on to warn.

That things have gone wrong in Israel many would argue should come as no surprise. For years now it has been brewing, born out of a combination of two interconnected and toxic factors.

The first is the battle between those Israelis who want a more secular and pluralist state, and those with a more religious, ultra-nationalist vision now represented by the country’s ultra-right wing government, under Netanyahu.

Or, as the Palestinian author and senior political analyst for Al Jazeera English described it more bluntly the other day, it’s a conflict “mainly between two types of Zionism, the pre- and post-1967 Zionism; in other words, between the more liberal and secular Zionism and more fanatic and fascistic Zionism”.

The second of these interconnected factors is Israel’s decades long occupation and oppression of the Palestinians. Nothing more starkly represents that oppression than Israel’s illegal settlement programme much of the renewed impetus for which is driven by the same ultra-nationalists pushing for the present judicial overhaul at the expense of democracy.

Only last month, Netanyahu’s government passed a controversial resolution that gives practically all control over planning approval for construction in West Bank settlements to Israel’s far-right ultranationalist finance minister Bezalel Smotrich.

It was Oz who as far back as 2014, four years before his death and also speaking at a Tel Aviv event to mark his 75th birthday, called out those far-right extremists and those in power that support them.

In a scathing rebuke, Oz urged Israelis to stop speaking about them in euphemisms and said he could not bear to hear groups of young, extremist settlers in the West Bank referred to by the “prettified term ‘Hilltop Youth’”.

To the obvious discomfort of many Israelis in attendance that day in Tel Aviv, he said that these were only “sweet names for a monster that needs to be called what it is: Hebrew neo-Nazis groups”.

As reported in the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz at the time, Oz added that in his mind, perhaps the only difference between neo-Nazis around the world and perpetrators of hate crimes in Israel is that “our neo-Nazi groups enjoy the support of numerous nationalist or even racist legislators, as well as rabbis who give them what is in my view pseudo-religious justification”.

My point here is a simple one. The political “perfect storm” that is currently convulsing Israel and Israeli society has not only been a long time in the making but was identified and called out by many Israelis some time ago.

Sadly, others instead of choosing to listen to the warnings of such dangers willingly harnessed it for their own political ambitions, Netanyahu being only one of a number.

For years such political opportunists also stoked fears that the greatest threat to Israel’s security was the Palestinians and while such an assessment is understandable given this long seemingly interminable conflict between the two sides, it also served to obscure the arguably bigger threat lurking inside Israeli society and corridors of power alike.

As The Washington Post columnist Max Boot observed just the other day, if anything it’s Netanyahu himself that is currently Israel’s biggest security threat. For this is a prime minster who doesn’t care if his polices are undermining democracy as long as he can keep together his cohort of far right extremist allies that will keep him in power.

These past months it’s as if the vast majority of Israelis have only suddenly woken up to the clear and present danger within their midst.

Just few years ago who could have imagined that commentators inside the country today would be talking about fears of a “civil war”.

Just this week The Jerusalem Post cited a poll published by the country’s Channel 13 that says over half of Israelis (56%) are concerned about a civil war breaking out amid the political crisis surrounding the government’s judicial reform plan.

Meanwhile Palestinians, of course all too familiar with civil strife and threats of extremism in various guises, can only look on, their own political ranks rudderless and in turmoil with all the additional dangers that brings to the region.

Just over 20 years ago when in Edinburgh I put the question, “The Middle East – What Next?” to Amos Oz, Raja Shehadeh and David Grossman, few in the audience could have foreseen what is happening in Israel today.

But all three of these great writers alluded to the possibility and dangers of Israel’s implosion. Israelis, just like Palestinians have experienced for years, are beginning to understand what it’s like to be “strangers in their own country”.