WhatsappHow Israel’s political left Is normalizing national self-destruction.
Israel’s democracy is not collapsing because citizens protest. Protest is a sign of civic life. The danger to Israel’s democracy is that parts of Israel’s political and cultural establishment have begun treating disruption, delegitimization, and even military refusal as normal tools for winning power.
This trend matters because it erodes trust in institutions that a small country at war cannot afford to weaken.
What worries me is not criticism of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or of any government policy. It is the growing willingness to frame Israel itself as an illegitimate regime—and to justify extreme tactics on that basis.
A striking example came recently from Amir Shperling, a prominent satirical voice and senior writer for Israel’s popular TV satire show Eretz Nehederet. In a viral post on X, Shperling compared Israel under Netanyahu to the Islamic Republic of Iran and argued that Israelis should learn from Iranian protesters who burn police stations and break the law.
Iran is a totalitarian Islamist dictatorship that crushes dissent, persecutes women for basic freedoms, and executes opponents. Israel is a democracy with competitive elections, a combative press, an independent judiciary, and one of the most permissive protest cultures in the West.
When influential voices collapse that moral distinction, they are not merely criticizing a government; they are normalizing the idea that violence and lawlessness are understandable—even admirable—responses to Israeli politics.
Shperling is not alone. A similar message was amplified from the protest stage by Nava Rozolyo.
Calls to “shut down the country” were not confined to fringe activists. Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak publicly urged mass, sustained civil disobedience for years. In 2023, he argued that disruption on a massive scale was the “only way” to stop the government.
Civil disobedience can be legitimate when it is measured, nonviolent, and aimed at expanding rights under genuinely oppressive conditions. But when senior figures treat paralysis of daily life as a routine political lever, the line between protest and coercion blurs quickly. And when the rhetoric escalates to talk of “blood in the streets,” the message received by the public is not a warning but a permission structure.
The state’s own legal leadership adds to the problem. In July 2023, Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara said at a cabinet meeting that there can be no effective protest without disturbing public order.
It is hard to maintain the rule of law when the top legal official signals that broad disruption is not only expected but almost required for a protest to be “effective.” Predictably, Israelis then watched major highways blocked night after night with uneven enforcement and little sense of where lawful protest ended and sanctioned chaos began.
The gravest development, in my view, was the normalization of military refusal during the 2023 protest wave. Prominent activists and organizations encouraged reservists, particularly the highest military elite, to threaten refusal to serve.
This was often framed as “moral,” “voluntary,” or “temporary.” But the practical effect was to inject partisan politics into the IDF’s cohesion, which is built on the principle that the army is not a political actor.
This is not an abstract concern. Israel’s enemies study our internal fractures. After Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas leaders explicitly pointed to Israel’s internal chaos and the refusal crisis as evidence of weakening deterrence. Whether one places more blame on Hamas’s capabilities, intelligence failures, or political decisions, the broader point stands: publicly advertising national fracture is strategically reckless.
Since the massacre, some of the same voices that romanticized disruption and refusal now present themselves as the responsible guardians of security and democracy. Yet in a country facing multi-front threats, accountability matters. Unity in wartime does not mean uniformity. It means recognizing that tactics do not simply “pressure the government,” they pressure the State.
Consider the ultra-Orthodox draft debate. It is a genuine national challenge that deserves serious, respectful policy work. But parts of the protest movement treated it as a destabilization weapon, a way to inflame internal tensions and fracture coalitions rather than to build workable models of service, training, and integration.
Israel can and should debate how to share burdens more fairly. But if the goal is reform, the method cannot be perpetual escalation designed to humiliate one community into submission. That is not nation-building; it is internal warfare.
Another troubling sign is the appetite for shutting down dissenting media. Yair Golan, the head of the party now calling itself “The Democrats,” has repeatedly argued that Channel 14 should be closed because it is “poisonous” and harmful to the state.
In any liberal democracy, the answer to speech you dislike is more speech—criticism, rebuttal, competition—not state power used to silence a private outlet.
When political leaders advocate closing channels rather than debating them, they reveal an illiberal instinct: democracy is fine as long as the “right people” control the narrative.
The crisis is deepened when legal institutions are perceived, rightly or wrongly, as political actors rather than neutral referees. A current example is the Attorney General’s effort to force the dismissal of Interior Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, reportedly on the grounds that sound more like policy disagreement than criminal conduct.
In a healthy system, removing an elected minister should require clear statutory authority and a high threshold, not a contest over policy preferences. When courts and prosecutors become entangled in partisan disputes, public trust erodes. And once trust collapses, governance becomes impossible.
Mainstream media has also played a decisive role in turning radical tactics into respectable language. Military refusal was sometimes presented as a principled act of civic courage. Calls to disrupt daily life were romanticized as “saving democracy.” Comparisons of Israel to Iran were treated as edgy analysis rather than a dangerous inversion.
Israelis need not agree on Netanyahu, judicial reform, or any party platform to recognize the basic principle: the legitimacy of the state and the cohesion of its defense forces are not bargaining chips.
Israel’s enemies would like nothing more than to see Israelis convinced that their own state is illegitimate, their courts are political weapons, their media is propaganda, and their army is just another arena for partisan struggle. A society that internalizes that story will eventually act it out.
We can and must argue fiercely over policy. We must protest when we believe a government is wrong. But we must reject rhetoric and tactics that treat national breakdown as a strategic option.
If you believe the government is leading Israel in the wrong direction, persuade voters. Build institutions. Compete in elections. If you believe the opposition is exploiting fear and fracture, demand better leadership there, too.
Either way, the goal should be to strengthen Israel’s democratic resilience—not to burn down the guardrails that keep us a functioning society.
