The effects of Operation Flood of Al-Aqsa began to appear in Israel before the war ended and the dust of the battles settled. Over the past year, Israel witnessed a series of political, economic and societal crises.
Haim Ramon, a former justice minister and a prominent member of the opposition Labor Party, believes that Israel is not “one step away from victory, but one step away from strategic defeat.”
The Israeli occupation is waging the longest war in its history, and it has not been able to decide the battle in the time it wanted, and has not achieved any of its goals in it.
Which prompted Israeli political analyst Raviv Drucker to say in Haaretz, “We bombed, killed, destroyed, wiped out, arrested, and used all our might, in addition to the American airlift. Despite that, our security situation is more difficult than ever.”
The Army… “The Holy Cow”
Israeli society describes the army as a “sacred cow” due to its role in “protecting them” and its status in the hearts of Israelis. After the Al-Aqsa flood, criticism of it increased and the aura of holiness around it and its actions faded, and it became less respected in society.
The number of resignations among its leaders, and the near future may witness the resignation of Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi, reflects “the extent of the loss that the army is experiencing.”
The statements of the leader of the Israeli opposition and head of the “There is a Future” party, Yair Lapid, are an indication of what the Israeli army has been exposed to since the beginning of the Battle of the Flood of Al-Aqsa, as he stated that the army lost “12 battalions, more than 700 dead and about 10 thousand wounded.”
Lapid’s statements show that “the October 7 war revealed the fact that this army suffers from a lot of weakness,” as Imad Abu Awad, director of the Jerusalem Center for Studies, told Tel Aviv Tribune Net. The occupation army “suffers from a shortage and is completely dependent on the United States of America, which has caused it to lose the aura it enjoyed before the Israeli public,” according to Abu Awad.
The losses of the occupation army in the Gaza Strip had a major impact on the community’s view of the army. Abu Awad believes that “there is a decline in confidence in the army leadership to 55%. These are not easy numbers. In other words, the last war on the Gaza Strip proved the failure of this army to deal with the war file.”
The signs of the deterioration that the occupation army has reached have clearly appeared in the West Bank. By following its storming of Palestinian cities and towns, it appeared that the occupation forces have begun using modern mechanisms that arrived from the United States. According to observers, this shows that the occupation army is now suffering from a clear shortage in equipment, which it is compensating for with shipments that arrived from Washington.
Hezbollah recently broadcast footage of a military base in northern Israel showing that the occupation army has begun to rely on civilian four-wheel drive vehicles in its movements in the rear lines on various fronts, which is unusual in armies.
The participation of members of the Prison Service (Shabas) in his attacks in the West Bank demonstrates beyond doubt that the occupation suffers from a major shortage of human resources, so it resorted to Shabas who are not prepared to fight in battles.
Observers believe that the continued depletion of the occupation army during the coming months may reach the stage of collapse and inability to fight and engage on the fronts of Gaza, the West Bank and the north.
What the occupation army is suffering from is evident from what the army’s rehabilitation authority recently announced, that it has received 11,000 wounded so far, and is still receiving a thousand wounded per month, most of whose injuries are either amputations, head and eye injuries, or back injuries.
According to a report by the Israeli Ministry of Defense, the number of occupation army casualties during the war reached 706, and the budget for the families of the dead during the years from 2020 to 2022 amounted to 1.7 billion shekels annually, and during the war on the Gaza Strip it increased to 1.8 billion shekels annually.
The number of mentally ill and disabled soldiers before the war was 62,000 registered disabled, 11,000 of whom were mentally ill. The budget for disabled affairs was 3.7 billion shekels annually.
The Ministry of Defense expects the number of disabled people to reach 78,000 by the end of the current year 2024, 15,000 of whom are mentally ill, and their budget will amount to 7.3 billion shekels annually.
The army’s crisis does not stop at the material and human losses and failures it has been exposed to since October 7. These crises have led to the outbreak of a crisis in recruiting the ultra-Orthodox (Haredim) into the army, especially after the shortage in the number of soldiers.
The number of people who can be assigned at the present time is 157 thousand people, but the Israeli army does not recruit them, and they refuse to serve in the army. The American Wall Street Journal quoted an official involved in recruiting the Haredim as saying, “They have reached a point where the army needs to recruit them.”
However, the reality indicates that the Haredim’s refusal to enlist has not changed, as the Israel Hayom newspaper reported that about 3,000 enlistment orders were recently sent to Haredi Jews, but less than 10% responded and complied with them.
As the Haredi crisis worsened, the sharp rift in Israeli society between secular and religious people came to the fore.
Religious and secular
The conflict between secularists and religious people in Israel has been tug-of-war since the declaration of the establishment of Israel in 1948, but it has intensified since the assassination of former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. Secular people in Israel (about 20% of society, most of them Western Jews) have always constituted the ruling elite, and the assassination of the “secular” Rabin by a religious person came because of what he “considered as the abandonment of Jewish land” after the peace agreements with Jordan and the Palestinians, according to Israeli writer Doron Weber.
Rabin’s assassination represented a turning point in the polarization between the two groups, allowing the societal rift to widen, and which has become one of the most dangerous strategic threats facing Israel.
Since the assassination, a process of transformation has begun in society and politics, witnessing a conflict that is sometimes hidden and sometimes loud between the right and the religious people in the face of the deep state that was established by the Labor Party and controlled by secular Western Jews, and was reflected in the confrontation with the army and the security services and the attempt to subjugate them to the religious people.
The judicial amendments file that preceded the Al-Aqsa flood was not immune to this conflict and mobilization witnessed by the complex. The polarization between the two groups increased after the Al-Aqsa flood, revealing the extent of the internal conflict raging between the secular forces and their religious counterparts in Israel.
The war on Gaza increased the “internal cracks and fissures in the Israeli entity, and contributed to a state of tension among Israeli society, which was already suffering from severe polarization before the war, as Osama Khaled, a security and military expert, told Tel Aviv Tribune Net.
Since David Ben-Gurion exempted religious Jews from military service in 1948, the exemptions have become an increasing source of irritation for secular Israelis who are obligated to serve in the army and whose taxes help support the Haredim.
Many secularists also expressed their fear that 200,000 weapons were distributed by Internal Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, the vast majority of which went to right-wing and religious groups. This could lead to a state of societal conflict at any moment.
Migration.. and a reminder of wandering
“It seems that the Jews of the twenty-first century are returning to travel,” said the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in a report on the reverse migration that has become a prominent feature after the Al-Aqsa flood.
The image of security in society has been shattered and Israel is now threatened by “great dangers that could lead to a frightening and uncertain future,” according to Osama Khaled, a military and security expert.
The newspaper reported that “tens of thousands of Jews in Israel have left their homeland in search of a safer place, whether motivated by fear of war, the collapse of democracy, opposition to the government, or the high cost of living.”
Haaretz reported, citing the Central Bureau of Statistics, that 42,185 Israelis left Israel between October 2023 and March of this year and did not return until last July, which is 12% more than last year.
In October 2023, the rise was dramatic, with 12,300 people leaving and not returning yet, a 400% increase compared to October 2022.
According to Professor Yitzhak Sasson, an expert on immigration at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University, “the number of those leaving may double or triple in the coming years, mainly among young people.”
According to the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, Israel is “at the point of a demographic turning point.” The departing “are a valuable human capital, and their departure jeopardizes Israel’s continued economic growth,” it said.
Displacement.. If only we were Tel Aviv
The displacement crisis that the residents of the southern and northern settlements have been suffering for 11 months is a crisis that is troubling the community and makes the residents of those areas feel that the government has abandoned them.
The Maariv newspaper described the impact of Hezbollah’s attacks on northern Israel as “sufficient to take the residents out of their routine and spread fear and anxiety in their souls.”
Shirley Siso, a resident of the settlement of Shlomi, told Israeli media: “We feel that Hamas and Hezbollah have defeated us. We have been away from home for 11 months and we have to move between countless apartments, in order to provide shelter and security for the children. I am also not working. Our lives have been turned upside down.”
This prompted the head of the Israeli Labor Party, Yair Golan, to say that the north is collapsing and that there is no security or reconstruction, stressing that the Israeli government is completely abandoning the region.
The continued displacement of the northern and southern settlements has prompted the residents of those areas to compare their situation with that of Tel Aviv. In a protest move, the residents of the northern settlements put the name of Tel Aviv on road signs, hoping that the government would care about them if they were residents of the center and Tel Aviv.
In this regard, Israeli journalist Almog Boker says on Channel 12 Israel, “Throughout 20 years of our lives, there were criteria specific to the ‘Gaza envelope’, and others related to Tel Aviv, which were completely different.”
Will the welfare state disappear?
Haaretz reported that the war and the high cost of living are pushing more Israelis to emigrate abroad. According to a study by the Zaytouna Center for Studies, the living conditions of Israelis have been affected, as unemployment and poverty rates have risen, consumer spending has fallen by 0.7%, and the consumer price index has risen by about 12%, leading to a deterioration in the economic situation of Israeli families.
According to the study, 85.1% of Israeli households suffer from energy shortages, while 81.8% suffer from accumulated debts. The poverty rate in Israel reached 22.7% in 2023, then rose to 25.3% in mid-2024.
These figures indicate that more than a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line, which increases the burden on social services and government support, and crime rates have increased by 7% as a result of increasing economic pressures.
Israeli companies have been affected by this deteriorating economic situation. Semi-official data showed that 726,000 Israeli companies (small and emerging) have closed since the start of the war, with expectations that the number will rise to 800,000 by the end of the year.
Foreign direct investment declined by 40%, from $25 billion in 2023 to $15 billion in the first half of 2024, reflecting the decline in foreign investor confidence in the Israeli market.
These crises and others have led many observers to say that Israel is going through “the most dangerous phase in its history” and that the apparent strength and power is “deceptive.” At the moment of “breakdown and beyond,” the apparent strength is merely an attempt to “pretend to be strong and act emotionally to prevent collapse.”
