Perhaps there is only one area where Israel still appears solidly united today: the total war in Gaza. It is a war consensus that shows very few cracks, despite the squares around the world continuing to call for justice and peace alongside the Palestinian people. Yet, beyond the front, Israeli society remains torn.
A few months before the elections, the fractures that existed before October 7 are resurfacing, the result of a political management that many observers – starting from the columns ofHaaretz– do not hesitate to define as a true criminal operation against the citizens.
In this context, the 2026 economic maneuver, approved in a nighttime session at the Knesset, acted as a detonator: not just a simple accounting document, but a brutal act of political survival for Benjamin Netanyahu. Economic newspapers and institutional sources, such as theJerusalem Postand the official Knesset portal, emphasize that this is the highest budget in the history of the State: 850.6 billion shekels, equivalent to about 234 billion euros.
While the country is under military pressure, the governing coalition has diverted 800 million shekels to ultra-Orthodox schools, taking vital resources away from the community to finance institutions that refuse basic subjects and encourage evasion from military service. For a people born and raised with the uniform glued to their skin, nothing could be more intolerable than seeing defense funds sacrificed to support those who refuse to wear that uniform.
THIS SHIFTThe use of public money occurs at a paradoxical moment. The defense budget has risen to a record 143 billion shekels (39.4 billion euros) to support Operation Lion's Roar against Iran and its allies.
Yet, despite hyperbolic figures, military leaders have been calling for the recruitment of an additional 15,000 soldiers for weeks to avoid the operational collapse of the units. To cover the costs of this war machine and the demands of religious parties, the government has confirmed linear cuts of 3% to almost all ministries: from health to welfare to transportation, draining vital resources from civil services.
While pro-government press such asIsrael Hayomcelebrates the budget as a necessary act of responsibility to avoid the dissolution of the Knesset, centrist and left-wing media denounce it as the "theft of the century." The maneuver passed not only due to the unscrupulous financial engineering of Minister Smotrich but also through a parliamentary trick that caught the opposition off guard, provoking mockery from ministers Levin and Elkin towards opponents accused of failing to read between the lines of last-minute amendments.
Protecting this power system is no longer just the parliamentary majority, but a security apparatus that seems to have changed its guise: police chief Danny Levy is now accused of becoming the executive arm of Minister Itamar Ben Gvir. The violent repression of protests in Tel Aviv and the tolerance towards the illegalities of settlers in the West Bank outline the face of a law enforcement agency transformed into an electoral asset, a political police ready to stifle internal dissent.
Completing the picture of authoritarian drift, just in these days, is the final approval of the death penalty law for "terrorists" – only if they are Palestinian. Approved with 62 votes in favor, the law was celebrated by Ben Gvir popping champagne in the chamber, while Amnesty International and the UN denounce an institutionalized "war crime" that, providing for execution by hanging within 90 days for Palestinians accused of terrorism, pushes Israel out of the community of Western democracies.
WHILE THE JERUSALEM POSTtries to maintain an institutional line emphasizing the record amount of funds allocated to defense, among reservists and the middle class there is a deep sense of betrayal. The government's message is cynical: those who pay taxes and fight at the front are asked to make cuts to healthcare and education, while the fruits of their labor are used to buy the loyalty of the religious parties necessary for Netanyahu's continued hold on power. Israel thus finds itself in a suffocating grip, united in a iron fist outwardly but plundered internally by a coalition that has traded the future of the country for its own self-preservation.
To reassemble such a fragmented Israel, only one argument is needed, the only one capable of shaking those few desperate Israeli citizens who, along with other exhausted Palestinians, still call for peace between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea: annihilating the other to unite their own. In view of the elections, the strategy appears clear: to fuel the state of perpetual emergency.
A new Gaza will be needed, new bombardments in rapid succession, and the decimation of the Palestinian population to tighten the ranks of citizenship once again. Because for this right, the survival of the executive inevitably depends on the prolongation of horror, transforming the blood of the front into the only glue capable of holding together a country otherwise ready to explode against most of its representation.