Political polarization is a major sign of stress and trauma in the collective. Stress and trauma deregulate both individual and collective nervous systems. It makes people suspicious, angry, ready to project, to judge and blame, and to attack.
Rapid changes, perceived loss of power, a tense environment and foreign pressures have been accelerating the main differences in worldview, objectives and vision among the different Israeli parties, driving serious divisions.
The division can be summarized as one side being oriented toward the West, with its progressive bend towards universal human rights, joining a more global order, solving everything through diplomacy and being a startup nation. It wants Israel to be a country excited about what it can offer to the world, such as technical wonders, medical lifesaving inventions, military ingenuity and power, etc., and has a strong desire to create a Western-style democracy with Jewish characteristics.
The other side is oriented towards Judaism as the foundation of the state. It embraces traditional values and is attached to the historical wonder of Israel’s existence, the land and the mission of the Jewish people. It believes it is keenly aware of security realities on the ground and does not trust negotiations with an implacable enemy. It wants a Jewish state first and a Jewish-style democracy.
These differences developed into dangerously heightened polarization after the 2023 Israeli elections. Many Israelis saw the struggle between the two camps as a sign of a vibrant democracy, unaware that it weakened Israel in the eyes of its enemies.
The unrelenting demonstrations and the chaos that ensued pushed people to cross many red lines. Both camps saw the situation as an emergency: One feared it would lose the democratic, modern character of the country. The other feared losing the Jewish nature of the country and its historical rights to the sacred land.
The struggle felt like a crucial, spiritual, life-or-death issue. As a result, people broke all the democratic rules guiding the democracy they thought they were saving. Worse, the dirty laundry was being washed on the international scene and people called upon the wider world to intervene—and intervene they did.
Oct. 7 put a stop to the division. That day did not just cause excruciating and maddening pain over the staggering loss of life, the dire fate of Israeli hostages and the ongoing casualties of Israeli youth fighting in the war. It also brought the horror of seeing that Iran’s noose, its crescent of terror so carefully and openly built for so many years, was tightening around Israel’s neck, with threats from seven groups or countries well-armed and motivated by a faith-driven genocidal ideation.
To maximize the pain and madness, an explosion of antisemitism worldwide in the name of anti-Zionism built on the “Palestinian cause” seemed like a reenactment of the pre–Holocaust Nazi era. In addition, the Ukraine-Russia war emptied Israel’s American weapons arsenal and turned a neutral and quasi-amicable Putin into a foe, willing to strengthen Israel’s enemies to his benefit. Terrified European leaders reacted in a misguided way, not only insensitively talking about an immediate Palestinian state but also withholding crucial weapons from Israel and doing everything to destroy its ability to defend itself and recover its deterrence—a crucially important factor in the Middle East.
This combination of factors is overwhelming and potentially mortal. The Holocaust is a hauntingly close event in Jewish history. How do we contain it all? How do we not give in to extreme helplessness? How do we avoid becoming easy prey to forces wishing us ill and manipulating us against each other?
It is much less overwhelming to bend our anger inward against each other. We know that, no matter what, we will not kill each other. So, we indulge our “friendly” allies, who believe that if they weaken us, they might stop potential escalation. Unwittingly, they interfere with the exceptional nature of our country, which tries to be modern and ancient, to have a mission and belong to the normal world; a country with a strong sense of nationalism but reaching out to others at a time when the West is culturally suicidal.
In the face of all these threats and betrayals, and with trouble in sight, temperaments can get fiery. The anger must be directed somewhere and we turn our anger towards each other. This only benefits our enemies. Imagine how much they succeeded.
Recently, a terrorist prisoner accused nine Israeli soldiers of raping and sodomizing him. Masked military police raided the Sde Teiman military detention center with much fracas to arrest the accused soldiers. It was still an unproven accusation by a violent terrorist prisoner, who had needed to be restrained when he was assaulting and stealing a Taser from the soldier searching him. An IDF prosecutor admitted that the army contacted released terrorists to testify regarding the rape allegations as if they could trust the terrorists’ testimonies. At least five of the nine soldiers were quickly freed. The investigation has not been completed.
Still, too many Israelis accepted the possibility that nine of their soldiers sodomized a terrorist, even though they have experienced Hamas’s bottomless malignancy. Then, those who understandably felt outraged by such a disrespectful arrest of soldiers decided to break the rules with protests and riots in the name of protecting the soldiers at military bases, otherwise considered sacred ground.
This was certainly an image that delighted our enemies, showing them how they can continue to manipulate us psychologically and exploit our weaknesses. It is easy to imagine the slew of complaints that prisoners will make from now on, seeing how eager we are to show we are ethical.
This is how fragile we have become. Targeted by the intolerable juggernaut of antisemitic international courts, Israel must demand from its army impeccable behavior and discipline. But do we need to be more royal than the king and arrest with alacrity Israeli reserve soldiers during war based on the testimonies of Palestinian terrorists without asking first? The antisemitic world is not going to like us better if we are harsh with our soldiers and our enemies will see it as a weakness to exploit.
The only silver lining of Oct. 7 was that it created a very important sense of unity that we must hold on to. It showed the unavoidable clarity of our enemy’s implacable intentions. It unveiled the magnificence and heroism of Israel’s youth. With God’s help, we will come out of these dangerous times, painfully bruised but hopefully unscathed in our spirit and mission.
We cannot afford to remain polarized. It harms the country’s ability to function optimally at this crucial time. We must also wake up to the foreign forces (including “friendly” forces) manipulating the Israeli public towards hostile division, which takes it to the brink.
Not examining the impact of our polarized words and actions on the enemy empowers Hamas, Iran and its proxies to use our internal divisions and weaknesses against us. This understanding should be our guideline to help us diminish such polarization in times of war.
