‘The Country’s Already Been Destroyed’

Eran Schwartz looks like a fighter pilot. The 40-something appeared last week on the Israeli television show Ofira and Berkowitz—a black V-neck T-shirt over his trim, athletic chest; his black hair cut short—to defend his decision to end his service in the air-force reserves. “We’re not the ones who tore up the social contract,” he said. “We swore to serve a state that is Jewish and democratic. And if Netanyahu is going to end Israel’s being a liberal democracy, it’s the country that violated the contract, not us.”

Member of the Knesset Matan Kahana, another pilot on the show, agreed with Schwartz that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was dragging the country to “the destruction of the Third Temple.” He insisted, though, that the pilots were wrong to end their service, “because that’s Judgment Day weaponry.” And he warned of the consequences: “Refusal to serve will destroy the army; it will rip the country apart.”

[Natan Sachs: Israel on the brink]

“And the country isn’t already being ripped apart?” Ofira Asayag, one of the hosts, shot back. “The country’s already been destroyed.”

In that one line, Asayag captured precisely what millions of Israelis are feeling. The political crisis in Israel is no longer about being in favor of the judicial reform the Netanyahu government pledged to enact, or about opposing it. It is no longer about law; it is about the almost complete erosion of any trust millions of citizens have in the government. It is about the sense here that something deep, sacred to many, has broken, the feeling that, as Asayag put it, “the country’s already been destroyed.”

Later in the show, she asked Schwartz the tough question his stand provokes: “If there’s an emergency, if we’re attacked, are you or are you not getting in a