President Reuven Rivlin could no longer contain himself. Rivlin, perhaps the last of a generation of dignified elder statesmen, took the podium on Oct. 12 to deliver the opening address of the Knesset’s winter session. The speech was meant to douse the flames licking at the edges of Israeli society. “It is unthinkable that every night, demonstrators are beating demonstrators. Police are beating demonstrators. Demonstrators are throwing stones at the police,” Rivlin thundered. “Israel’s tribalism is breaking out through the cracks, and accusatory fingers are pointed from one part of society to the other, one tribe to the other. Stop! Please stop! This is not the way. Pain must have its place. … It seems to me as if we have lost the moral compass that was with us from the state’s independence until today. The compass of fundamental principles and values that we are committed to uphold.”
The unprecedented speech, alternately warning and beseeching, did not resonate as expected. The public climate in Israel these days is the most explosive ever. Israel has experienced the assassination of a prime minister (Yitzhak Rabin in 1995), but it has never been this close to civil war.
This is not the president’s first reference to the tribal fault lines in Israeli society. In a defining 2015 address to the annual Herzliya Conference, Rivlin described the four tribes emerging from the country’s socio-economic shifts — secular, national/religious, ultra-orthodox and Arab — and warned of the lack of unity and cohesion among them. In the years since, the chasms among them have deepened. The police investigations of corruption by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the subsequent decision by Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit to indict him on three criminal charges appeared to pour a huge barrel of fuel on the simmering tribal fires.
“The situation on the streets is highly flammable,” a senior police source told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity. The official, who is involved in attempts to control the disruptions to public order resulting from a nationwide wave of protests against Netanyahu, added that he had not encountered such a situation throughout his career. “Such hatred of Israelis against each other, such alienation between the camps. Sometimes it really scares me,” he confessed.
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