The imminent threat of civil war in Israel

The words “civil war” are among the most dominant used by Israeli politicians today. What began as a mere warning from Israeli President Isaac Herzog is now an accepted possibility for much of Israel’s mainstream political society.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “is ready to sacrifice everything for his survival and we are closer to a civil war than people realize,” former PM Ehud Olmert stated in an interview with The New York Times last week.
The assumption is that the feared civil war reflects the political polarization in Israel: two groups divided by strong views on war, the role of government, the judiciary, budget allocations and other issues.
However, this assumption is not entirely accurate. Nations can be divided along political lines, but mass protests and security crackdowns do not necessarily indicate that a civil war is imminent.
In Israel’s case, references to civil war stem from its historical context and social-ethnic makeup.
An important but largely concealed CIA report, titled “Israel: The Sephardi-Ashkenazi Confrontation and Its Implications,” was almost prescient in its ability to detail future scenarios for a country with deep socioeconomic and, therefore, political divisions. The report was prepared in 1982 but only released in 2007. It followed the 1981 elections, in which the Likud Party, led by Menachem Begin, won 48 seats in the Knesset, while Labor under Shimon Peres won 47.
Ashkenazi (European) Jews had for decades dominated all aspects of power in Israel. This dominance makes sense: Zionism was essentially a Western ideology and all elements of the state — military (Haganah), parliamentary (the Knesset), colonial (the Jewish Agency) and economic (Histadrut) — were largely composed of Western European Jewish classes.
Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews, of Arab Middle Eastern backgrounds, arrived in Israel mostly after its establishment on the ruins of historic Palestine. By then, the Ashkenazim had already established dominance, controlling the country’s political and economic institutions, speaking the dominant languages and making major decisions.
Begin’s election victories in 1977 and 1981 came after an arduous battle against Ashkenazi dominance. The Likud, a coalition of several right-wing factions, was established four years before the first of those triumphs. Through appealing to and manipulating the grievances of fringe ideological and ethnic groups, Likud managed to remove the Ashkenazi-dominated Labor Party from power.
The 1981 elections represented a desperate Labor attempt to regain power and thus class dominance. However, the almost perfect ideological split only highlighted the new rule that would govern Israel for many elections — and decades — to come, where Israeli politics became dominated by ethnic orders: East versus West, religious fanaticism versus nationalistic extremism, though often masked as “liberal” and the like.
Since then, Israel has either managed — or, more accurately, manufactured — external crises to cope with internal divisions. For example, the 1982 war on Lebanon helped, at least for a while, to distract from its shifting social dynamics.
Though Begin and his supporters reshaped Israeli politics, the deep-rooted dominance of Ashkenazi-led institutions allowed Western liberals to continue their control over the army, the police, the Shin Bet and most other sectors. The Sephardic political resurgence mainly focused on populating Israel’s illegal settlements in the Occupied Territories and increasing privileges and funding for religious institutions.
It took nearly two decades after Begin’s 1977 victory for the Sephardic constituency to expand its power and establish dominance over key military and political institutions.
Netanyahu’s 1996 coalition marked the beginning of his rise and the start of coalition-building with Sephardic and Mizrahi alliances.
To maintain that newfound power, the political core of Likud had to change, as Sephardic and Mizrahi representation increased exponentially within Israel’s now-dominant party.
Though it is accurate to argue that Netanyahu has managed Israeli politics ever since by manipulating the grievances of disadvantaged socioeconomic, religious and ethnic groups, the fundamental change in Israel, as correctly predicted in the CIA document, was likely to happen based on the country’s own dynamics.
Netanyahu and his allies accelerated Israel’s transformation. To permanently marginalize the Ashkenazim, they needed to take control of all institutions that had largely been dominated by European Jews, starting with altering the system of checks and balances that had existed in Israel since its inception.

In Israel’s case, references to civil war stem from its historical context and social-ethnic makeup.

Dr. Ramzy Baroud

This battle preceded the Israeli genocide in Gaza. It largely began when Netanyahu rebelled against the Supreme Court and attempted to fire then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in March 2023. The mass protests that followed highlighted the growing chasm.
The war on Gaza further widened these divisions, with Netanyahu and his allies deflecting all blame and using the events of Oct. 7 and the subsequent failed war as an opportunity to eliminate their political rivals.
Once again, they turned their gaze toward the judiciary, reordering the system to ensure that Israel, as envisioned by Western Zionists, was transformed into a completely different political order.
Though the Ashkenazim are losing most of their political power, they continue to hold most of the economic cards, which could lead to disruptive strikes and civil disobedience.
For Netanyahu and his supporters, a compromise is not possible because it would only signal the return of the balancing act that started in the early 1980s. For the Ashkenazi power base, submission would mean the end of Israel’s David Ben-Gurion, Chaim Weizmann and others — essentially, the end of Zionism itself.
With no possible compromise in sight, civil war in Israel becomes a real possibility — and perhaps an imminent one.

• Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and author. He is editor of The Palestine Chronicle and nonresident senior research fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs. His latest book, co-edited with Ilan Pappe, is “Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak Out.” X: @RamzyBaroud