[This is the third in a five-part article series on “Israel’s Zombie Economy,” based on the breakthrough series of broadcasts on Israel’s political economy with Shir Hever. Click here to watch the interviews for this series and see below for links to the remaining parts of the article series]
The definition of a "nation state" is a state in which the members of the nation and the citizens of the state are the same group (Brittanica, 2025). Israel as an apartheid state has never been a nation state; its entire political structure is premised on the idea that the Jewish nation and the citizens of the State of Israel are separate groups with an overlap between them – those who belong to both categories are supposed to be the ruling class (Amnesty International, 2022). It is, therefore, ironic that the July 2018 basic law legislated by Israel’s Knesset by a large majority is called "The Law of the Nation State." It prescribes exactly the opposite of what its name implies. Instead of defining Israel as a nation state, it exposes the racist and colonial nature of the State of Israel by declaring that it belongs to the Jewish nation, and that non-Jewish citizens are restricted to individual citizen’s rights, and enjoy no collective rights (Knesset, 2018).
Apartheid is incompatible with the concept of a liberal democracy, but the reason usually mentioned in political critique of apartheid is that ethno-national states such as Israel fail to award equal rights to their citizens and subjects. The phrase "equal rights" misleadingly creates the impression that in an apartheid system some people enjoy rights and others do not, or that some enjoy more rights than others. Rights, however, as they are defined in the Declaration of the Rights of Man or the US’s Declaration of Independence (the texts which came to define the contemporary notion of a liberal democracy), are by definition inalienable. Israel offers no inalienable rights to anyone, not even to Jewish Israelis, but only privileges. Privileges are tiered and unpredictable. The racist discourse in Israel often states unapologetically that if Palestinian citizens of Israel are "allowed" to hold senior positions in the private market or in public office, they should be "grateful" for being allowed to do so. In other words, it is not their right, but their privilege (B’tselem, 2022).
Because privileges are precarious, individuals and groups fight to preserve their privilege based on a sectarian logic. This sectarian logic explains, for example, why the organizers of protests against Netanyahu's far-right government created an unwelcoming space for Palestinians to protest with them and banned Palestinian flags (Ziv, 2023).
During the Covid crisis, Netanyahu exploited the regime of privileges to convince Israelis to get vaccinated. He announced that Israel would not provide vaccines to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza (even though this policy also endangered the health of Israelis), and secured the first vaccine shot for himself, which he received on live television (TOI Staff, 2020). Netanyahu thus turned the vaccine into a privilege, a status symbol which proves one's place in the strict hierarchy. Israel became the most vaccinated society in the world within weeks in per-capita terms, if one only counts citizens. When the hype regarding the privilege of access to the vaccine started to wear off, Israel was quickly overtaken by the UAE in vaccination rate and then started dropping further behind (Our World in Data, 2025).
The tribal nature of Israeli society was mentioned by its former president Reuven Rivlin in a famous 2015 speech in which he called for reconciliation among the "four tribes": the "Israeli Arabs" (a derogatory term for Palestinians with Israeli citizenship), the Ultra-Orthodox, the Mizrahi (Jews who originate from Arab or Muslim countries) and the Ashkenazi (Jews of European origin). His speech was already a sign that as a settler colony established through the migration of settlers into Palestine, the "melting pot" fantasy of Israel is failing (iCenter, 2025).
In fact, Rivlin’s tribal framework deeply misunderstands the difference between a nation and a tribe. While tribes are face-to-face communities, based on familiar relationships, the nation is an imagined community (Anderson, 2016). Rivlin referred to tribes as components of the nation, but the implication that Palestinians are a part of the Israeli national collective is not accepted neither by Zionism, as the Law of the Nation State proved, nor by the Indigenous Palestinians themselves.
The speech was given after a bloody year in 2014, in which Israel launched a vengeful attack into the West Bank following the abduction and murder of three settlers. In addition, individual acts of murder of Palestinians proliferated, with the Dawabshe family burnt alive in the village of Duma in the occupied West Bank by National-Orthodox settlers, and 16-year-old Muhammed Abu-Khdair from East Jerusalem burnt alive by Ultra-Orthodox Settlers. This was following by Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip that lasted 51 days. A society consumed by revenge, in which the state does not hold monopoly over what constitutes legitimate violence, is a society on the verge of disintegration, hence Rivlin’s speech.
In fact, there are far more than four tribes. None of the groups which Rivlin mentioned are homogeneous. Apartheid is a system based on privileges and status and by its very nature it tends towards increasingly complex hierarchies. Israel's political crisis in which no coalition was able to hold on to power for a complete term, started in 2014 when the government fell amid mass protests by the Ultra-Orthodox against military service as National Orthodox and secular parties made the recruitment of the Ultra-Orthodox a major part of their platform. But neither faction was willing to discuss ending the occupation or Israel’s apartheid system (Associated Press, 2014).
Netanyahu thrived during that political crisis by forging one ad-hoc coalition after another, a different mix of parties each time who were lured by the promise of power and the chance for upward mobility in the complex hierarchy and then hitting a crisis because of the failure to find common ground with other such sectarian groups. For a brief time in 2021-2022, a coalition was formed with eight political parties and a rotation of two prime ministers, unified by nothing except their personal opposition to Netanyahu (Averbuch & Lintl, 2022).
The so-called "Government of Change" headed by Lapid and Bennett failed to change anything, because it was a coalition spanning from the Islamic Party to the Islamophobic and semi-fascist "Israel Our Home" party. The opposition Likud party decided it would vote against renewing Israel's racist emergency order to deny the right of family unification only from Palestinians. The "Government of Change" managed to find enough votes to keep the emergency order in place, but broke apart quickly afterwards (Kingsky, 2022).
The political acrobatics are all desperate attempts to evade the simple political truth, that while Jewish nationalism is in crisis, its breakdown into tribes signals the breakdown of the imagined collective into bitterly opposed sectarian face-to-face communities, while the Palestinian nationhood remains intact. Although Israel’s apartheid electoral system was designed to make sure that Zionist parties would always have a majority in the Knesset, no Zionist coalition is stable for long because of internal divisions. The alternative – respecting the collective rights of Palestinians to self-determination in their own country – is terrifying to Zionist Jews.
The breakdown into tribes is most relevant regarding Israel's military. In 2016 Israeli soldier Elor Azaria’s murder of Abdel Fatah al-Sharif in Hebron was caught live by a B'tselem camera. This event is one of thousands of such killings of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers, but this particular murder was important because Azaria argued in his trial that killing Palestinians is his right (and by this, he meant privilege), and that combat pilots, who are almost all Ashkenazi, never face trials for killing Palestinians (Guiora, 2021). He was backed by large parts of the Israeli public and the military itself, as a representative of a faction within Israel's military which was discriminated against because it must follow orders but not receive anything in return.
Yagil Levy, an Israeli professor and former general, wrote several books on the internal hierarchy which developed within Israel's military, most notably Israel's Death Hierarchy (Levy, 2012) on how the military values the lives of soldiers differently based on their ethnic and religious identity, and how this trend has become increasingly divisive with the passage of time. In a groundbreaking 2023 article by 972 Magazine, Levy argued that Israel's army split into two parts: the "sophisticated army" and the "brutish army." The divide cuts along units, with the air force, drones, intelligence and medical corps belonging to the first and the infantry, artillery and armor belonging to the second army. The "sophisticated" army is crewed mostly by Ashkenazi Jews, by secular Jews, by middle-class educated Jews who are politically associated with liberal Zionism and the Labor party. The "brutish" army is comprised mostly of Mizrahi Jews, religious, lower-class and poorly educated, and politically associated with the right wing (Levy, 2022).
At this stage, less than half of Israelis who turn 18 end up recruited for military service. When entire "tribes" are exempt from military service (mainly Muslims, religious women and Ultra-Orthodox), it becomes both socially and technically easy for Israelis who wish to avoid military service to evade the draft. In 2010 the military manpower department admitted that only 48 percent of Israelis are recruited at age 18 (Pfeffer, 2010). The number in 2023 is unknown. I argued in an article that year, referring to Levy's analysis above, that splitting the military into two parts prevents it from acting as an effective military force. I claimed that the pogrom in Huwara in February 2023 was a sign that Israel's military is descending into the mentality of an angry mob: uncoordinated, lacking in military discipline (Hever, 2023).
After Israel launched a genocide campaign in Gaza, the transformation was completed. The distinctions between regular soldiers, reservists, obligatory service soldiers and volunteers were reversed. Soldiers decorated their uniforms with symbols to represent religious and political affiliations (which is technically illegal, New Arab Staff, 2024). Throughout the genocide, soldiers were rarely punished or even investigated over insubordination. When soldiers disobeyed orders, either by committing atrocities or by deserting, the military command turned a blind eye (Peleg & Shezaf, 2024). Soldiers who asked to leave were emotionally blackmailed by their officers ("will you abandon your comrades in arms?") but not punished (Levinson, 2025).
Tensions reached a peak in July 2024, when Israeli media exposed that the Sde Teiman detention center in the Naqab was a site of torture, including sexual torture, of Palestinian prisoners from Gaza. A militia mobilized to prevent the arrest of the suspected guards, goaded by members of the Knesset and ministers from the far-right (Speakman Cordall, 2024). Israel's most powerful journalist Amit Segal joked that the problem about raping Palestinians is "getting caught" (Morag, 2024). When in October 2025 it became known that the chief military prosecutor, Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, had leaked a video of the abuse of prisoners to the press in order to generate public support for investigating the guards, the Israeli public turned against her as a "traitor," despite the fact that she refrained from investigating any of the war crimes and crimes against humanity which Israel has committed in Gaza. Tomer-Yerushalmi resigned and was later arrested (MEE staff, 2025). Yagil Levy commented that her identity (belonging to the "sophisticated army": Ashkenazi, secular, well-educated) had eroded her authority as a chief military prosecutor (Levy, 2025).
When Israel's Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir created his "national guard," an armed settler militia, he gutted Israel's police and created an environment of fear in which protests against the genocide were met with ferocious violence. An unprecedented level of internal repression in Israel is targeting not only the Palestinian citizens and other discriminated minorities, but also the privileged elite groups (Imbert, 2023). The internal division between the Jewish tribes keeps them from offering any meaningful resistance to the rampant far-right, even as its violence destroys the settler colony itself.
More from the Israel's Zombie Economy Series
Part 1: The War Currency
Part 2: The Counterrevolution of the Israeli Arms Industry
Part 3: Israel’s Breakdown into Tribes
Part 4: Is Israel’s Economy on the Verge of Collapse?
Part 5: The Disinformation Bubble
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