Israel’s January 6 moment

As the Gaza war escalates in Lebanon and Tehran, Israel has been thrown into a new domestic crisis: a collapse of the rule of law that threatens to tear Israeli society apart.

The crisis centers on grave allegations of torture: that Israeli soldiers at the Sde Teiman base in southern Israel had physically and sexually assaulted Palestinian detainees. On Monday, Israel’s military police raided the base and detained 10 soldiers believed to be responsible for the torture of one detainee.

Shortly after the raid, far-right demonstrators — including some reserve soldiers and sitting parliamentarians from Israel’s current government — began rioting against the arrest. 

The rioters tore down Sde Teiman’s exterior fence and entered its premises, hoping to free the detained soldiers by force. Footage showed Zvi Sukkot, a far-right member of the Knesset (Israel’s Parliament), amid the mob assailing the base. When they failed to find the soldiers, a mob attacked another military base — one that houses the headquarters of Israel’s military court system.

Eventually, Israeli authorities restored order without surrendering any soldiers to the mob (two were later released without charges). Yet multiple right-wing parties in the current ruling coalition issued statements condemning the soldiers’ arrest and even defending participation in the mob. 

Even now, as a wider war with Hezbollah and Iran looms, Israel remains deeply divided over an incident that feels a lot like the US torture abuse scandal in Abu Ghraib and the January 6 riot rolled into one. Ahmad Tibi, a member of the Knesset (MK) from an Arab political party, asked during a parliamentary debate over the abuses at Sde Teiman if “inserting an explosive into the rectum of a person [is] legitimate.” In response, Hanoch Milvetsky — a member from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party — said that when it came to Hamas commandos, “everything is legitimate.”

It’s a situation that reflects Israel’s basic bifurcation: a country that is simultaneously a democracy within its recognized borders and a lawless authoritarian state in the Palestinian territory it controls. It is an unbearable tension, one that has increasingly led the domestic democracy Israel is so proud of to begin resembling its authoritarian shadow.

The riot at Sde Teiman shows exactly how this process works — and why it has led even some sober Israeli analysts to begin fretting about civil war.

How the chaos at Sde Teiman happened

What happened at Sde Teiman this week is the consequence of two opposing legal systems crashing into each other.

After Israel seized the West Bank and Gaza Strip at the end of the Six-Day War in 1967, it faced a classic conqueror’s dilemma: How do you administer land where the majority of people who live there oppose your presence?

Israel’s solution was to forgo formally annexing the territories and instead set up a military regime that would “temporarily” govern until a more permanent solution could be found. A special department of the Israeli military called the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, or COGAT, was charged with managing the governing tasks necessary for Palestinian civilian life to function. The Israeli general in charge of COGAT was in essence the governor of the West Bank: the head of a military regime whose legal system differed fundamentally from the one at work inside Israel.

Inside Israel proper, political leaders are determined by elections and citizens of all religions have basic rights, like freedom of speech and rights to due process. In Israeli-occupied Palestine, the leader is an unelected general who affords few basic rights to Palestinian civilians. Things that would be scandals if done to citizens in Israel, like torture of suspects in custody, are fairly common in the West Bank and have been so before the current war.

That doesn’t apply to the settlers, Israeli Jews who live in the West Bank. They are legally entitled to all the privileges attendant with Israeli citizenship, yet their interactions with Palestinians typically take place in land controlled by the military. While soldiers are empowered to arrest settlers who commit violence, the IDF prefers to delegate such tasks to the police. The result is that soldiers frequently turn a blind eye when extremist settlers bully, assault, and even kill Palestinians. Sometimes, they even join in.

Sde Teiman is not in the Palestinian territories; it’s in Israel proper, meaning domestic Israeli rules should apply. But it is a military base used to house Palestinians detained in Gaza, who seemed as though they’re being treated by West Bank standards — or potentially even worse. A UN investigation found that thousands of Palestinians have been detained since October 7 and kept in awful conditions.

“Detainees said they were held in cage-like facilities, stripped naked for prolonged periods, wearing only diapers. Their testimonies told of prolonged blindfolding, deprivation of food, sleep and water, and being subjected to electric shocks and being burnt with cigarettes,” the UN investigators write. “Some detainees said dogs were released on them, and others said they were subjected to waterboarding, or that their hands were tied and they were suspended from the ceiling. Some women and men also spoke of sexual and gender-based violence.”

In effect, the lawlessness of the West Bank and the Gaza war had moved into Israel. When reports of the abuse came to light, both in the American and Israeli press, the Israeli government decided that it needed to start applying Israeli domestic law on Israeli territory. Hence the raid that detained Israeli soldiers suspected of inflicting severe torture, including rape, of a Palestinian detainee.

This dynamic also explains the subsequent riot. The Israelis who attacked the base are hardline supporters of the Israeli settlement movement; Zvi Sukkot, the MK who broke into the base, is himself a settler who has been repeatedly arrested in connection with violence against West Bank Palestinians. They believe that Gazan detainees should be treated according to Occupation standards, not Israeli ones. If the law was going to accord them rights, then the law, not the abuse, was the problem.

This also may explain why the violence managed to spread to another base and continue for roughly 12 hours.

The Israeli police are controlled by the Ministry of National Security, which is currently led by Itamar Ben-Gvir — a far-right settler who has been convicted of crimes eight separate times. There are widespread suspicions that Ben-Gvir, who has been out front supporting the soldiers who allegedly tortured the Gazan detainee, intentionally obstructed the police response to the riots (not unlike Donald Trump’s reluctance to call in the National Guard on January 6). It’s serious enough that Yoav Gallant, the current minister of defense, has called for an inquiry into Ben-Gvir’s conduct.

What happened at Sde Teiman, in short, is what happens when Israel’s two legal systems are forced into conflict. When people like Sukkot and Ben-Gvir ascend to positions of power in the Israeli government, they expect the Israeli legal political system to change accordingly — to begin adopting the norms and procedures of the West Bank occupation. When it doesn’t, they try to make the system accommodate their lawlessness.

Typically, they do so through legal channels. But at Sde Teiman, they crossed the line into violence, helping lead a kind of minor insurrection against the Israeli state.

A bayit divided cannot stand

In my new book The Reactionary Spirit, I argue that Israel today resembles Abraham Lincoln’s description of the United States before the Civil War: “A house divided cannot stand.”

By this, Lincoln didn’t just mean that the United States was divided over slavery. He meant that slavery created two sets of laws, one for slave states and one for free ones, that would inevitably contradict each other. This tension, embodied by things like the Fugitive Slave Act, created a situation where one side would ultimately need to triumph over the other — bringing the citizens of the North and South into direct conflict over what the laws for the country should be. Which is precisely what happened.

Sde Teiman shows how Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians creates similar tensions. They were at the root of the fight over the judiciary that mobilized the largest protests in the country’s history prior to October 7, and they’ve only become more acute since the Gaza war began. 

Rather than unifying Israel, the conflict has only shown where its fault lines lie.  

After the riot, Yair Lapid — a centrist politician and current leader of the opposition — argued that it revealed an “existential” threat to Israel from within.

“The incursion into Sde Teiman is a despicable and dangerous crime by lawmakers who weaken and dismantle the IDF, weaken and dismantle the State of Israel, gnawing away at the foundations of our power,” he said. “The politicians who abandoned the hostages, abandoned security and destroyed Israeli society are now destroying the chain of command. The country is in existential danger if these people do not leave power and get out of our lives.”

But while politicians like Lapid are willing to condemn the excesses of people like Ben-Gvir, they are less willing to forthrightly pinpoint the root of the problem: Israel’s ongoing occupation of Palestinian land. Without a serious move toward both an end to the Gaza war and a two-state solution, the root causes of incidents like Sde Teiman will stay in place. And the struggle between the two Israels will intensify accordingly.

Where that ultimately leads is, at this point, anyone’s guess. But the chances are that it isn’t good.