This Independence Day, Israel Has Split Into Two Incompatible Jewish States [View all]

[Israeli]

The confluence of the catastrophe of October 7 and Israel's 76th anniversary may blunt the political debate for a while, but it cannot hide the reality: There are now two states here – Israel and Judea – with contrasting visions of what the nation should be

There is an elephant in the Israeli room – and no, it's not occupation, though that is its main cause.
The elephant in the room is Israel gradually but inexorably being divided into the State of Israel – a high-tech, secular, outward-looking, imperfect but liberal state – and the Kingdom of Judea, a Jewish-supremacist, ultranationalist theocracy with messianic, antidemocratic tendencies that encourage isolation.

This is what happened between (roughly) 796 B.C.E. and the destruction of the First Temple by the Babylonians in 586 B.C.E., and again from 140 B.C.E. to 63 B.C.E. when the Hasmoneans ruled until the Roman conquest. The divisions were most acute during the First Jewish Revolt of 66 C.E., leading to the destruction of the Second Temple in 70, resulting in exile and statelessness until 1948.

It is no longer "Tel Aviv versus Jerusalem" but increasingly "Tel Aviv versus Masada." The modern day versus the extremist, messianic Sicarii cult in Masada in 73. In recent years, Israel has been ruled by a modern-day version of those Jewish Zealots.

Zionism, the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, designed as a political tool to redress a 2,000-year anomaly of statelessness, has in Judea and inside the current government morphed and mutated through the settler movement and extreme right-wing zealots into a Masada-like political culture, based on the concept of the redemption of the ancient kingdom in the ancestral land.

For years, there was a division between Israel and the occupied territories. Now, those occupied territories have taken over the government in Jerusalem under the tutelage and active encouragement of Judea's self-ordained king: Benjamin Netanyahu.

Source : Haaretz

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