What do you think?
Rate this book
How Long Will Israel Survive Threat Wthn
Israel is surrounded by an array of ever-changing threats. But what if its most serious challenge comes from within? There was once a national consensus in Israeli politics was split between left and right, but its people were broadly secular and liberal. Over the past decade, the country has fractured into tribes---disparate groups with little shared understanding of what it means to be a Zionist, let alone an Israeli. A once-unified population fights internecine battles---over religion and state, war and peace, race and identity---contesting the very notion of a 'Jewish and democratic' state.
While this shift has profound implications for Israel's relationship with the broadly liberal Jewish diaspora, the greatest consequences will be felt at home. Israel's tribes increasingly lead separate lives; even the army, once a great melting-pot, is now a political and cultural battleground. Tamir Pardo, former head of Mossad, has warned of the risk of civil war.
Gregg Carlstrom maps this conflict, from cosmopolitan Tel Aviv to the hilltops of the West Bank, and asks a pressing will the Middle East's strongest power survive its own internal contradictions?
While this shift has profound implications for Israel's relationship with the broadly liberal Jewish diaspora, the greatest consequences will be felt at home. Israel's tribes increasingly lead separate lives; even the army, once a great melting-pot, is now a political and cultural battleground. Tamir Pardo, former head of Mossad, has warned of the risk of civil war.
Gregg Carlstrom maps this conflict, from cosmopolitan Tel Aviv to the hilltops of the West Bank, and asks a pressing will the Middle East's strongest power survive its own internal contradictions?
256 pages, Hardcover
Published July 20, 2017
21 people are currently reading
182 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
January 16, 2018
A fascinating account of the internal divisions in Israeli society. The book's episodic structure gives it a dynamic feel and fast pace linking together issues of race, ethnicity, religion, politics, and history.
May 12, 2024
For all the attention it receives on the international stage (which has only amplified since the Hamas 10/7 attacks), I feel most of the world, and I would include myself in this category, only really knows Israel through the prism of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and not much about Israel the country. Gregg Carlstrom, the Middle East correspondent for The Economist, helped me to fill in some of the gaps with this very informative, readable, and compact book about modern Israeli society, specifically focusing on the years during Benjamin Netanyahu's second premiership. He covers the full spectrum of economics, culture, politics, and religion. Of course, since you can't really write about Israel without discussing their forever war with the Palestinians, there are sections on that, too.
A shooting in Hebron
The current Israeli war on Gaza and the outburst of frenzied nationalism within Israel has helped disguise the fact that it's actually a bitterly divided society. As the title of this book indicates, those fractures threaten the very future of the state. For Carlstrom, a prime example of this domestic discord was a 2016 shooting in the West Bank city of Hebron, when an Israeli soldier, Elor Azaria, shot and killed a Palestinian assailant after he unsuccessfully tried to stab a group of Israeli soldiers. There was no self-defense case to be made, since the assailant was lying wounded on the ground and posed no imminent threat. It was an open-and-shut case of murder. Or at least it should have been. After the soldier was charged with manslaughter, the Israeli right rallied to his defense: Netanyahu even made a sympathetic phone call to the defendant's father and a petition calling for his release soon gained 63,000 signatures. Israeli liberal opinion was scandalized by these actions. And not just Israeli liberals, either. Netanyahu's defense minister, a member of Netanyahu's Likud party, was also offended by the phone call, and, after vocally defending an Israeli general who supported Azaria's prosecution, was replaced as defense minister by a far-right politician who once called for "disloyal" Israeli citizens to be beheaded with axes.
Not your father's Israel
If you want to understand how an obvious case of murder could have been so polarizing within Israel, you have to look at the broader changes in Israeli society. As Carlstrom explains, this is no longer the nation of Golda Meir and socialist kibbutzim. Some 1/4 of Israelis are now affiliated with the "national-religious" camp. As the term implies, they're hawkish on security matters and conservative on social issues (3/4 support gender segregation in schools). A smaller, but growing percentage, are ultra-Orthodox (haredi): they're about 1/8 of the population now and are projected to reach a quarter's share by 2050. Their influence is already felt: public transportation is largely unavailable on Saturdays and Israel still lacks civil marriage. They have a huge impact of Israeli society in other ways: a majority of haredi adults don't work and few serve in the military; most haredi children graduate from religious schools without even an understanding of basic math and science. Israel likes to bill itself as a "start-up" nation, but an increasing percentage of its young people are entering adulthood better versed in the Old Testament than in multiplication tables. Even the Israeli center-left, a shadow of its former self, holds views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, like annexation of settlement blocs and control over a united Jerusalem, that are extreme to the international community. If there's one huge revelation I took away from reading this book, it's the realization that Benjamin Netanyahu, seen internationally as a hard-right figure, is actually a moderate within Israel.
Fractured country
While Israel is a country shifting rapidly to the right, it's hardly a monolith. Carlstrom does a good job walking you through the various demographic divides: Ashkenazi (European) Jews vs. Mizrahi (Middle Eastern) Jews, the latter of whom were viewed with racist contempt by Israel's European founders; the fortunes of the 130,000 Ethiopian Israelis, and the collective experience of Israel's 20% Arab minority, seen by many Israelis as a fifth column. There are lots of fascinating vignettes in this book that capture this divide, from the waitress at a Tel Aviv bar despairingly saying that she didn't know a single Likud voter after Netanyahu's come-from-behind victory in the 2015 election, to the ultra-Orthodox Jews protesting outside of Ashdod shopping malls for doing business on Saturdays. There are equally revealing passages about Israeli settlers in the West Bank, some of whom can only be described as fascist.
Where is Israel heading?
People have been scrambling since October 7th, 2023 to find comparisons between the current Israeli war on Gaza and past wars, but one already exists: the Israeli war on Gaza in 2014, which Carlstrom concisely summarizes. Israel killed 2,000 people in Gaza, mostly civilians, displaced a quarter of the population, and destroyed tens of thousands of homes. Combined with the siege imposed upon it since 2007, Gaza was already a society on the brink before the latest Israeli onslaught. Yet especially noteworthy was the almost complete lack of dissent against the war in Israel, even as Israel came under heated international criticism for its conduct. Even in liberal Tel Aviv, anti-war protests were sparsely attended. One professor who wrote an email to his students expressing sympathy for Palestinian civilian casualties was even threatened with jail by a Likud member of parliament. It is hardly the sign of healthy society when the only common cause that binds it together is its periodic violence against its stateless, impoverished subjects.
Carlstrom pessimistically ends by noting the dangerous trends he documented in the book are only accelerating, with polls showing that younger Israelis are more right-wing, religious, and nationalist than their parents. He thinks Israel is heading toward an illiberal future and, as the oppression of the Palestinians deepens, will come to be seen in the international community as South Africa was during the apartheid era. It is hard to disagreement with that assessment.
A shooting in Hebron
The current Israeli war on Gaza and the outburst of frenzied nationalism within Israel has helped disguise the fact that it's actually a bitterly divided society. As the title of this book indicates, those fractures threaten the very future of the state. For Carlstrom, a prime example of this domestic discord was a 2016 shooting in the West Bank city of Hebron, when an Israeli soldier, Elor Azaria, shot and killed a Palestinian assailant after he unsuccessfully tried to stab a group of Israeli soldiers. There was no self-defense case to be made, since the assailant was lying wounded on the ground and posed no imminent threat. It was an open-and-shut case of murder. Or at least it should have been. After the soldier was charged with manslaughter, the Israeli right rallied to his defense: Netanyahu even made a sympathetic phone call to the defendant's father and a petition calling for his release soon gained 63,000 signatures. Israeli liberal opinion was scandalized by these actions. And not just Israeli liberals, either. Netanyahu's defense minister, a member of Netanyahu's Likud party, was also offended by the phone call, and, after vocally defending an Israeli general who supported Azaria's prosecution, was replaced as defense minister by a far-right politician who once called for "disloyal" Israeli citizens to be beheaded with axes.
Not your father's Israel
If you want to understand how an obvious case of murder could have been so polarizing within Israel, you have to look at the broader changes in Israeli society. As Carlstrom explains, this is no longer the nation of Golda Meir and socialist kibbutzim. Some 1/4 of Israelis are now affiliated with the "national-religious" camp. As the term implies, they're hawkish on security matters and conservative on social issues (3/4 support gender segregation in schools). A smaller, but growing percentage, are ultra-Orthodox (haredi): they're about 1/8 of the population now and are projected to reach a quarter's share by 2050. Their influence is already felt: public transportation is largely unavailable on Saturdays and Israel still lacks civil marriage. They have a huge impact of Israeli society in other ways: a majority of haredi adults don't work and few serve in the military; most haredi children graduate from religious schools without even an understanding of basic math and science. Israel likes to bill itself as a "start-up" nation, but an increasing percentage of its young people are entering adulthood better versed in the Old Testament than in multiplication tables. Even the Israeli center-left, a shadow of its former self, holds views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, like annexation of settlement blocs and control over a united Jerusalem, that are extreme to the international community. If there's one huge revelation I took away from reading this book, it's the realization that Benjamin Netanyahu, seen internationally as a hard-right figure, is actually a moderate within Israel.
Fractured country
While Israel is a country shifting rapidly to the right, it's hardly a monolith. Carlstrom does a good job walking you through the various demographic divides: Ashkenazi (European) Jews vs. Mizrahi (Middle Eastern) Jews, the latter of whom were viewed with racist contempt by Israel's European founders; the fortunes of the 130,000 Ethiopian Israelis, and the collective experience of Israel's 20% Arab minority, seen by many Israelis as a fifth column. There are lots of fascinating vignettes in this book that capture this divide, from the waitress at a Tel Aviv bar despairingly saying that she didn't know a single Likud voter after Netanyahu's come-from-behind victory in the 2015 election, to the ultra-Orthodox Jews protesting outside of Ashdod shopping malls for doing business on Saturdays. There are equally revealing passages about Israeli settlers in the West Bank, some of whom can only be described as fascist.
Where is Israel heading?
People have been scrambling since October 7th, 2023 to find comparisons between the current Israeli war on Gaza and past wars, but one already exists: the Israeli war on Gaza in 2014, which Carlstrom concisely summarizes. Israel killed 2,000 people in Gaza, mostly civilians, displaced a quarter of the population, and destroyed tens of thousands of homes. Combined with the siege imposed upon it since 2007, Gaza was already a society on the brink before the latest Israeli onslaught. Yet especially noteworthy was the almost complete lack of dissent against the war in Israel, even as Israel came under heated international criticism for its conduct. Even in liberal Tel Aviv, anti-war protests were sparsely attended. One professor who wrote an email to his students expressing sympathy for Palestinian civilian casualties was even threatened with jail by a Likud member of parliament. It is hardly the sign of healthy society when the only common cause that binds it together is its periodic violence against its stateless, impoverished subjects.
Carlstrom pessimistically ends by noting the dangerous trends he documented in the book are only accelerating, with polls showing that younger Israelis are more right-wing, religious, and nationalist than their parents. He thinks Israel is heading toward an illiberal future and, as the oppression of the Palestinians deepens, will come to be seen in the international community as South Africa was during the apartheid era. It is hard to disagreement with that assessment.
December 31, 2018
It’s rare to find a book on Israel that actually focuses on the domestic issues effecting the country today. Gregg Carlstrom’s How Long Will Israel Survive? fills that gap. While the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict does very much impact how issues are approached, the book tends to focus more on how the Israeli right and ultra-orthodox are contributing to a kind of Israel—deeply religious and far right—that isn’t part of the original message of a secular Israel established in 1948.
December 25, 2021
For the most part, this was a very informative book - but I felt that the concluding chapter didn’t really live up to its promise. It’s still difficult to understand why Israel is lurching so far to the right. Despite the title, the book does not explain, or attempt to explain, where it all ends.
3.5 stars in the end, although reading through it I kept expecting to rate it four stars, because of its usefulness on economic issues and the breadth of its insights.
The last chapter though, looking at Brexit, not really looking at Trump, seemed cobbled together with something attempting a conclusion. It did not really deliver.
3.5 stars in the end, although reading through it I kept expecting to rate it four stars, because of its usefulness on economic issues and the breadth of its insights.
The last chapter though, looking at Brexit, not really looking at Trump, seemed cobbled together with something attempting a conclusion. It did not really deliver.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews