Can Israel survive another 75 years?

In 2015, Israeli President Reuven Rivlin delivered a warning on the future of his country. “The ‘new Israeli order’ is not an apocalyptic prophecy,” he told a conference. “It is the reality.” The nation risked being split, Rivlin argued, into “four tribes” – secular, conservative and ultra-orthodox Jews, and Israeli Arabs – which would change the face of modern Israel.

This is not the division on which Europeans and Americans choose to fixate. The Israel-Palestine conflict monopolises the attention of observers. Occasional bouts of violence push it back into the headlines, bringing condemnation and concern from an intelligentsia unwilling to admit the death of the peace process. This is the arena of grand and futile ambitions, where Western statesmen’s dreams of a Nobel Peace Prize go to die.

Isabel Kershner’s arresting book, The Land of Hope and Fear, demonstrates that the enigma of Israel is best understood through a close analysis of its social makeup and potential breakdown. Seventy-five years after the nation’s founding, it’s convulsed by social and political turmoil. In 2021, Naftali Bennett, briefly Prime Minister, warned that the United Monarchy of David and Solomon had lasted just 80 years. The old guard of independence fighters, socialist statesmen and committed peacemakers is now gone: after the age of prophets, as it heads towards a tenebrous 80th anniversary, what is Israel to be?

Kershner, a British-born reporter, takes us through the fractious pieces of Israeli society with a swift eye and an eager commitment to the nation she calls home. Its Ashkenazi elite is being displaced, as Mizrahi Jews, the descendants of Middle Eastern immigrants, mobilise around Right-wing parties with Likud and Benjamin Netanyahu as their standard-bearers. Older resentments, from the early years of the state, still fester. In the 1950s, some babies of Mizrahi immigrants from Yemen disappeared from hospitals and the parents were given no cause of death, bodies or indication as to the whereabouts of their children’s graves. Some had been abducted and adopted by Ashkenazi families; the trauma still lingers. Meanwhile, Ultra-Orthodox or Haredi communities fiercely defend their interests, and their influence is growing as their society expands – Haredi families have, on average, seven children, as opposed to the national average of under three.

Netanyahu has been the beneficiary of these transformations, and become the centre-of-gravity around which all of Israeli politics is oriented. The labels of “pro-Bibi” and “anti-Bibi” offer sufficient metonyms for each faction in Israeli politics, which, on the latter side, include an eclectic mix of ultra-nationalist, centrist, socialist and Arab parties that would never typically work together. Netanyahu has been, Kershner writes, “a master of stoking ethnic tension to his advantage... The Mizrahim on the periphery formed the core of Likud’s – and Netanyahu’s – loyal base that had kept him in power so long.”

An electoral defeat in 2021 appeared to augur Netanyahu’s end, as a bribery scandal of suitably Epicurean dimensions – he was accused of trading official favours for elaborate gifts, including expensive cigars, pink champagne and jewellery – haunted him. Yet he returned to office last year, where he remains, and has just forced through a package of judicial reforms that have inspired mass protests across the country.

Kershner writes that Netanyahu has “allied himself with populist leaders in Europe and beyond”, including Trump, Victor Orbán in Hungary and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. A distinctive, transnational form of jingoistic conservatism is being bred from these friendships, merging populist bombast with a defensive posture against attempts to infringe upon “the common civilisation, the Judeo-Christian civilisation”, as Netanyahu put it in 2019. These developments have set the tenor of the next generation of the global conservative movement: the National Conservative conference, which took place in London two months ago, was organised by the Edmund Burke Foundation, which is run by Yoram Hazony, a former advisor to the Israeli PM.

Beneath the unabating cycle of elections lies the consistent power of Israel’s security apparatus. Kershner writes of the difficulties facing the Israeli Defense Forces as a growing number of young Israelis refuse to enlist for their compulsory national service – the IDF has taken to co-opting social-media influencers as proponents – though this doesn’t amount to a balanced analysis of Israel’s security state. A recurrent theme of The Land of Hope and Fear is the nature of threat, yet the omnipresent protections for daily life – such as the Iron Dome missile defence system, or the powerful security services Mossad and Shin Bet – are left as enigmatic, faceless guardians to an evolving society.

Israel exists, to many, as an ineffable idea: a homeland, a model, a warning, the source of biblical civilisation and the scene of its potential end. It can never be regarded as just another nation. Kershner breaks open the common interpretations of its identity and place, which have been myopically refracted by fixations on the peace process. Her narrative might have been given more direction by the end: platitudes about Israel’s “proven knack for improvisation, innovation, resilience, and survival” pass for a note on the future. In reality, the vicissitude and violence of the recent past caution us about what may be to come.

The Land of Hope and Fear is published by Scribe at £25. To order your copy, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books