Meron Rapoport
+972 Magazine / December 5, 2024
Less concerned by the plight of Palestinians, Moshe Ya’alon fears the impact on the defense establishment of Netanyahu’s anti-democratic revolution.
On Sunday, December 1, Israel’s Channel 12 hosted a conversation with Moshe “Bogie” Ya’alon, a former chief of staff of the Israeli army who later served as defense minister. In an illuminating exchange, Ya’alon insisted on defining Israel’s actions in Gaza as “ethnic cleansing,” argued that the arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court in The Hague were entirely justified, and stated that he himself would have issued such warrants “long ago” against Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, and perhaps even Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
To Yaron Abraham, the Channel 12 interviewer, this was entirely unexpected; he seemed to take it personally that Ya’alon was unwilling to repeat the standard Israeli mantra that the “IDF is the most moral army in the world.”
There is no doubt that such statements carry a particular weight — coming from someone who continues to identify as a right winger, who once smeared members of the left-wing NGO Breaking the Silence as “traitors,” and who, while head of Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate, pushed the argument that PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat was to blame for the Second Intifada. To disagree with Ya’alon that Israel is carrying out ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip — an act that clearly constitutes a war crime — requires a unique blend of shamelessness and audacity.
One might assume at first glance that Ya’alon is speaking out against ethnic cleansing because he sees it as a moral injustice. However, the true motive behind his statements seems to emerge toward the end of the interview.
“[Israel] is no longer defined as a democracy, nor is the judiciary independent,” he said. “We are transitioning from a Jewish, liberal, democratic state in the spirit of the Declaration of Independence to a messianic, racist, corrupt, and leprous dictatorship. Prove me wrong.” In other words, Ya’alon’s concern is not for the Palestinians being forced out of their homes en masse by the Israeli army, but for Israel’s future as a “Jewish and democratic” state.
These statements are particularly interesting because Ya’alon has been one of the most prominent figures in the protest movement against Netanyahu’s judicial coup, in which the “anti-occupation bloc” largely failed to convince the movement’s leaders that there cannot be true democracy as long as the occupation persists. Is Ya’alon effectively saying now that with no democracy there will be ethnic cleansing? Has he concluded that there is a direct connection between the judicial overhaul, the dismantling of the democratic institutions of the “Jewish and democratic” state that he holds dear, and the ethnic cleansing and war crimes Israel is committing in Gaza?
What reinforces this connection is the fact that the ethnic cleansing in Gaza is being carried out at the same time as the far-right government is intensifying its crusade against civil liberties and state institutions. At the end of November, the Knesset advanced a bill that would make it significantly easier to disqualify candidates and lists from running for parliament due to “support for terrorism”; this bill is clearly designed at eliminating Palestinian parties from the Knesset, thereby rendering the elections themselves meaningless and virtually eradicating the possibility of the right wing ever losing.
The media, too, is coming under attack: the government is advancing legislation to shut down the Public Broadcasting Corporation, while also boycotting the Haaretz newspaper for “numerous articles that harmed Israel’s legitimacy in the world and its right to self-defense,” as Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi put it.
But another central target of the assault is, ironically, the very system from which Ya’alon hails: the defense establishment. In a nine-minute video following the indictment of Eli Feldstein, Netanyahu’s aide and spokesperson suspected of leaking classified military documents to sway Israeli public opinion, the prime minster depicted the army, the Shin Bet, the police, and, to a lesser extent, the Mossad, as another “front” that he is forced to surmount.
On Channel 14, Netanyahu’s main propaganda outlet, various security agencies are not only blamed as the sole culprits for the failures of October 7, but are also portrayed as systematically undermining the pursuit of “total victory” in Gaza. This attack goes beyond rhetoric: measures like the “Feldstein Law,” which would give immunity to those passing classified documents from the military to the prime minister, and the bill to transfer the oversight of intelligence from the military to the Prime Minister’s Office — both of which have passed their first reading in the Knesset — are aimed at establishing a personal intelligence apparatus for the prime minister that bypasses the army and the Shin Bet.
The dismantling of the defense establishment is becoming a tangible reality.
An increasingly unpopular war
As in any populist regime, these actions are justified as necessary steps to carry out the mandate supposedly given to Netanyahu and his government by “the people,” while Netanyahu’s opponents — in the military, the Shin Bet, the prosecution, or the media — are portrayed as an elite seeking to preserve its power undemocratically, against the will of the people. In an absurd twist, the Palestinian minority is portrayed as being on the side of the elites, who are supposedly concerned with Palestinian rights at the expense of the rights of “the Jewish people.”
Interestingly, Ya’alon’s remarks about the war in Gaza increasingly align with public sentiment in Israel, where polls indicate the government now represents only a small minority. A Channel 12 poll published last weekend found that 71 percent of the public supports a hostage deal and ending the war in Gaza, while only 15 percent favours its continuation.
The decision to send soldiers to a war where they may lose their lives, especially when they serve in a conscript army, lies at the core of the social contract between a government and its citizens: the government is supposed to ensure citizens’ welfare, protect their rights, and defend them, and in return, they are expected to willingly risk their lives for the state. A democratic government, therefore, is expected to secure broad consensus before going to war.
After October 7, there was an overwhelming consensus in favour of the war in Gaza. The military action in Lebanon similarly faced little resistance from the Israeli public. But now — 14 months into the war, with a ceasefire achieved in the north, hostages dying one by one, and soldiers continuing to lose their lives despite Hamas supposedly having been virtually “eliminated”— polls indicate that most Israelis believe the war in Gaza persists solely for Netanyahu and his government’s own interests.
The overt agenda of the messianic right centers on renewing settlements as the ultimate goal of the war. This only deepens the divide, as there is a stark difference between dying in a war against Hamas, which carried out the October 7 massacre, and dying in a war aimed at re-establishing the Gush Katif settlement bloc, which was dismantled in the “disengagement” of 2005. The fact that people like Housing Minister Yitzhak Goldknopf — an ultra-Orthodox leader who doesn’t send his children to fight in Israel’s wars — waves settlement maps alongside far-right settlement activist Daniella Weiss only exacerbates the increasing illegitimacy of the war in the eyes of large segments of the public.
This growing “democratic deficit” between the government and the public may explain the former’s renewed assault on democracy and state institutions. It’s as if the government suddenly realized that waging an unpopular war was difficult in a society where the army relies on mandatory enlistment and reserve service, so it decided to dismantle what remains of democracy.
After all, why not strip elections of their meaning by excluding the Palestinian minority from the political arena? Why not crush the media and cultivate a loyal propaganda outlet like Channel 14 to eliminate public criticism of the war from the discourse altogether? Like any totalitarian regime, the Netanyahu government understands the critical need for a monopoly over the dissemination of information.
The moves aimed at granting Netanyahu and his government direct control over the military and security apparatus are part of the same dynamic. The head of the Shin Bet, Ronen Bar, is under scrutiny, as are senior military leaders. The government seems to believe that by achieving direct control over the mechanisms of force, it can continue the war in Gaza and carry out ethnic cleansing and resettlement, even with the support of only 30 percent of the public.
Consciously or unconsciously, Ya’alon has come out firmly against this very move: the dismantling of democracy to allow Smotrich and Ben Gvir to achieve what they call the “thinning out” of the Palestinian population in Gaza. And Ben Gvir can be believed when he says that Netanyahu, who may have been more cautious about such overt war crimes in the past, is now “showing a certain openness” to the idea of encouraging Palestinians to “voluntarily emigrate.”
There’s no need to paint Ya’alon as the gospel of democracy and morality or as a defender of Palestinian rights. In fact, we can understand his recent statements in the context of his military leadership. As Israeli sociologist Lev Grinberg has argued, the military depends on a clear division between “Israeli democracy” within the Green Line and the occupation beyond it. Netanyahu’s assault on democratic institutions blurs this boundary — and in doing so, undermines the military’s legitimacy to continue its blatantly undemocratic suppression of the Palestinians.
A full military reoccupation of Gaza, ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and the re-establishment of settlements completely erases this boundary, which is why Ya’alon opposes these moves. He does not address the direct link between the ethnic cleansing of 1948 and that of 2024, and it is doubtful he will do so in the near future. However, for a former defense minister and chief of staff to become a vocal opponent not only of Netanyahu’s anti-democratic revolution but also of the army’s ethnic cleansing in Gaza is a fascinating development.
Meron Rapoport is an editor at Local Call
