A RACE OR A RELIGION?:

 From the outside, Israel appears to be a strong and effective state. The 2022 US & News Report, for example, ranks it as the 10th most powerful state in the world, with Israel's military placed 4th, preceded only by the United States, China, and Russia. Israel's Covid response has also been lauded internationally as among the most effective in the world, suggesting high state capacity. 

But this is increasingly a façade. Over the last few decades, Israel has allowed three shadow-states to gradually emerge under its nose: an ultra-Orthodox (or haredi) Jewish one, Bedouin-Arab areas of lawlessness and violence in the country's rural regions, and a nationalist West Bank settler movement operating in a twilight-zone of ambiguous Israeli authority over the Palestinians. In each case, what began as fringe communities have metastasized into full-blown areas of limited statehood. Even if Israel manages to resolve the settlements issue, unless it can integrate its growing haredi and Bedouin populations into broadly liberal modernity, Israel will become increasingly balkanized and unstable.

Achieving such a mammoth task of socio-economic integration over the coming decades appears to be increasingly precarious. This is partly due to the second reason I am concerned about the health of Israeli democracy: the disintegration of a viable political center marked by the precipitous decline in the electoral power of the Israeli center-left, Benjamin Netanyahu's transformation of Israel's dominant center-right party to a cult of personality, and the parallel rise of religious populist parties on Israel's far-right.

Last but not least, there is the hellish democratic conundrum of Israel's continued occupation and security control over more than two million Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Captured by Israel from Jordan in a defensive war in 1967, military occupation over these territories was supposed to be temporary, maintained until a peace settlement with either Jordan or an independent Palestinian state would separate the two peoples into two sovereign polities. Despite a growing circle of peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors, however, Jordan officially renounced its claims to the West Bank in 1988, and peace with the Palestinians has proven elusive ever since. International law prohibits an occupying power from extending voting rights to an occupied population. But how long can a temporary occupation last? At what point does the temporary occupation become de facto annexation and the fact that Israelis and Palestinians living in the West Bank are subject to different rules become democratically untenable?

The inability to disengage from the Palestinians places Israeli democracy in an incrementally-tightening temporal vise.

To Israel's friends in North America,

We are taking the unusual step of directly addressing you at a moment of acute crisis in Israel. We write with a sense of anguish and anxiety for the future of our country. All of us moved to Israel from North America and raised our children here. Between us are many decades of work as reporters, literary chroniclers and translators of Israeli reality for audiences abroad. We have explained and defended Israel against the campaign of distortions that seeks to turn the Jewish state into a pariah and will proudly continue to do so.

Today, though, protecting Israel also means defending it from a political leadership that is undermining our society's cohesion and its democratic ethos, the foundations of the Israeli success story. The changes afoot will have dire consequences for the solidarity of Israel's society and for its economic miracle, as our leading economists are warning. It will also threaten Israeli-American relations, and it will do grave damage to our relations with you, our sisters and brothers in the Diaspora.

This crisis is unique, and uniquely heartbreaking, because it comes from within.

Leading US financial institute JPMorgan has warned of a growing risk of investing in Israel due to the new government's far-reaching plans for overhauling the judicial system.

The internal memo released Friday came days after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pointed to both JPMorgan and fellow US banking giant Goldman Sachs as evidence that the judicial proposals were not chasing away potential investors.

In the memo, which was first published by Channel 12 news, JPMorgan cited both the judicial overhaul plans presented by Justice Minister Yariv Levin, as well as an increase in "geopolitical hostilities."

The document -- which stressed that the views expressed in the memo are indeed the bank's official positions -- compared Israel to Poland, which passed similar judicial reforms and subsequently had its credit rating downgraded in January 2016.

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