Israel’s Existential Crossroads: Navigating Internal Strife and External Conflict Amid a Crisis of Democracy

The Fight for a New Israel

In late July 2024, Israel experienced one of the biggest shocks to law and order in its history. For several hours, dozens of Israeli protesters were able to infiltrate two military compounds largely unimpeded, starting with Sde Teiman, a recently established base in the Negev desert where thousands of Palestinian detainees have been held since Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack. For months, journalists and nongovernmental organizations had reported systematic abuses at the base, and on July 29, Israel’s military police detained ten Israeli reservists on suspicion of raping one of the prisoners. But the protesters, among them several far-right elected officials who are members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition, were not decrying the mistreatment of Palestinians. They were furious that the military was taking such a step against its own, and were trying to block the arrests.

Although the riots at Sde Teiman and Beit Lid, the base where the suspects were taken, were unusual in their extremity, they were not isolated events. Since the war in Gaza began, there have been proliferating signs that Israel’s institutions of state are under severe stress. Netanyahu has ignored repeated warnings from Israel’s attorney general that his government’s actions have violated the law; in response, government ministers have called for the attorney general’s dismissal. Israel’s legal system is in disarray. For over a year, the government held up dozens of judicial appointments, including on Israel’s Supreme Court; and in September, Netanyahu’s justice minister escalated his efforts to stymie the appointment of a chief justice to the Supreme Court, even defying a court order requiring that the position be filled. 

Israeli law enforcement has become highly erratic. The murder rate among Israel’s Arab community has more than doubled under the current government, largely because of organized crime, yet in 2023, only 17 percent of such murders were solved. Even worse is the situation in the West Bank: despite soaring attacks by settlers against Palestinians, the state is now detaining only a quarter of the number of Jewish suspects it did in 2022. The Israeli military—which is responsible for enforcing the law in occupied territories—has ignored or even participated in the violence.

At first glance, this accelerating lawlessness, including from Israel’s own government, may appear to reflect the extraordinary pressures of a country mired in the longest and most challenging war since the war of independence. As of late September, Israel was not only continuing its year-old, devastating war against Hamas in Gaza amid dimming prospects for more than one hundred Israeli hostages still held there. It was also embarking on a precipitous escalation with Hezbollah in Lebanon, even as it confronted growing threats from the Houthis in Yemen, militants in the West Bank, Iranian-backed Iraqi militias, and from Iran itself. 

But the assault on Israel’s institutions began long before October 7, 2023. At the time of Hamas’s attack, Israel had been racked for months by a huge protest movement that aimed to stop the Netanyahu government’s sweeping effort to weaken judicial independence. This plan was crafted to allow the ruling coalition to fill the courts and other key civil offices with ideologically aligned justices and political loyalists. Along with consolidating its own power, the government was seeking to institutionalize higher status for Jewish citizens and strengthen the influence of Jewish religion in public and private life. But perhaps above all, the reforms were designed to give the government unfettered power to extend sovereignty—a euphemism for annexation—over the West Bank, a longtime goal of Israel’s far right.

When Israelis began protesting the judicial overhaul in January 2023, they were stunned by the government’s extreme plans and blatant power grab. But they were at least as shocked to realize that Israel’s institutional checks and balances were so vulnerable, or even absent, a problem that stems directly from the country’s incomplete democratic foundations. Foremost is the lack of a constitution. Despite repeated attempts since the country’s founding, Israel has consistently failed to adopt a formal constitution that defines the balance of powers and a complete bill of rights that guarantees fundamental human rights, civil liberties, and the equality of all citizens. Instead, it has relied on piecemeal legislation, court rulings, and ad hoc arrangements that have evolved through custom or committee. The country has only the most tenuous human rights legislation, anchored in hotly contested laws passed in the early 1990s. As recently as 2018, a controversial law gave Jews alone the right to self-determination in Israel. Unlike with almost any other democracy in the world, many of the country’s borders are not concretely defined. Israel also maintains control over millions of Palestinians who have few basic rights.

For decades, various Israeli lawmakers—along with generations of legal scholars—have recognized the core defects in Israel’s democratic foundations and have sought to address them through a constitutional process. It has also long been acknowledged that Israel faces a growing crisis of legitimacy as a result of its occupation of Palestinian lands and control of a large population of noncitizens, policies that the International Court of Justice has ruled illegal. Today, the problem is intensified by the devastating human cost of Israel’s war in Gaza. Yet even now, Israelis tend to treat these two issues—the country’s lack of constitutional order and its ongoing military occupation of Palestinian people and territories—as wholly separate phenomena. In reality, they are inseparable: it is Israel’s weak or missing democratic foundations that have enabled successive Israeli administrations to pursue and continually expand the occupation.

Throughout a terrible year of war, many observers have urged Israel to make clear its endpoint for the conflict and how Palestinians will be able to govern themselves in the future. If Israel wants to avoid a long-term reoccupation of Gaza and perpetual violence in the West Bank, it will need a comprehensive strategy for unified Palestinian self-governance in both territories, ideally statehood. But lost in this discussion is what will be required of Israel’s own political culture and institutions to ensure lasting peace. Israel must work toward its own “day after,” and that day will never arrive unless the country addresses the constitutional vacuum at its core.

ABSENT AT THE CREATION

Israel’s founders did not originally intend for the country to have no constitution. In November 1947, UN General Assembly Resolution 181, known as the partition plan, required the future Jewish and Arab states to adopt strong democratic constitutions, and Zionist leaders began crafting one. Early drafts show that the founders were intimately aware of the elements necessary to make the country a full democracy, including establishing the equality of all citizens, formulating a bill of rights, and setting down a clear constitutional order defining the powers of the branches of government.

But following the declaration of independence, in May 1948, Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, came to oppose the idea. Among various considerations, he worried about limiting his party’s powers in government and alienating religious parties who rejected secular civic principles. He also may have been concerned about offering equal rights to all Arabs who remained after independence, since he viewed them as a potential threat to Israeli security and an obstacle to building a state for the Jewish population, including through the dispossession of Arab land and property. Whatever the reason, the failure to adopt a constitution meant that Israel lacked binding legal foundations for core components of democratic statehood.

For one thing, apart from its border with Egypt, established in the 1978 Camp David accords, Israel has never defined the limits of its sovereign territory. (Although Israel established borders with Jordan in 1994, they do not determine the status of the West Bank.) As a result, it is often unclear where Israeli laws do or do not apply. During the war of independence, the new state conquered territories that extended well beyond those allotted to it in the UN partition plan; Israel’s sovereignty in these areas was eventually recognized by internationally brokered armistice agreements in 1949. But any division of the former British mandate of Palestine was complicated by Palestinian and Arab opposition to a Jewish state at all, as well as the Zionist vision of a Jewish state that would cover the entire land. The 1949 armistice lines, also known as the Green Line, were never formalized into Israeli law. 

Following Israel’s sweeping victory in the 1967 war—the Israeli army defeated Egypt, Jordan, and Syria and occupied the West Bank along with East Jerusalem, Gaza, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights—the lack of a finite eastern border provided fuel to those who hoped to incorporate these conquests. In the wake of that war, Israel also showed a proclivity for expansionism, annexing East Jerusalem and eventually the Golan Heights, and allowing the settlement movement to spread throughout all occupied lands. (Israel eventually returned the Sinai to Egypt, and dismantled settlements there, as it did later in Gaza.)

Israel also was slow to define its body politic. At the time of Israeli independence, some 750,000 indigenous Arab Palestinians had been expelled or else fled from areas that became part of the new state. But about 150,000 remained, making up some 15 percent of Israel’s population. In the absence of a constitution, bill of rights, or even a formal citizenship law, this group had ambiguous status, and the Israeli government developed contradictory approaches to it. For example, the new state adopted a then progressive policy of universal suffrage, including for Palestinians in Israel. But it also placed most of their communities under direct military rule, which was enforced through colonial emergency regulations rather than through Israeli law. That approach lasted virtually until the 1967 war, after which Arab Israelis fell under civilian law. But at that point, the state once again established a military regime over nearly a million Palestinians in newly conquered territories, creating, under the pretext of temporary occupation, a huge category of noncitizen subjects. Over time, Israeli control over this population became increasingly entrenched, mitigated only marginally by the limited local autonomy established in the 1993 Oslo accords.

From the outset, Israel’s leaders sought to ensure that the country maintained a clear Jewish majority. Thus, the government declined to enact a citizenship law until it had safeguarded unlimited Jewish immigration to the new state. Israel passed the Law of Return in 1950, granting any Jew in the world the right to immigrate to Israel and facilitating a massive growth of the Jewish population. Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, didn’t proceed with a citizenship law until two years later; even then, citizenship rights for those not covered by the Law of Return—that is, non-Jews—were still limited, and many Palestinians in Israel could become citizens only by waging a legal battle.

Ever since its founding, Israel has lacked core components of democratic statehood.

Yet another missing element in Israel’s democratic foundations was a formal guarantee of equality. To this day, there is no explicit guarantee of equality for all citizens in Israeli law. Although Israel’s declaration of independence calls for such equality, the legal status of that document has long been disputed. Moreover, because of Israel’s identity as a Jewish state, the usual democratic separation of religion and state is a nonstarter: the state will not commit to secular sources of law or authority, because with few and highly limited exceptions, Israeli leaders have rejected the possibility of Arab parties joining a government. This has created a dependence on small Jewish religious political parties to reach coalition majorities. These parties have always demanded an expansive role for religion in state institutions; they have also blocked attempts to impose equal duties, such as universal military service, on all citizens.

To some degree, Israel has sought to compensate for a missing constitution with its Basic Laws, a system that was introduced in 1950. But these laws, which have been adopted incrementally over time, are not formally defined, and most of them can be amended or annulled by a plurality of votes in the Knesset, just like any other law. At present, out of 13 Basic Laws, four are “entrenched”—meaning that they require an absolute majority in the Knesset to change them; two more require a two-thirds supermajority to change certain articles.

As a result of this history, Israeli democracy rests on legal and constitutional foundations that are surprisingly weak and readily subject to modification. In the late twentieth century, the risks posed to the state by these vulnerabilities were less apparent. Despite the government’s expansion of a fundamentally undemocratic occupation regime after 1967, democracy for Israeli citizens improved for several decades. But starting in the early years of this century, as the Oslo peace process unraveled and violence flared again, democratic progress stagnated, then declined. Since the 2010s, successive Israeli governments have actively chipped away at the country’s tenuous institutional framework in order to advance an exclusivist, expansionist, and increasingly antidemocratic Zionist state.

THE WAR ON THE JUDICIARY

At the center of the current struggle for control over Israel’s institutions is its judiciary. For most of the decade and a half since Netanyahu’s second election as prime minister (he first served in the late 1990s) in 2009, lawmakers and ministers from his Likud Party and allied parties on the right have been arguing that the courts have too much power and that the executive and the Knesset need more authority. This campaign was inspired in part by the emergence in the 1990s of a more activist Supreme Court, which many conservatives argued would, in promoting a liberal democratic vision of the state, threaten Jewish identity and the will of the majority.

For example, the Knesset passed two Basic Laws in 1992 that guaranteed partial individual rights. The Supreme Court interpreted these rules as conferring on it the right to judicial review of future legislation, although lawmakers themselves were divided on the matter. As a result, citizens demanding greater protections, progress on gender equality, rights for sexual minorities, and revocation of the ultra-Orthodox draft exemption—as well as those seeking to challenge Israel’s harsh occupation policies in the West Bank—increasingly turned to the Supreme Court. 

In the years that followed, the court issued numerous rulings that established greater protections from religious coercion, increased gender parity and media freedoms, and upheld other liberal values. It also made a few decisions restricting individual settlements or occupation practices that violated individual Palestinian rights, although it hardly ever intervened against the government’s overall occupation regime. Nonetheless, right-wing factions began to view the court as an obstacle to their Jewish religious agenda and to settlement expansion. They were particularly infuriated when the court declined to block the government’s decision to dismantle Israeli settlements in Gaza in 2005.

And so in the decade after Netanyahu’s return to power, an increasingly right-wing majority in the Knesset began advancing a slew of illiberal laws aimed at eroding civil liberties and human rights and entrenching the occupation. In 2011, the Knesset passed a law against political boycotts; in 2014, it added a Basic Law requiring a referendum for Israel to withdraw from any territory—including areas Israel had annexed in violation of international law, such as East Jerusalem or the Golan Heights. The Knesset also extended a 2002 law imposing bureaucratic hurdles on Palestinian spouses of Israeli citizens, effectively threatening them with family separations that most Jews would never encounter. It also passed laws targeting the foreign funding of human rights groups documenting occupation-related violations of Palestinian rights—seeking to tarnish them as foreign agents—and other legislation aimed at encroaching on civil rights.

Knowing that citizens would challenge these laws before the Supreme Court, right-wing leaders and influential allies in the public sphere began to make direct rhetorical assaults on the court itself. They accused it of advancing elite interests; spreading secular, universalist values; and trampling the will of the people by tying the hands of the elected right-wing government. The court was regularly accused of privileging the rights of Palestinians over the interests of Israeli security, even though its decisions upholding Palestinian rights were extremely limited and it allowed the settlements and other occupation policies to go forward. After becoming justice minister in 2015, Ayelet Shaked, a member of the right-wing Jewish Home party, advocated a series of policies and legislative efforts to weaken the judiciary, including giving the Knesset the power to override Supreme Court rulings. The leader of her Jewish Home party was Naftali Bennett, who, in the 2013 Knesset elections, campaigned on annexing a large portion of the West Bank. Having served as prime minister briefly in 2021–22, Bennett is currently seen as one of the leading contenders to succeed Netanyahu.

As Netanyahu continued to win elections—in 2009, 2013, and 2015—Israel’s religious right began to call more openly for annexation of the West Bank. In 2017, the Knesset passed legislation legalizing unofficial West Bank outposts that even Israeli law did not recognize. (All settlements are illegal under international law.) The following year, the Knesset passed the “nation-state law,” a new Basic Law defining Israel as a state in which Jews alone have the right to self-determination and supporting Jewish settlements. The legislation created a formal legal basis for discriminating against non-Jews and demoted the status of the Arab language, which until then had been an official language in Israel. Finally, in the course of 2019 and 2020, Netanyahu made public his plans to gradually annex the West Bank, beginning with specific parts. The prime minister and his political allies did not reveal what they intend to do about the tens or even hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in those lands. If Israel prevents Palestinians in annexed areas from gaining citizenship and forces them to remain merely subjects without rights, it would be openly embracing the status of an apartheid state.

An overarching goal of Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul is to advance annexation.

The Supreme Court struck down some of these efforts, including the law to legalize settlement outposts, as well as several government attempts to formalize the military exemption long claimed by large numbers of ultra-Orthodox Jews, a step aimed at buying the Orthodox parties’ loyalty. The court rejected challenges to the 2018 nation-state law; nonetheless, leaders of Israel’s right wing were incensed by the court’s willingness to even entertain such challenges, and they continued their attack on the judiciary.

By late 2019, Netanyahu’s political allies were also seeking to fight his indictment on corruption charges, which led to the opening of a trial against him in a Jerusalem district court the following year. To do so, they needed to further delegitimize the proceedings and the courts overall. They sought, furthermore, to weaken the powers of the attorney general and appoint amenable Supreme Court justices, likely hoping they would strike down relevant legal challenges to Netanyahu’s government—such as his ability to serve under indictment—or rule favorably on future appeals in the corruption case. (As of late September 2024, the trial was ongoing, and defense testimonies, including by Netanyahu, are scheduled to begin in December.) By June 2021, Netanyahu was out of power, having failed to secure a coalition majority in repeated elections. Finally, in late 2022, Netanyahu was able to engineer a return to power by allying with two ultra-Orthodox parties and two ultranationalist, messianic right-wing parties that openly supported the full annexation of the West Bank. Now, Netanyahu saw an opportunity to push through some of the larger plans of the Israeli right and strengthen his grip on the country.

LESS LAW, MORE LAND

Launched in January 2023, the Netanyahu government’s plan to overhaul the judiciary was the culmination of the Israeli right’s long attempts to remove democratic constraints on its power. Among other changes, it aimed to gouge out judicial review, engineer the selection of judges to ensure that courts would be friendly to the ruling coalition’s ideology, and turn professional legal ministerial advisers into political loyalists. The overarching goal was to make sure that the government had as little institutional resistance as possible to its efforts to crack down on Palestinian citizens, civil society, media freedom, and the opposition; stifle left-wing, anti-occupation activism; and advance annexation. Most courts would assess these deeply illiberal policies as violating basic democratic principles.

The plan immediately set off mass protests that quickly evolved into a titanic clash between the government and a large segment of the Israeli population. The ruling coalition insisted that it could not implement the voters’ will because of the decisions of an unelected judiciary. But for the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who took to the streets, Israel’s independent courts were the only things protecting them from the government’s efforts to advance theocratic and Jewish supremacist values, slash individual rights and freedoms, annex occupied territories, and institutionalize corruption. The protests drew a very large cross-section of society, including community and business leaders, doctors and mental health professionals, workers in high-tech industries, scholars, and teachers.

More critically, groups of military reservists, on which the Israel Defense Forces relies to a great extent, threatened that they would refuse to report for duty, sparking deep concerns within the Israeli security establishment. Yoav Gallant, Netanyahu’s own defense minister, called on the government to pause the legislation out of security concerns, and Netanyahu nearly dismissed him. But the government pressed ahead, pushing through one key part of the reform in July 2023, as massive protests continued. By this point, Israelis had begun to recognize how weak their country’s democracy was and were demanding stronger foundations.

 Yet the vast majority of those taking part declined to protest the government’s plan to expand the occupation and advance annexation of the West Bank; save for small clusters of anti-occupation activists, protesters insisted that this was a separate issue from the judicial takeover. They failed to see that Israel’s ambiguous relationship with democratic values and rules, going back decades, had enabled the occupation and the conflict all along, or that it was setting the stage for a disastrous new war.

In the months after Hamas’s October 7 attack, Netanyahu was given an opportunity. At first, the war stopped the protest movement in its tracks, allowing the government to pursue many of its antidemocratic plans with far less scrutiny. Overnight, groups that had helped organize the democracy protests in 2023 shifted from criticizing the government to distributing basic supplies—including cooked meals, clothing, and toiletries—to those in need. The government, for its part, lagged badly in providing these emergency services but wasted no time pushing through its broader program of consolidating power by eroding civil liberties and installing political loyalists in less-visible professional and technical levels of government. Meanwhile, it ramped up its plans to annex occupied territories, accelerating settlement expansion and virtually ceasing to enforce the law against Israelis living in the occupied territories. Given free rein, settlers in the West Bank became increasingly violent toward Palestinians, culminating in several pogrom-like attacks on Palestinian villages.

For most Israelis, the growing lawlessness in occupied areas is a secondary concern. Yet as the war has ground on, many have become disillusioned by the government’s inability to address their core concerns or even to ensure national security, and a large majority now fear that the conflict in Gaza could spread to the West Bank. At present, the sources of public discontent include the security and intelligence failures that allowed the Hamas attack to happen, the failure to return Israeli hostages from Gaza, and the failure to make clear how the war in Gaza will end—although most Israeli Jews believe the war was eminently justified. Many also blame the government for not securing Israel’s northern border with Lebanon so that tens of thousands of displaced civilians can return, a situation that has become all the more volatile since Israel’s dramatic confrontation with Hezbollah began in September.

Moreover, a clear majority of Israelis now believe the government’s behavior to be driven primarily by Netanyahu’s personal stake in remaining in power. In a June 2024 survey by Israel’s N12 news channel, for example, 56 percent of respondents agreed that Netanyahu’s reluctance to reach a hostage-release deal was driven by political interests. A July poll by the same organization found that 54 percent of Israelis thought Netanyahu’s political considerations were behind the continued fighting in Gaza; and a September N12 poll found that 63 percent believed Netanyahu’s threat to replace his defense minister was driven by political considerations rather than for the good of the state. Through much of the first nine months of 2024, a majority of Israelis said they wanted the government to accept a hostage deal, knowing this would entail a cease-fire—steps that the government continually refused to take.

Israelis were shocked that their government’s checks and balances were so vulnerable, or even absent.

Anger at the government has pushed Israelis back onto the streets for huge demonstrations. Surveys regularly indicate that approximately 70 percent of Israelis want Netanyahu to resign; his current coalition has failed to draw majority support in any survey since early 2023, shortly after its inauguration. Many Israelis are demanding new elections. In a poll in May, the Israeli Democracy Institute found that just 29 percent of Israelis were optimistic about the future of democratic rule in Israel, its lowest such finding ever; in August, the figure inched up but remained at a still dismal 36 percent.

Israel’s democracy crisis cannot be solved by elections alone. The war was ignited from Gaza, a territory that is central to Israel’s strategy of occupation and its division and control of Palestinians. For the sake of continuing and expanding that control, the current government is willing to dismantle Israel’s independent judiciary and further undermine the country’s institutions. By setting out to claim full and exclusive Jewish sovereignty over all the land—including what Netanyahu euphemistically refers to as an ongoing security presence in Gaza—the government is seeking to impose a messianic, theocratic vision of territorial expansion and to formally codify Jewish supremacy. Permanent military occupation has become an inseparable part of the state itself.

ISRAEL REINVENTED

Amid one of the worst regional crises in decades, prospects for democratic renewal in Israel may seem more remote than ever. After all, for more than three-quarters of a century, Israel has been unable to formally commit itself to key democratic principles, even when it wasn’t involved in a dangerous multifront war. But the country’s democratic institutions are under greater threat than at any previous moment in history, and a growing number of Israelis seem to recognize this. Picking up from the extraordinary 2023 protest movement, Israelis have an opportunity to lay down fresh, and genuinely democratic, foundations when the war ends.

To start with, the country needs fixed borders, a government that is committed to full democracy, and a legal system that reflects both Jewish self-determination and true commitment to equality for all citizens. And Israelis must finally adopt a full bill of rights. Such a step is not a fantasy: the writers of a future constitution can draw on numerous drafts of such a concept, painstakingly developed by Israeli lawmakers and civil society figures over many decades but never enacted. Most urgent are crucial rights that are still missing from Israel’s Basic Laws, such as freedom of speech and expression, freedom of religion, and due process. These universal rights must be formally legislated for all Israeli citizens.

An Israeli constitution must also face the sensitive task of addressing the collective identity of Palestinian citizens, who constitute the country’s largest non-Jewish minority. Numerous democratic nation-states, including North Macedonia, Slovakia, and Spain, have constitutions that recognize ethnic or national minorities within their citizenries and acknowledge their equality. Israel can adopt collective minority rights—by way of cultural, linguistic, or even national recognition—without forgoing the Jewish character of the state. Indeed, the Jewish state must be compatible with universal democratic standards so as to ensure civic equality between Jews and non-Jews—and to establish equality between religious and secular Jews, as well.

Of course, building these pillars in the immediate wake of a violent and prolonged conflict will be extremely difficult. But as the examples of other war-riven societies have shown, a constitutional process can itself provide crucial anchors for a more durable peace. Indeed, for Israel, any serious constitutional effort must include Palestinians—both those who are its own citizens and those who are now under Israeli occupation. Effectively conceived, such a constitution-building effort could thus spur a broader peace process based on Palestinians’ self-determination in a state of their own. Ultimately, the two states would then define the border between them—ideally along the Green Line, and preferably in a confederated arrangement that allows for freedom of movement and residency, and in which residents remain citizens only of their nation-state.

For now, any large-scale constitutional process, let alone a two-state solution, may appear far-fetched. But once a cease-fire is finally reached in Gaza or Lebanon, and new Israeli elections are held, the horizon for change might look different, even to Israel’s own leaders. After all, in 2023, hundreds of thousands of Israelis recognized that the ills of the Netanyahu government could not be addressed simply by toppling that government. Instead, they looked deeper, to Israel’s roots. At demonstrations, they broadcast the recording of Ben-Gurion reading the declaration of independence in 1948. Protesters chanted, “We won’t stop until there’s a constitution.” Legal scholars offered public lectures and circulated short, readable explanations of such concepts as judicial review, the evolution and merits of Israel’s judicial-appointment system, and the obscure “reasonability” grounds that the Supreme Court has used to review executive action, particularly the political appointments of figures suspected of corruption. The law passed in July 2023 would have limited the court’s ability to do so, but the court struck down the law in January.

A constitutional process could provide crucial anchors for Israeli-Palestinian peace.

Another group of scholars tried to revive long-defunct efforts to build a constituent assembly, in order to establish a citizen-led process for adopting a constitution. At times during the nine months of protests that lasted from January 2023 to the October 7 attack, Israelis were asking themselves bigger questions about the foundations of their country than at any time in recent memory—and they felt an urgency to find answers.

The consequences of not doing so could be dire. If Israel chooses to remain on its current path of conquest and annexation and commits itself to opposing Palestinian statehood—as Netanyahu repeatedly has done—it will consummate the destruction of Israel as a democratic state. It will face the de facto incorporation of millions of noncitizen Palestinians under Israeli rule; and in such a scenario, it would never be able to recognize this huge population, because it would pose a threat to Israel’s Jewish identity. (At present, an approximately equal number of Jews and Palestinians—seven million each—live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.)

Such an outcome will affect every Israeli citizen and subject. To avoid international isolation, Israel will increasingly rely on authoritarian and nondemocratic states, and on nondemocratic forces within the United States. Israel will find it difficult to retain the support of longtime democratic allies. Already, numerous key Western partners have constrained weapons exports to Israel over the past year, including Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Italy—Israel’s third-largest arms supplier. The United States itself has delayed shipments. If Israel no longer manifests the “shared values” that have notionally bound it to the liberal democratic order, pressure on Western governments to limit their aid to Israel will deepen.

After a decade in which populism has surged all over the world, it has become clear how easy it is for political leaders to undermine democratic norms in service of their own pursuits of power, especially during large-scale wars. Democracy must always be defensive, but first it must be built. Israel must end the war and start building.

By Dahlia Scheindlin