'Hebrew weapons must not be used against Hebrew fighters'
The riots in support of Israeli soldiers accused of rape expose how much the taboos against civil war have broken down.
Things went topsy-turvy in Israel on Monday night. After months of international pressure regarding the treatment of inmates at the Sde Teiman prison, Israeli military police began a probe into one of the most egregious cases. Nine soldiers had allegedly raped a Palestinian prisoner so hard that he was sent to the hospital with a ruptured bowel, a severe injury to his anus, lung damage and broken ribs.
Police detained some the accused soldiers, leading to a political uproar. Nationalist rioters, including members of Israeli parliament, stormed both Sde Teiman and the Beit Lid military courts in support of the accused rapists. The army was forced to pull three battalions away from the Palestinian territories to guard the courthouse, and far-right security minister Itamar Ben Gvir was accused of refusing to deploy police to quell the riot, a charge he denied.
The riot raised the specter of something that hasn’t been seen since the founding of Israel in 1948: a Jewish civil war. And it has been a long time coming. Much has already been said about the settler movement’s encouragement of lawless behavior. Less has been written about the ways that October 7 and the subsequent war in Gaza have broken taboos against Israelis killing Israels.
Several times, undisciplined Israeli forces intending to kill Palestinians instead killed Israeli civilians, and some Israeli leaders accepted it as the cost of doing business. For a faction in Israel, revenge seems to be a higher priority than the cohesion of the state and the protection of its citizens. Israeli politics are entering uncharted waters.
Zionism and Israeli nationalism have always put an extremely high premium on Israeli and Jewish life. In order to avoid repeating the horrors that they suffered in diaspora, the logic goes, Jews must be able to practice collective self-defense through a state. Even violence against Palestinian or foreign civilians has been justified in terms of deterring threats to Israeli and Jewish life. Importantly, the state’s firepower would always be directed outwards, never inwards.
Soon after declaring its independence in 1948, the new Israeli government moved to bring different Jewish militias under a unified command. A ship known as the Altalena, which right-wing leader Menahem Begin was using to smuggle guns for his militia, became the test case. Prime minister David Ben Gurion demanded the surrender of the Altalena.
“There are not going to be two states. There are not going to be two armies,” he famously said. After a tense standoff and a brief exchange of fire that killed 26 troops, Begin backed down, conceding that “it is forbidden for a Hebrew weapon to be used against Hebrew fighters.”
The specter of a Hebrew civil war appeared again five decades later. A far-right nationalist named Yigal Amir assassinated prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 for signing an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord. Amir believed that Rabin was a rodef, a Hebrew term for someone who poses an active threat to Jewish lives and can only be stopped with death. According to Amir’s twisted logic, Begin was a co-belligerent with Palestinian rebels, a Hebrew fighter who had turned his weapons on his brothers.
For most of Israeli history, the question was not even on the table. Israel did not fight another full-scale military campaign on its own soil after 1948; its military planning revolved around counterinsurgency in Palestinian cities or wars in foreign nations. That counterinsurgency strategy often involved deploying massive firepower against civilian — but always non-Israeli, non-Jewish — populations.
The Hamas attacks of October 7 shattered the old paradigm. Now Palestinian rebels were occupying entire Israeli villages and terrorizing a captive Israeli population. Israeli forces struggled through the panic and chaos, suffering an “immense and complex quantity” of friendly fire incidents, in the words of one Israeli military correspondent. Going further, some Israeli commanders reportedly activated the Hannibal Directive, an order to kill surrendering Israeli troops rather than let them fall into enemy hands.
Veterans of October 7 have talked about shooting without knowing for sure what they were shooting at. An Israeli tank shelled a house full of both Hamas fighters and Israeli hostages in Kibbutz Be’eri. (The commander of that unit was just promoted to lead the entire Gaza Division.) A former hostage claimed that an Israeli helicopter had fired on her while she was being taken into Gaza, and Israeli police came to a similar conclusion.
When the Hamas fighters were driven back into Gaza, they took around 240 captives with them. Still reeling from the shock and trauma, Israel found itself in an unprecedented situation. A mass bombardment or invasion of Gaza would put additional Israeli civilians at risk, and raise the possibility of more situations like the Kibbutz Beeri incident.
In other words, Israel now had to make the same calculation around Israeli lives that it was accustomed to making around Palestinian and foreign lives.
The Israeli government consciously decided to prioritize the war on Gaza over the safety of the remaining hostages. Economy minister Nir Barakat said so openly to ABC News. A meeting between Netanyahu and hostages’ relatives turned into a vicious argument about whether the death of Israeli captives would be a worthy sacrifice for destroying Hamas.
Although popular opposition forced the government to soften its stance, a line had been crossed. Israeli politicians were publicly willing to accept that Israeli civilians would be killed by government policy.
Another line was crossed with the Castleman incident. During a Hamas attack in Jerusalem on December 6, retired Israeli policeman Yuval Castleman fought off the attackers and waited with his hands in the air for authorities to arrive. An army reservist, who believed Castleman was a surrendering Palestinian, shot him dead. The controversy quickly turned into a debate on whether it is acceptable to shoot a surrendering enemy.
Both sides ended up relitigating the case of Elor Azaria, an Israeli soldier jailed in 2015 for summarily executing a wounded, captured Palestinian attacker. Instead of reevaluating their stance in light of the Castleman incident, Azaria’s former defenders doubled down, arguing that soldiers’ right to perform field executions was more important than the risk to Israeli bystanders.
“Killing terrorists under these conditions is the appropriate way to act, morally and justly — even though it can also be painfully dangerous, as unfortunately happened in the death of Yuval Castleman,” declared one right-wing newspaper. Netanyahu did not defend Castleman’s killer, instead calling for a thorough investigation into the incident, but he also told reporters that “we might have to pay a price” for a well-armed society. “That’s life.”
It was already a leap for Netanyahu to sacrifice hostages for military objectives. It was a step further for him to declare that Israeli civilians may have to die for the principle of vigilante justice.
Then came an incident of Israeli troops directly killing Israeli hostages, up close and personal. Less than three weeks after the Castleman shooting, Israeli troops gunned down three hostages who had escaped Hamas captivity.
The troops said they mistook the hostages for surrendering Palestinians pulling an elaborate ruse, a defense that embarrassed the Israeli army internationally, since it implies that shooting disarmed prisoners was a matter of policy. Although the Israeli army said that the killing of hostages violated the rules of engagement, it also vowed to “hug” rather than punish the soldiers responsible.
Parents of two hostages echoed that sentiment. Iris Haim said in a message to troops that they should never “hesitate for a single moment — if you see a terrorist, don’t think that you have deliberately killed a hostage, you need to protect yourselves.” Avi Shimriz did say that the shooters should have hesitated, but “I cannot complain to our troops because they have encountered different situations where [Hamas] tried to ambush them and they suffered losses. I don’t want another such incident on my conscience.”
It was far from the callous disregard for human life and chaotic vigilantism that Barakat and Netanyahu endorsed. At the same time, the bereaved parents’ reaction showed just how far the social baseline had moved. The call that Hebrew weapons should not be used against Hebrew civilians had simply become unrealistic.
Meanwhile, the atmosphere of unrestrained violence has leaked outside of security policy, taking the form of gruesome personal crimes. In February 2024, an army reservist fresh off the Gazan front — said to be suffering from PTSD — shot dead 22 year old security guard Daniel Aminov in his own apartment. “I can't believe that a Jew, one of our own, killed him,” Aminov’s mother said in court. “I want them to give him the death penalty.”
Last month, Sigal Yana Itzkovich was arrested wielding an axe at a shopping mall, dripping blood. She confessed to killing her six year old son in a fit of paranoia. Her husband is an army reservist serving on the Gazan front. A false rumor spread that Itzkovich was a survivor of the October 7 attacks.
Of course, random murders do not make a civil war, nor do they mean that everyone connected to the Israeli war effort is a psychological time bomb. But they reveal a dangerous cauldron of impulses brewing underneath Israeli society. Israelis are tossed between feelings of vulnerability and invincibility, while being desensitized to violence in the process. Israel’s political Right seems to see a golden opportunity to push for final victory.
So far, these impulses have mainly been directed outwards. (A day after the riots, Israel carried out high-profile assassinations in Lebanon and Iran, which may yet become a regional war.) The pro-rapist riots on Monday gave a glimpse into what Israel could look like when the same forces are forced to turned inwards.
