Former Israeli Defense Warns: ‘Israel Is One Step Away From A Civil War.’

Former Israeli Defense Minister, Benny Gantz, has warned that Israel is one step away from entering a civil war. This is being said in the midst of Netanyahu’s push to reduce the power of Israel’s highest court. As we read in the Cradle:

In a series of tweets made on 17 March, former Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz expressed his fear over the eruption of a civil war in Israel, lamenting what he referred to as a ‘disintegration’ of Israeli society.

The tweets come in light of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan for a complete overhaul of the Israeli judicial system.

“I’m afraid there will be a civil war here. I believe that no one wants it, but the deterioration is on a negative slope, and the danger of its occurrence is increasing. These are not tongue-in-cheek words, these are not prophecies of wrath, I live within my people, and I see how we are falling apart,” Gantz said.

“This coup could be the basis for the collapse of the State of Israel as a Jewish, democratic, safe, and just state … whoever takes advantage of … the Knesset to promote a predatory move that will destroy the State of Israel from within, is not fit to lead the country. Netanyahu, I am turning to you: we are a step away from an abyss,” he added.

The name Judas simply means Jew or Judea (Yehuda, the nation of the Jews) and as Judas destroyed himself after partaking in the murder of Christ, the Jews in the future — the descendants of the ones who told Pilate, “His blood be on us, and on our children” (Matthew 27:25) — will destroy themselves just as their ancestors did in their war with Rome and Masada.

Christ was the fullness of Humanity. When the Jewish religious order had Him crucified, they murdered Humanity itself. Thus, Israel, like Judas, will eventually destroy itself. Even the president of Israel, Isaac Herzog, warned:

“Israel is in the throes of a profound crisis. Anyone who thinks that a real civil war, of human life, is a line that we will not reach has no idea. The abyss is within touching distance.”

We are currently witnessing Israel crack and shake in a cacophony of rage within its own society. This rage is against the government, and the simmering anger lies between Israel’s liberal secularists and its religious and right-wingers. The divide has always been in Israel, but its fault lines have been really been exposed amidst the anger over Netanyahu’s judicial policy. According to the Rolling Stone: “Netanyahu’s government has committed to passing several of its most ambitious bills, including a Supreme Court Override Law, which would relegate Israel’s high court rulings to social commentary, and a law to stuff the Judicial Appointments Committee with politicians, by Passover, which begins on April 5.”

The former head of Israeli intelligence (Mossad), Tamir Pardo, stated that Israel is “on the verge of collapse.” He warned that Israelis are at the very precipice of “the total destruction of the state of Israel.” Major Israeli author, David Grossman, stated that while for years there has been this sense of unity in Israel, the divide is there and it is intense. Grossman stated:

“But somewhere in the depths of our hearts, we knew that we were not really brother … We knew that there are vast gaps, and variant yearnings of the heart, with religious people wanting a halachic [religious] state, whereas for me, it is an aberration to think of stoning someone over LGBTQ rights or that a non-Jew has a lesser value. All these things hovered in the background, but we thought we’d overcome it. … These are not just words. Suddenly, we see that what we thought we could always subsume, the lack of similarity between us … [is] staring us in the face.”

The February 2023, Israeli Voice Index, a nonpartisan survey, shows that 72% of Israelis think that tensions between numerous factions of society have intensified under the current government. Nearly 20% of Israelis have partaken in protests against Netanyahu’s government.

Even reservists in the Israeli army are resisting Netanyahu. Royi Elcabets, chief of staff for Israel’s Southern Command, stated that he is presently exerting around 70% of his time to opposing Netanyahu. He told Rolling Stone:

“I think we are at a critical moment in our national story, and there is real concern that we could lose Israel’s identity as a Jewish, democratic state”

Elcabets went on to say that he administers a group of some 2,000 reservists, including over 40 generals, who “want to raise a red flag — no, a black flag. If this country does not remain democratic with an independent judiciary, and they succeed in changing the regime, it will critically harm the reserves.” Israeli Army Chief of Staff General Herzi Halevi, in the face of reservist anger, told an auditorium full of reservists at Tel Aviv University that the Israel Defense Forces “cannot operate without the volunteer spirit of the reservists.” If Israel’s reservists go against their own government, Israel will be internally fragmented.

As Judas destroyed himself after he took part in the murder of Christ, so Israel — being the nation that declared in the trial of Christ, “His blood be on us, and on our children” (Matthew 27:25) — will destroy itself in the end. Sycophancy and professional exaggeration was most definitely exhibited in the mobbish trial of Christ. Christ spoke of the Kingdom of Heaven, and these deceivers used this to tell Pilate that He was planning a revolution against the kingdom of the Caesar. They took something that was truly said and inflated it for a false accusation, filled with hysteria about sedition. Every tyranny has the use of political exaggerations about national security as its foundation for unjust policies. This truly was witnessed in the trial of Christ when the elites of Judea hollered about Christ being an enemy of the Caesar who they exalted as their only king:

From then on Pilate sought to release Him, but the Jews cried out, saying, “If you let this Man go, you are not Caesar’s friend. Whoever makes himself a king speaks against Caesar.”

When Pilate therefore heard that saying, he brought Jesus out and sat down in the judgment seat in a place that is called The Pavement, but in Hebrew, Gabbatha. Now it was the Preparation Day of the Passover, and about the sixth hour. And he said to the Jews, “Behold your King!”

But they cried out, “Away with Him, away with Him! Crucify Him!”

Pilate said to them, “Shall I crucify your King?”

The chief priests answered, “We have no king but Caesar!” (John 19:12—15)

They rejected Christ as their King, and instead chose a king who called himself divine. They were possessed by the same spirit that possessed the Hebrews in the time of Samuel to whom they cried about how much they wanted a king. They did not want God to be their King, but rather they preferred Saul, a king who would slaughter the priests of God, consulted a witch, and later commit suicide after being defeated by the Philistines. “Saul took a sword, and fell upon it.” (1 Samuel 31:4)

As Saul committed suicide, so the Jews who rejected Christ would commit mass suicide in the siege of Masada, being like Judas who hanged himself. It was this very Saul who slaughtered the Canaanites of Gibeon in his zeal for the children of Israel and Judah. (2 Samuel 21:2) In the cause of nationalism did Saul spill innocent blood in a policy of ethnic genocide. He butchered innocent Canaanites, the very people of whose tribe Melchizedek was a member. And it was the Order of Melchizedek of which Christ was a priest. “You are a priest forever According to the order of Melchizedek.” (Psalm 110:4) The tribalist sentiment of a group that confines itself to its ethnicity and rejects humanity was not upheld by the universal spirit of God, but rather it was rejected.

Israel is a nation that has embraced sodom, and is probably the country that has welcomed Sodom the most. The demons have been released on such nations, and the end result is destruction. Even Netanyahu, is suppose to be a religious conservative, embraces Sodom. The chaos of nationalist fanaticism, with the spirit of the Pharisee, with the spirit of Sodom, all together accumulate into a torrent of blood. When Rome was at war with Jerusalem, the Jews were killing each other more than the Romans were killing them. And Jerusalem, in the midst of this chaos, was riddled with homosexuality. As Josephus says:

They also devoured what spoils they had taken, together with their blood, and indulged themselves in feminine wantonness, without any disturbance, till they were satiated therewith; while they decked their hair, and put on women’s garments, and were besmeared over with ointments; and that they might appear very comely, they had paints under their eyes, and imitated not only the ornaments, but also the lusts of women, and were guilty of such intolerable uncleanness, that they invented unlawful pleasures of that sort. And thus did they roll themselves up and down the city, as in a brothel-house, and defiled it entirely with their impure actions; nay, while their faces looked like the faces of women, they killed with their right hands; and when their gait was effeminate, they presently attacked men, and became warriors, and drew their swords from under their finely dyed cloaks, and ran every body through whom they alighted upon.” (Josephus, Wars, 4.9.10)

And what did St. John say of Jerusalem?

“in the street of the great city that symbolically is called Sodom and Egypt, where their Lord was crucified.”

As the Jews killed one another, and partook in Sodom, the Romans watched. Their strategy was to wait as the Jews slaughtered each other, so that when the time came to besiege Jerusalem, the Jews would already be a defeated people. If Israel has a civil war, it will destroy the country from within, so that an invading army will just come and vanquish it.

“It shall come to pass in that day that a great panic from the LORD will be among

them. Everyone will seize the hand of his neighbor, and raise his hand against his

neighbor’s hand” (Zechariah 14:13)

Zechariah 14 is no history for it speaks about the Second Coming. Israel will have civil unrest, lose territory army and its military strength is also recorded in Micah 5. Most who read Ezekiel 12 see it is speaking of past exile but this prophecy is also designated for the latter days: “The days draw near as well as the fulfillment of every vision” (v.23) is the closer of prophecy since “The vision that he sees is for many years from now, and he prophesies of times far off.” (v.27) “Fulfillment of every vision” is the closure of prophecy. Ezekiel also predicts another holocaust:

“Therefore this is what the Sovereign Lord says: As I have given the wood of the vine among the trees of the forest as fuel for the fire, so will I treat the people living in Jerusalem.I will set my face against them. Although they have come out of the fire [the holocaust] the fire will yet consume them [Second Holocaust]. And when I set my face against them, you will know that I am the Lord.I will make the land desolate because they have been unfaithful, declares the Sovereign Lord.” (Ezekiel 15:6-8)

Most read Christ in Matthew 24 “nation will rise against nation” but ignore how it all escalates from small “brother against brother” to simmer “neighbor against neighbor” (civil unrest) to hot “city against city” (state vs. state or region vs. region) to boiling hot “nation against nation”. And today we already see simmer: 

“From 2011 to 2019, the number of riots rose by 282% and general strikes rose by [whopping] 821%. This reflects a longer-term trend, with riots around the world increasing by 282% in the last decade, while general strikes are up by 821%. Eurṓpē experienced the most protests, riots and strikes

“Civil unrest in sub-Saharan Africa rose by more than 800% over the period, from 32 riots and protests in 2011 to 292 in 2018.”

The seas roar” prior to the judgment and today it is increasing at an alarming rate nearly triple “282%” and double quadruple of strikes “821%”. This turmoil is also confirmed in 2 Chronicles:

“For a long time Israel has been without the true God, without a teaching priest, and without law; but when in their trouble they turned to the LORD God of Israel, and sought Him, He was found by them. And in those times there was no peace to the one who went out, nor to the one who came in, but great turmoil was on all the inhabitants of the lands. So nation was destroyed by nation, and city by city, for God troubled them with every adversity.” (2 Chronicle 15: 3-6)

This is a global turmoil that will finally bring a remnant Jews to repentance during a time of civil strife within Israel itself where who leaves finds no peace and who escapes persecution from other lands and goes to Israel will also find no peace even in Israel but in those days nations will war with other nations even city against city (civil strife).

“And the people shall rush one upon another. And every man against his neighbor: the child shall make a tumult against the ancient and the base against the honorable” (Isaiah 3:5).

The persecution of the elderly will become immense and gangs will infest many cities of the world. When it comes to Israel, everyone is waiting for — more or less — the same thing: the next world war or the end of the world. Either way, humanity awaits for a major disaster when it gazes upon Israel. In Israel, the world discovered salvation, and at the same time, damnation. For some, Israel holds the land where redemption commenced, and for most, Israel is a source of insanity. Israel is a source of redemption in the sense that humanity’s Savior was murdered there; it is a source of insanity because humanity’s Savior was murdered there. The Man without sin was murdered in the land of Israel, where Greeks longed for Him but Jews despised Him. “Now among those who went up to worship at the feast were some Greeks.” (John 12:20) Surely, such a place is not one of serenity, but chaos. This present article will focus on this hysteria and how its presence ever lingers in our own time, intoxicating the souls of many. “And in that day will I make Jerusalem a burdensome stone for all people: all that burden themselves with it shall be cut in pieces, though all the people of the earth be gathered together against it.” (Zechariah 12:3) The Muslim burdens himself with Jerusalem, revering it as a holy site second to only the Kaaba; the Jew burdens himself with Jerusalem, seeing the city as his mecca; the Christian (typically those of the protestant or evangelical persuasion) burdens himself with Jerusalem since he sees it as the holy city of the Jewish people to which he is grafted in; and many secular people revere Jerusalem out of a zionistic attachment to Israel. Regardless of their diversity of beliefs, they all burden themselves with Jerusalem.

Do we need to elaborate on all of the blood that was spilt from Christians and Muslims fighting one another over this city? And we don’t need to go through a detailed lecture to know of the fighting between Israelis and Palestinians. The inciters of the West Bank and Gaza stoke up their people to war against Israel, because they burden themselves with Jerusalem. They look to the earthly Jerusalem, but are blind to the heavenly Jerusalem. “But you have come to the Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem” (Hebrews 12:22). During the Roman-Jewish war, the fighting was not merely Jews versus Romans; a huge part of that conflict was Jews fighting one another, and for what? To control Jerusalem. Time and time again we have seen the numerous examples of blood spilt over this city, and since mankind does not learn, who is to say that a civil war amongst the Jews could never happen again? There are voices in Israel — albeit they are few — who have been warning about an impending civil war, not between Jew and Arab, but amongst the Jews, between the Left-wing and the Right-wing. In the year 2016, the former director of the Mossad, Tamir Pardo, affirmed that there is a threat to Israel much worse than any of its Muslim neighbors — civil war amongst Jews. In a press conference Pardo was asked about threats to Israel and he replied:

“If a divided society crosses a certain threshold, you can reach phenomena such as civil war, in extreme cases… I’m afraid we’re in that direction … Threats to countries today are internal and not external. What you have in Syria, in Iraq, in Libya and in Yemen and in a lot of countries – you see the daily statistics of attacks.”

In other words, while external threats do exist, the greatest threat is within, and thus Israel could become another Syria where civil war has devastated the country. Israel is a country heavily divided between Right and Left, with the Mizrahim (Arab or North African Jews) being more in the former and the Ashkenazi (European Jews) in the latter. The Israeli activist and writer, Uri Avnery, agreed with Pardo and wrote on how this rift would not just be on ideological lines but ethnic lines as well:

“We don’t have a civil war yet. But ‘we are rapidly approaching it.’ Civil war between whom? The usual answer is between ‘right’ and ‘left’. Right and left in Israel do not mean the same as in the rest of the world. In Israel, the division between left and right in Israel almost solely concerns peace and the occupation. But I suspect that Pardo means a much deeper rift, without saying so explicitly: the rift between Ashkenazim (‘European’) and Mizrahim (‘Oriental’ or ‘Arab’) Jews. The Sephardic (‘Spanish’) community, to which Pardo belongs, is seen as part of the Orientals. The overwhelming majority of the Orientals are rightist, nationalist and at least mildly religious, while the majority of the Ashkenazim are leftist, more peace-oriented and secular. Since the Ashkenazim also tend to be socially and economically better off than the Orientals, the rift is profound.

When Pardo was born (1953), those of us who were already aware of the rift comforted ourselves with the belief that it was a passing phase. The ‘melting pot’ will do its job, intermarriage will help and after a generation or two the whole thing will disappear. It did not happen. On the contrary, the rift is deepening swiftly.”

Right-Left tensions have not calmed down at all in Israel, but is only getting more and more exasperated, especially with the new government coalition that has now supplanted Netanyahu’s Likud Party. More than half of Israel still supports Netanyahu’s Likud Party, which is evident in the fact that it won the most seats and votes in both the 2020 and 2021 elections. A huge chunk of Israel, on the other hand, despises Netanyahu which is demonstrated in what just took place within the Israeli government in which a coalition of parties led by Naftali Bennet and Yair Lapid overpowered the Likud and removed him from power (46% of Israelis support the Bennett-Lapid government). But this does not demonstrate that Netanyahu is not popular, but only that Israel is intensely divided. The cult of personality surrounding Netanyahu has been in Israel for a long time. In 2002, three years after Netanyahu lost the premiership, he was told by Yair Lapid:  “there were people who cried and said they would kill themselves, and there were others who said they would leave the country if you were ever elected again.” Netanyahu rose to power in the midst of Jewish fanaticism. He first won office in 1996, just a year after a Jewish fanatic murdered the Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, because he advanced the Oslo Accords which guaranteed the “right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.” Any move by the government to enact the demands of the Palestinians will be met with not just protest, but violence by Jewish nationalists. This was affirmed back in 1986 by professor Ian S. Lustick. He warned that if a governing coalition party could be in the position to appeal to Arab demands, there would be a very violent reaction, not just against Arabs but other Jews:

“Even if a governing coalition could be formed of parties willing to accept an agreement based on the principle of territory for peace, the implementation of that policy would trigger intense and widespread opposition and pose real challenges to the parliamentary regime’s ability to sustain itself. … In Israel such a crisis would almost certainly involve repeated demonstrations by hundreds of thousands of Jews, violence against both Jews and Arabs, challenges to the authority and legitimacy of the government, a host of rabbinical decrees opposing the government’s intentions, the creation of scores of new illegal settlements, threats of civil war, a sudden influx of militantly ultranationalist Diaspora Jews, and, as suggested above, attempts at spectacular actions such as the destruction of the Muslim shrines in Jerusalem.”

The new coalition that has removed Netanyahu is a mix of left-wing, liberal, rightist, nationalist and religious parties, and even an Arab party called Raam, — a partnership that Netanyahu described as “a dangerous leftist government.” That the new government included an Arab party as part of its coalition against the Likud Party is ominous of more political tension between Jews. For decades we have been fed the narrative of “Jew vs. Arab” as if this is the emphatic, black and white reality of the situation. What we are rarely told of is the division between Jews. When two different religious and ideological groups go head to head, it gets violent and bloody, but there is no war more vicious than those between people of the same group, of the same nation. The most vicious war that America was ever in was against itself; the worst wars that Europeans ever engaged in were the ones against themselves; the most devastating wars that Israel ever went through where ones in which Hebrew killed Hebrew, be it in Israel versus Judah, or when the Zealots killed the Jews not on their side. When the Romans and Jews warred against each other, it was obviously destructive, but it was nowhere near as devastating as the inter-Jewish fighting that occurred within the walls of Jerusalem. Catholics and Muslims had many wars against each other, but nothing was more destructive than when Catholics and Protestants — who had similar theologies — fought one another. Muslims will fight those of other religions, but when it comes to Islamic wars, there is none more cruel and ruthless than when Sunnis and Shiites war with each other. That a coalition of Jewish parties — some Rightest and some Leftists — are including an Arab party that represents the demands of Israeli Arabs, shows that Jews will side with those who have been portrayed as their worst enemies just to overthrow their Jewish rivals (in this case the Likud). The Right-wing Jews loyal to Netanyahu’s party are, expectedly, using the presence of an Arab party in the rival coalition as proof that these Jewish parties are traitors.

With the replacing of Netanyahu has come an intensification of rage. This was pointed out by Israel’s Shin Bet domestic security service director Nadav Argaman:

“We have recently identified a rise in increasingly extreme violent and inciteful discourse particularly on social networks… This discourse may be interpreted among certain groups or individuals, as one that permits violent and illegal activity that may even cause physical harm”

This is happening regardless of the fact that the presence of an Arab party in an Israeli coalition could actually help accelerate the deepening of ties between Israel and her Arab neighbors, a trend which we have been seeing in recent years. Nonetheless, the alliance between Arabs and Jews to defeat a rival Jewish politician indicates one thing: the rift between Jews is more seething with hatred than the divide between Arabs and Jews. In fact, when Netanyahu entertained the idea of making an alliance with the Arab Raam party, Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky, the spiritual leader of the United Torah Judaism party, commented that “cooperation with those who respect religion and Jewish tradition is better than those who persecute religion.” By those who “respect religion” he was referring to the Islamist Raam party, and by those who “persecute religion” he was referring to the secular Jews.       

The tensions between the Right and the Left, between the religious and secular in Israel, has been ongoing for many decades. In 1970, the Jewish Orthodox professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz stated that it was likely that Israel would eventually come to a split between the religious and the non-religious: “we will likely split, against our will, into two nations, not marrying into each other, each pursuing its own historical path, feeling profound hostility toward the other.” Leibowitz envisioned that these two nations would be the Jewish nation and “the non-Jewish Israeli people.” (See Passig, The Fifth Fiasco, p. 159) Yuval Diskin, the 12th director for Israel’s Shin Bet, warned in 2015 that if the Israeli government, to make a compromise with the Arabs, ever decided to force Jews out of the settlements that a civl war would break out between settlers and the government. He made mention of this prospective insurrection in an interview with Dror Moreh:

“As the threat of people having to leave their homes increases, we’ll see more and more people, and not on the outskirts, supporting or joining actions which ultimately might lead to use of force — including against the army, including against the police — and this could also lead to another political murder.”

When Moreh asked Diskin to elaborate further on what he meant by a civil war, he explained:

“There are situations in a people’s life where the option is either to split up — establishing the Kingdom of Judea and the Kingdom of Israel —or to go for a situation where one side enforces its opinion and defeats the other side fully and absolutely.” (Moreh, The Gatekeepers, p. 361)

We are not predicting a forced eviction of the settlements, but the words of Diskin reflect how explosive the political and ideological atmosphere in Israel really is. Another sign of Israel’s political ticking time bomb are the demographic trends. The ultra-Orthodox in Israel have more children than any of the other Jewish factions. They have a fertility rate of 4.2% as opposed to the 1.2% birth rate of the non-Orthodox Jews. The majority of the immigrants making aliyah (Hebrew term to signify Jews moving to Israel from other countries) are religious and nationalistic. Two out of three immigrants to Israel are from Ukraine or Russia, a previous source of both nationalist and religious Jews to Israel. As these trends continue, another thing that continues is the growing domination of Right-wing ideology in Israel. The fact that Right-wing nationalism is extremely high amongst Israel’s youth is very significant, since when an ideological movement is confided to the elderly, it is a sign of its impending death, but when youth advance a cause, it will continue on and thrive. As we read in a report from Statfor:

“Israel’s right-wing attitudes have come to dominate the overall youth vote, with most of this demographic rejecting a Palestinian state and favoring military deterrence over diplomacy with militants.”

With such zeal for a militarist Israel against Palestinians, a compromise with the Arabs would be a prospect for throwing a match into a room full of gas; any such move is a potential catalyst towards bloodshed. The same report by Stratfor warns of political instability due to the intensification of nationalist sentiments: “The right-wing drift will have potentially negative consequences domestically and abroad, such as political unrest and international isolation.” This political unrest, if it goes on unchecked, would inevitably escalate to inter-Jewish conflict.    

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