Abstract:
This article argues that the most serious threat to Israel is not external but structural. A society that cannot agree on who is obligated to defend it, on what limits its government, or on what kind of state it intends to be faces a crisis that military superiority cannot address. Four documented fractures are examined: the conscription crisis, in which the ultra-Orthodox refusal to serve has collided with a Supreme Court ruling and is now collapsing the governing coalition; the constitutional crisis, in which the judicial restructuring that produced the largest protest movement in Israeli history has continued under the cover of war; the demographic crisis, in which sustained negative net migration is draining the educated population that sustains the technology sector, the officer corps, and the tax base; and the underlying crisis of identity that connects all three. Each fracture is documented by Israeli institutions, Israeli courts, and Israeli researchers, not by external critics. The argument is not that Israel faces imminent collapse, but that the trajectory of internal fragmentation operates on a timescale and a logic that no battlefield victory reverses. The question is no longer whether Israel can survive its enemies. It is whether it can survive the version of itself it has chosen to become.
Main Article:
A state that cannot agree on who must defend it, who governs it, or what it fundamentally is, is not facing a crisis of security. It is facing a crisis of identity. No air force resolves that.
This distinction matters because the dominant framing of Israeli vulnerability is almost entirely external. The discussion concerns Iran, Hezbollah, the missile threat, the nuclear timeline. These are real questions. But a state can win every engagement against every external adversary and still fracture along the internal lines that determine whether it can field an army, constrain its own executive, and retain the population on which its economy and its defence depend. The most consequential threats to a society are frequently the ones its own institutions document while its attention is fixed elsewhere.
In 2017, the journalist Gregg Carlstrom argued that the deepest vulnerability of Israel was not military but internal: a society fragmenting along tribal lines into secular liberals, ultra-Orthodox communities, national religious settlers, Russian-speaking immigrants, Mizrahi Jews, and Arab citizens, each operating in separate political and cultural universes with fundamentally incompatible visions of what the state should be. (1) At the time the thesis was treated by many as overstated. Nine years later, each structural fracture it identified has hardened into a documented institutional crisis.
The sharpest of these is the question of who is obligated to fight.
In June 2024, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the longstanding arrangement exempting ultra-Orthodox men enrolled in religious seminaries from military service was unlawful, and that the state was obliged to begin drafting them. (2) The ruling struck at the foundation of a bargain dating to the founding of the state, when exemptions were granted to a small number of Torah scholars and grew over decades to encompass tens of thousands. The ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, community, representing approximately 13 percent of the population and growing faster than any other segment, responded with sustained mass defiance. On 30 October 2025, an estimated 200,000 ultra-Orthodox men converged on the entrance to Jerusalem in what organisers called a million-man march, shutting down the centre of the city. The emergency service recorded 56 people injured in confrontations with police. (2) The protest was directed not against Hamas or Iran but against the army of the state itself and its demand that they serve.
The political consequence has been the slow collapse of the governing coalition.
The two Haredi parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism, resigned their government roles in 2025 over the failure of the coalition to codify their exemption, accusing the prime minister of betraying their religious base. (3) United Torah Judaism then moved to dissolve the Knesset entirely. In May 2026, Benjamin Netanyahu informed the Haredi members of parliament that his coalition did not have the votes to pass a conscription law acceptable to their communities, and reportedly asked them to shelve the matter until after elections. (3) The Knesset is now on a path to dissolution, with elections that must be held no later than 27 October 2026 and that the Haredi parties wish to hold as early as September. (3) The structural fact beneath the political theatre is stark. Israel has fought simultaneous campaigns in Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and Iran while its government depends for its survival on parties whose core constituency is actively resisting service in the military that fights those campaigns, and a senior officer told a parliamentary subcommittee in November 2025 that the military needed twelve thousand additional soldiers it could not raise. (3)
The second fracture concerns the limits of power itself.
What began in January 2023 as a proposal to strip the Supreme Court of its capacity to review executive decisions became the largest sustained protest movement in the history of the country, with hundreds of thousands mobilising weekly for nine months. The attack of 7 October 2023 did not resolve that crisis. A peer-reviewed analysis published in 2025 concluded that the security emergency functioned as a cover under which the restructuring of the judiciary quietly continued. (4) Legislation altering the composition of the Judicial Selection Committee and increasing the control of politicians over judicial appointments advanced through the Knesset. Critics across the Israeli legal establishment warned that judicial independence, the last institutional check on executive power in a state with no written constitution and no second legislative chamber, was being deliberately dismantled. (4) A state removing the only formal constraint on its own executive, during a war, while its governing coalition disintegrates, is not consolidating power. It is hollowing out the institutions that allow power to be transferred peacefully.
Beneath the political crises runs a demographic one, slower but more difficult to reverse.
The population growth rate fell to approximately 0.9 percent in 2025, the lowest since the founding of the state. (5) For the second consecutive year, more people left Israel than arrived, with the net emigration gap projected to reach 37,000 in 2026. (5) The Taub Center for Social Policy Studies documented that those departing are disproportionately educated, native-born Israelis between the ages of 25 and 45, the precise population that sustains the technology sector, supplies the military officer corps, and carries the national tax base. (5) A Nobel laureate described the trend as an existential threat. The assessments come not from external critics but from Israeli research institutions examining Israeli data. A society that loses its most productive and most mobile citizens faster than it can replace them is not facing a problem that any military success addresses, because the problem is the erosion of the human foundation on which the military itself depends.
These three fractures share a single root, which is the absence of agreement on what the state is for.
The conscription crisis is at bottom a dispute over whether Israel is a state organised around religious study or around a citizen army. The constitutional crisis is a dispute over whether it is a liberal democracy bound by judicial limits or a majoritarian system in which the executive governs without constraint. The demographic crisis is the quiet verdict of those who have concluded that the answers emerging to the first two questions are not ones they wish to live under. The advocates of the current direction make a coherent case on their own terms: that a sovereign Jewish state is entitled to define itself by the will of its majority, that judicial review by an unelected court is itself undemocratic, and that the demands of religious communities are a legitimate part of a pluralistic society. The serious counter-question is whether a state can sustain itself when its definition of its own purpose is contested so fundamentally that the groups within it cannot agree on who must defend it or what may limit those who govern it.
A military can defeat an army. It cannot defeat the internal arithmetic of a society fragmenting faster than it can conscript, cohere, or govern itself.
The question Carlstrom raised in 2017 was whether Israel would survive its enemies. The question that 2026 is answering is a different one. It is whether Israel can survive the version of itself that it has chosen to become.
References:
(1) Gregg Carlstrom. How Long Will Israel Survive? The Threat From Within. London: Hurst, 2017.
(2) Times of Israel. "200,000 Ultra-Orthodox Men Block Entry to Jerusalem in Protest Against Serving in IDF." Times of Israel, October 30, 2025; Fox News, "Ultra-Orthodox Protesters in Jerusalem Rally Over Israel's Draft Exemption as Clashes Break Out," October 30, 2025.
(3) Times of Israel. "As Coalition Collapses Around Him, Netanyahu Revives Haredi Draft Exemption Bill." Times of Israel, May 2026; Middle East Eye, "Why Are Ultra-Orthodox Jews Against Conscription?" November 17, 2025.
(4) Verfassungsblog. "The Judicial Overhaul Post October 7: Populist Constitutionalism in Israel Under the Fog of War." Verfassungsblog, November 28, 2025.
(5) Taub Center for Social Policy Studies. "Israel 2025: A Demographic Crossroads." Taub Center, January 2026; Middle East Monitor, "Record Israeli Emigration Exposes Deep Crisis at Heart of the Zionist Project," January 10, 2026.