Matti Friedman: Whiplash in Israel

On Monday, Israelis were preoccupied with the possibility of regional war breaking out in Lebanon when our attention was abruptly diverted to a threat closer to home: unprecedented scenes of far-right Israelis, including lawmakers from Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition, breaking into two military bases and fighting with soldiers. They were protesting the arrest of nine soldiers on charges of sexually abusing a Hamas suspect at a military prison facility called Sde Teiman. 

Citizens of the tiny Jewish state facing Iranian proxies on a half-dozen fronts were thus forced to watch Israeli soldiers called away from far more urgent missions to fend off other Israelis with their fists. The army chief of staff himself had to be called away from planning the coming military moves to put things in order. The impression was of a society barely in control of itself.

Then, just a day later, a country with the same name but which seemed like a completely different place carried out two stupendously complicated assassinations of terror leaders in enemy capitals in a matter of hours. 

First a top Hezbollah commander, Fuad Shukr, in the heart of the Shi’a militia’s stronghold in south Beirut, a retaliation for the killing by Hezbollah of 12 children playing soccer in northern Israel this weekend. Then the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas political leader, in Tehran.

The strikes demonstrated the technological and intelligence capabilities that Israel has built up over decades, and which failed abysmally on October 7, 2023, during the Hamas invasion that triggered the current war. Israelis were relieved to see that the country still has those tools and the courage to use them. 

The riots at the military prison and courthouse, on the other hand, demonstrated the internal rot that threatens this society as much as any external enemy—which is why it would be unwise to allow the drama in Beirut and Tehran to obscure what happened at home. 

Official details of the crime for which the nine prison guards were arrested remain scant, but according to Israeli press reports the prisoner, a commander in the elite “Nukhba” unit that spearheaded the October 7 terror attack, had been brought to the hospital with signs that he’d been sodomized with an object. 

One wouldn’t think the soldiers’ arrest was a controversial decision given the shocking nature of the charge. But to the religious extremists who quickly congregated outside the bases and then breached the gates, Israel’s court system and military chain of command are Western perversions that weaken the nation and foil the will of “the people,” meaning them.  

For a moment, Lebanon—a sunny and prosperous country on the Mediterranean coast before it allowed itself to descend into mismanagement and civil war—appeared less like a military threat than a vision of Israel’s future.