Earlier today I published a piece about Professor Dan Schueftan, who says Israeli society is the eighth wonder of the world — cohesive, resilient, proving itself under pressure. This morning a friend wrote to me with a different story: a leaked CIA assessment saying Israel may be heading for civil war or state collapse.
Drop Site News reported on Monday
“Just as you predicted,” she wrote. She’s right. I did predict it. Someone asked me in the questions after my talk last Saturday where I thought Israel was heading, and I said it was heading for a fracture from inside and a civil war — the Haredim, the army, the settlers, the soldiers coming home.
I should not have said it.
From the lectern, twenty minutes earlier, I had told that same room: I am not going to describe the ending. I have been wrong about the ending before. Then somebody asked a direct question, I had an answer ready, and out it came. A rule you keep until someone asks you nicely is not a rule.
So let me do now what I would do if the forecast had gone against me, and look at what this document actually is.
Drop Site News reported on Monday that two US sources described an August paper titled “Fracture From Within.” It lists economic strain, military spending, anger over the Haredi draft exemptions, settler violence in the West Bank, and soldiers returning from Gaza, Lebanon and Iran with serious psychological trauma, ahead of the elections on 27 October.
Three things about that, before anyone starts celebrating.
It was written to be contrarian. The paper came from the CIA’s Red Cell, a unit whose entire function is to challenge the prevailing consensus and argue the alternative case. A Red Cell paper is not what the agency believes. It is what the agency pays people to argue so that assumptions get tested. “The CIA says Israel is collapsing” is not what happened here.
Nobody outside that room has read it. Two anonymous sources described a classified document to one outlet. That may be entirely accurate. It is not the same as a report you can check.
It reportedly concerns only Jewish Israelis. It does not account for Arab citizens, about a fifth of the country, let alone the millions of Palestinians living under Israeli control. It reportedly concerns only Jewish Israelis. It does not account for Arab citizens, about a fifth of the country, let alone the millions of Palestinians living under Israeli control. That is the same hole I described earlier today in Schueftan’s argument, and I didn’t notice it here until I went looking — which tells you how easily it passes when the conclusion suits you.
What strikes me most is that Schueftan and the Red Cell are looking at the same fault line and reading it in opposite directions. He spends twenty minutes of an eighty-two-minute interview on the Haredi draft exemptions as the central internal threat to Israel’s future. So does this paper. One concludes Israeli society is strong enough to survive it. The other concludes it may not be.
Neither of them knows. And neither do I — including on the evening I stood in a church in San Anselmo and told a hundred people that I did.
This post draws on reporting by Drop Site News and on my memoir, The Awakening.