In his novel “The Prague Cemetery”, Umberto Eco elliptically outlines something that he explicitly addressed in his essay Constructing the Enemy: it is necessary to always have an enemy at hand and, if it does not exist, one must be invented, because it is essential for load his own guilt on him and to get out of pressing situations.
In “Building the Enemy,” the Italian philosopher and novelist argued that the disappearance of the “evil empire” described by Ronald Reagan in 1983 generated confusion that blurred the American identity, until Osama Bin Laden “reached out his merciful hand and it provided Bush with the opportunity to create an enemy.”
Having an enemy serves to turn him into a scapegoat, also to divert attention from serious situations and for society to close ranks around questioned leadership. For this reason, certain “opportune” irruptions of enemies arouse suspicion. For someone who is losing a game, the gale that blows the board with the pieces is welcome.
So many Israelis have suspected since a car plowed into pedestrians on the Tel Aviv promenade and snipers killed two Jewish women in the West Bank, while rockets rained down from Gaza, southern Lebanon and Syria. It just so happens that all this happened immediately after a violent police raid on the Al Aqsa Mosque when it was packed with worshipers for Ramadan celebrations.
Anyone in the Middle East knows what the consequence of such an action is. So does Benjamin Netanyahu. That is why he suspects that he kicked the honeycomb, because what would come is equivalent to the gale that sweeps the board on which the massive protests against the judicial reform that he is promoting were putting him in check. In a country that was born with its existence threatened by its neighbors, when the external enemy attacks, the internal differences disappear because the nation and its leadership close ranks. That is why it is possible to suspect that, with the country divided, Netanyahu provoked the irruption of the foreign enemy that forces them to close ranks after his questioned government.
Israel is facing its crack. He discovers her dark and abysmal. Netanyahu paused the offensive against the judiciary, but does not seem willing to bury the reform with which he intends to ward off the corruption proceedings that corner him, at the price of allowing his fundamentalist partners to replace secular laws with a kind of sharia law. hebrew
In the long term, demography threatens the future of Israeli democracy, because Orthodox communities have higher birth rates than the rest of society. This growth has been reflected in the radicalization of religious parties. And that radicalization increases a risk that Israelis have always felt immune to: civil war.
It is not new that there are religious parties in government coalitions. Mafdal, which represented religious Zionism, and Agudat Yisrael, which grouped Orthodox Judaism, made up the so-called Alignment, the left-wing coalition headed by Mapai, the political force from which the Labor Party emerged.
Those religious parties had moderate positions and in 1977 they crossed over to the other side, joining the first Likud government, headed by Menahem Begin and supported by Shlomtzion, the party created by Ariel Sharon.
Shas, which is the party of the “Torah-observant” Sephardim, had also integrated governments of the left and the right. The difference between those forces and the current members of the ruling coalition, Religious Zionism-Jewish Power and United Torah Judaism, is that these partners of Netanyahu hold extremist positions ranging from fundamentalism to Jewish supremacism. Ergo, they are willing to bury the “two-state solution” for good to turn the entire West Bank into ancient Judea and Samaria, and to replace the civil code and other secular laws with jurisprudence inspired entirely by the Talmud and other sacred texts.
The fact that religious parties are no longer an Israeli equivalent to the Christian democracies of Europe and Latin America puts at risk the system with which the state of Israel was born: liberal democracy, inspired by the Western Rule of Law. As a still majority portion of the population (but with the highest voter abstention rate) is unwilling to lose secular democracy, the streets of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Beersheva and other cities were flooded with protesters willing to stop a despot from converting the state in its lair.
Israel does not have a constitution but rather a set of foundational laws that are interpreted by the supreme judges. This makes the Court the instance of containment and control of political power. Since Netanyahu began an era of governments radicalized towards conservatism, this instance worked because the majority of its members adhere to liberal-democratic secularism. But the government has decided to tear down that wall.
For the prime minister, the objective is to destroy the processes that advance against him. And for the fundamentalist parties that make up the government, the goal is to replace secular laws with religiously inspired jurisprudence, which would make Israel no longer resemble Western democracies.
In defense of democracy, hundreds of thousands of Israelis came out to protest. It is also defended by secular parties, prestigious military groups and the Histadrut, which is the largest union in the country.
Netanyahu imposed a process on Likud similar to the one Trump imposed on the Republican Party: radicalization towards extreme conservatism, personalist and enemy of the demo-liberal model. The question is whether the strong democratic resistance will be able to definitively ward off this authoritarian project. The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by the fundamentalist Yigal Amir, in 1995, demonstrated that Israel is not immune to political violence between citizens, therefore it is not immune to civil war.
The brooding shadow of chaos may drive Likud back to the center-right and reverse the process that has reduced the Labor Party, Meeretz and other center-left forces to insignificance for decades. But, for now, what Netanyahu does to save himself is to invoke the action of the enemy, for the reason that Umberto Eco explained in an essay and that he elliptically addressed in the novel “The Prague Cemetery.”
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