This is the Introduction to “Explaining Israel: The Jewish State, the Middle East, and America,” by Peter Berkowitz. The book will be released by RealClear Publishing on Sept. 23, 2025.
Introduction
In 2014, Israel’s future had never seemed brighter. Led by the high-tech sector, the economy was booming. The Israel Defense Forces—with advanced weapons, an outstanding air force, sophisticated intelligence capabilities, and cybersecurity prowess—gave the Jewish state the most powerful military in the Middle East. While not producing warm relations and bustling commerce, treaties with Egypt (1979) and Jordan (1994) brought cold peace and stability along Israel’s two longest land borders. World surveys placed Israelis among the happiest of populations. In a country whose national security interests compelled it to impose mandatory military service on men and women, life expectancy ranked among the longest in the West. Secular Israeli women had higher fertility rates than secular women in any country in the West; those of their ultra-Orthodox sisters were significantly higher. Israel pumped plentiful amounts of natural gas from offshore fields that had come online during the previous decade. Over the previous 30 years, the country had gone from a few vineyards making largely cheap wine for sacramental purposes to around 300 vineyards producing a variety of fine wines. And with its bustling commerce, stunning Mediterranean beachfront, culinary delights, thriving culture, and work-hard-play-hard spirit, Tel Aviv had become one of the world’s most exciting, and expensive, cities.
At the same time, and generally ignored or downplayed by much of the population and more than a few political leaders, Israel’s enemies strengthened their capabilities and plotted the Jewish state’s demise. In the summer of 2014, Iran-backed Hamas jihadists kidnapped and brutally murdered three young Israeli men in Judea and Samaria—the biblical names, used with increasing regularity in Israel, for the West Bank. Subsequently, Iran-backed Hamas jihadists in Gaza showered southern Israeli communities with rockets. In response, Israel conducted a seven-week military campaign in Gaza, Operation Protective Edge, to degrade Hamas’s ability to launch rockets at Israel’s civilian population, but not to destroy the organization or remove it from power. In Lebanon to the north, Iran-backed Hezbollah had amassed a vast arsenal of projectiles aimed at Israel—by that time tens of thousands of ordinary rockets, precision-guided rockets, and intermediate-range missiles—while its fighters gained battlefield experience in the Syrian civil war. The Islamic Republic of Iran made steady progress toward constructing nuclear weapons; insulating its nuclear program from attack; producing ballistic missiles; and funding, training, and equipping not only Hamas and Hezbollah on Israel’s borders but also other militias around the region.
As external threats intensified in 2014 and in the following years, internal strife in Israel mounted. Members of the working class, often Mizrahi Jews with roots in the Muslim-majority countries of North Africa and the Middle East, resented the well-educated, highly remunerated, and progressive Israeli elites, in large measure, Ashkenazi Jews hailing from families that had emigrated from, or could trace their ancestry to, Europe. While priding themselves on their commitment to equality and pluralism, Israel’s Ashkenazi elites often looked down on Mizrahi Jews’ traditional beliefs and practices. Meanwhile, much of the non-ultra-Orthodox majority angrily objected to the ultra-Orthodox minority’s exemption from military service and to the substantial subsidies that the government allocated to their religious schools (in 2014, the ultra-Orthodox constituted about 11 percent of the population and by 2024 about 13.5 percent). Although Israel had made considerable progress in improving the social and economic well-being of its Arab minority – around 21 percent of the citizenry – much remained to be done.
Internal strife over the status and future of West Bank Palestinians in 2014 was muted, but the dilemma for the Jewish state persisted. In the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel seized the West Bank—including the old city of Jerusalem and the heartland of biblical Israel—from Jordan and the Gaza Strip from Egypt (as well as the Golan Heights, home to Druze communities but no Palestinian ones, from Syria). In 2005, Israel evacuated every Israeli soldier and civilian from Gaza; in short order, Hamas ousted the Palestinian Authority (PA) and seized control. But approximately 3 million West Bank Palestinians, notwithstanding exercising considerable autonomy in civil and political matters, continue to live under Israeli military rule in Judea and Samaria.
It is reasonable to maintain – contrary to the dominant opinion among diplomats, professors, and journalists – that Israel does not occupy the West Bank because the territory had never been widely recognized as part of a sovereign nation-state (Jordan’s 1950 annexation of the West Bank was only recognized by three countries), at least not since the fall of the second Jewish commonwealth in AD 70. Yet the legal issue obscures the overarching political dilemma. Over the long run, Israel cannot remain a rights-protecting democracy while ruling over a population to which it declines to grant citizenship, and it cannot remain a Jewish state if it grants citizenship to millions more non-Jews. Nevertheless, if Israel were to withdraw from Judea and Samaria, then, as in Gaza, Hamas would overthrow the PA, and the jihadists would impose a second Iran-backed Islamist theocracy pledged to Israel’s destruction on the nation’s border – this one overlooking Israel’s cultural, commercial, and population center.
From 2014 to 2018, their churning economy and the relative quiet on their borders distracted Israelis from the troubling developments from without and from within. Many, not least in the political establishment, supposed that Israeli deterrence operated effectively. The state-of-the-art Iron Dome defense system intercepted most of Hamas’s occasional rocket fire. Hezbollah had not disrupted life in Israel since the end of the 2006 Second Lebanon War. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who had led Israel since 2009, assured the public that he was the man to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
The new affluence also diverted people’s attention from the erosion under Netanyahu’s watch of Israeli political cohesion – the sense among citizens that their remarkably diverse population formed one people devoted to a common national enterprise. Enmities – between ordinary citizens and the elites, the secular and the religious, Netanyahu’s voters and the opposition – steadily worsened, in no small measure owing to the state attorney’s investigation of Netanyahu for bribery, fraud, and breach of trust. Launched in 2016, the investigation produced an indictment in November 2019 and proceeded in May 2020 to a trial that, more than four years later, has reached no resolution. Netanyahu’s camp views the investigation, the indictment, and the trial as stemming from charges fabricated by a desperate political establishment that could not defeat him at the polls. Led by Netanyahu, they have portrayed the opposition as an enemy within.
A sharply split nation, Israel conducted five closely contested elections between April 2019 and November 2022. Netanyahu maintained control following each of the first three. The fourth election brought to power an unlikely governing coalition, headed by conservative Naftali Bennett and centrist Yair Lapid – each took a turn as prime minister – that included eight parties spanning the right, center, and left and, for the first time in 50 years, an Arab-Israeli party. With the fifth election in three and a half years, Netanyahu, by then Israel’s longest-serving prime minister and on trial, returned to power, scraping through by a mere 30,000 votes out of approximately 4.8 million cast. The intensity of the opposition’s hostility toward Netanyahu, from center-right to left, gave him only one option for forming a government. Half of his coalition consisted of two extreme elements of Israeli politics: the ultra-Orthodox, who not only enjoy an exemption from military service but whose adult male population also often shun the labor force in favor of full-time, state-subsidized religious study; and religious ultranationalists, who prioritize retaining Israeli control over Judea and Samaria.
Two major crises have defined Netanyahu’s sixth government, which took office on December 29, 2022. The first, a self-inflicted wound, erupted less than a week later. Although Netanyahu had not made it a campaign issue, on January 4, 2023, Justice Minister Yariv Levin announced a far-reaching judicial overhaul. While Israel’s exceptionally progressive and activist Supreme Court needed substantial reform, the government’s poorly rolled out and ill-considered proposals, if adopted, would have undermined the independence of Israel’s judiciary.
The proposals sparked massive protests week after week throughout the country, shook investors’ confidence in the nation’s political stability, and impelled reservists, not least air force pilots, to threaten to decline to report for training on the grounds that the government sought to destroy Israel’s democratic character. In response, the government accused the opposition of fomenting anarchy and undermining military readiness. The controversy eroded morale, damaged the economy, and drove Israel to the brink of a constitutional crisis.
That constitutional crisis was averted on October 7 by a terrifying national security crisis. Israelis responded swiftly, bravely, and resolutely to the massacre perpetrated by thousands of Hamas jihadists on the day Israelis refer to as “the black Sabbath.” Over the next few days, hundreds of thousands of reservists dropped everything to join their units and defend their country against Islamist terrorists whose battle plan, in manifest violation of the laws of war, called for fighting in civilian clothes; killing, raping, and kidnapping Israeli civilians; turning Palestinians into human shields by operating from within and under Gaza’s civilian areas; and using Palestinians as human sacrifices, counting on their corpses to win sympathy for Hamas’s cause.
Even as international institutions geared up to condemn Israel’s exercise of its right to self-defense, and American university students and professors organized demonstrations in support of Hamas terrorists, Israeli soldiers and officers adopted rules of engagement that respected the international laws of war. Israelis from all walks of life prepared meals for the troops around the clock at Tel Aviv restaurants and delivered them to the front lines. Parents of soldiers led efforts that raised millions of dollars to purchase essential military equipment. Retirees picked fruits and vegetables in untended fields. Combat veterans organized to provide counseling and schooling for the displaced and the bereaved. These, along with countless more acts of quiet valor, exhibited the vibrant and resilient spirit of Israeli society.
This spirit blends the free, the democratic, and the Jewish principles of the nation-state proclaimed in Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence. It energizes and elevates the individuals and communities responsible for Israel’s splendid achievements. And it fortifies the Jewish state to meet its formidable challenges.
This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.