For months, Israelis put aside their deep rifts to fight a common enemy. Now, amid a renewed government push for power, they are battling one another.
Eighteen months ago, in the aftermath of Hamas’s attack on Israel, Israelis suspended their internal conflicts to form a united military front against a shared external threat.
Now, that semblance of common cause has been cast aside. Beyond its borders, Israel has resumed fighting on four fronts — in Gaza, Lebanon, the occupied West Bank and Yemen. And internally, Israel’s citizens have returned to the bitter domestic feuds that once again, pose existential questions about their country’s future.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition has revived its contentious efforts, frozen after the attack in 2023, to expand its control over other branches of government. The moves have set off mass protests after the government tried to fire the head of Israel’s domestic intelligence service as well as the attorney general — two powerful gatekeepers who are overseeing investigations into both Mr. Netanyahu and his aides.
This week, Parliament will vote on the government’s plan to give itself greater control over the selection of justices on the Supreme Court, an institution that has long thwarted the ambitions of Mr. Netanyahu’s ultranationalist and religiously conservative allies.
“The foundations of the state are shaking,” Ehud Olmert, a former Israeli prime minister, said in an interview. “In Israel, Netanyahu is ready to sacrifice everything for his survival and we are closer to a civil war than people realize. In Gaza, we have returned to fighting — and for what? And overseas, I never remember such hatred, such opposition, to the state of Israel.”
To Mr. Netanyahu and his supporters, the moves are a legitimate effort to rein in unelected bureaucrats and judicial officials who have stymied the will of an elected government. “The leftist Deep State weaponizes the justice system to thwart the people’s will,” Mr. Netanyahu wrote on social media last week.
