A Democracy Cannot Survive on a Permanent War Footing

For decades, the standard geopolitical analysis of the Middle East has focused almost exclusively on external threats. The assumption was that shared peril would always act as a glue, binding a disparate Israeli society together against a common enemy. But as a new report from The Atlantic makes clear, that glue has dissolved. The primary threat to the future of the Israeli state is no longer found at the border, but within a fundamental, structural divide between its secular and religious citizens.

This isn't just a local crisis. It is a cautionary tale for any democracy—including our own—about what happens when a nation attempts to postpone its internal reckoning through perpetual conflict and the erosion of the rule of law. When a government prioritizes the expansion of territory and the pacification of dissent over the maintenance of a social contract, it eventually finds itself presiding over a house divided against itself.

The Secular-Religious Schism

According to The Atlantic, the intractable divides between secular Israelis and the growing religious-nationalist bloc now pose a bigger problem for the country than any external threat. This isn't merely a disagreement over theology; it is a battle over the very definition of a modern state. One side envisions a liberal democracy integrated into the global economy; the other seeks a state governed by halakhic principles and focused on settlement expansion.

From a progressive perspective, this friction is the inevitable result of a political system that has traded long-term stability for short-term right-wing coalitions. By empowering extremist elements to maintain a grip on power, leadership has alienated the very secular, tax-paying, and tech-sector citizens who provide the nation's economic and military backbone. You cannot have a high-functioning democracy when a significant portion of the population feels the state is actively working to dismantle their civil liberties and pluralistic way of life.

The Cost of Occupation

We must be honest about the role the ongoing occupation of Palestinian territories plays in this domestic fracture. The project of settlement and the security apparatus required to maintain it have empowered the most illiberal segments of Israeli society. This has created a feedback loop: the more the state leans into religious nationalism to justify its territorial claims, the more it alienates its secular, democratic base.

The progressor has long argued that human rights and democratic norms are indivisible. You cannot maintain a democracy for one group while denying basic self-determination to another in the same geographic space. The internal "reckoning" described by The Atlantic is, in many ways, the chickens coming home to roost. The tools of state power used to manage a population without rights are now being turned inward, threatening the independence of the judiciary and the rights of secular citizens.

The Global Warning

This crisis is a mirror for the United States and other Western democracies. We see the same patterns here: a hard-right movement that views the secular state as an enemy to be conquered, and a political class that often prefers the distraction of external friction to the hard work of internal reform.

When a nation stops investing in its social fabric—when it ignores the widening gap between different visions of the national identity—it becomes brittle. Israel’s current predicament shows that no amount of military hardware or technological superiority can save a country from a fundamental lack of domestic consensus. A state that does not protect the rights of all its inhabitants, and does not maintain a clear separation between religious dogma and civil law, is a state on the brink of failure.

The bottom line

To survive as a democracy, Israel must end the cycle of permanent war that serves as a smokescreen for domestic extremism. The U.S. government must condition its support on the protection of democratic institutions and the pursuit of a genuine two-state solution that ends the occupation. Only by addressing the root causes of its internal and regional conflicts can the country hope to bridge the chasm between its secular and religious citizens.