Every system built on control eventually faces a reckoning. There comes a day when the power that once pointed outward—silencing critics, suppressing truth—turns inward, consuming those who still dare to feel. That moment rarely comes with explosions or revolts. It arrives quietly, through acts of conscience that refuse to be buried.

Israel seems to be standing at such a moment. The arrest of Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, the country’s chief military prosecutor, for allegedly leaking a video showing the torture of a Palestinian prisoner, is not just a legal scandal. It is a mirror held up to a nation struggling with its own reflection.

Tomer-Yerushalmi was not an outsider or an enemy. She was part of Israel’s most protected core—the legal and military establishment that has long defined itself as the guardian of national survival. Yet within that machinery, she chose something deeply human: empathy. Her decision to expose brutality was not rebellion; it was an act of moral courage, a quiet insistence that law without conscience is just another form of violence. For that act, she was punished.

Her arrest reveals something profound: that a government obsessed with control begins, sooner or later, to fear honesty as much as dissent. Israel, once haunted by external threats, now trembles before its own inner truth. When truth itself becomes the enemy, a nation’s strength doesn’t vanish—it begins to hollow out from within.

For decades, “security” has been the heart of Israel’s identity. In its early years, that word meant survival. But over time, it turned into something sacred and........

© Middle East Monitor