Netanyahu’s Concrete State: How Israel Learns to Live With Impunity

Benjamin Netanyahu’s political survival has required more than coalition discipline, media warfare, or ordinary electoral strategy. It has required something deeper: a change in the physics of Israeli statehood.

The state must remain strong outwardly, but become weak inwardly. It must be able to strike enemies, mobilize soldiers, invoke emergency, and speak in the language of national survival. But when the same state is asked to investigate power, restrain ministers, protect the independence of the courts, defend the attorney general, scrutinize the security services, or establish a full commission of inquiry into October 7, its force begins to disappear.

That is now the central danger.

Netanyahu does not need a failed state. He needs a selective state: strong against Hamas, Iran, and Hezbollah, but hesitant before his own coalition; aggressive toward external enemies, but paralyzed before internal accountability; capable of war, but increasingly incapable of self-interrogation.

This is no longer ordinary political struggle. It is the cementing of the political field.

Cementing does not mean that one politician wants to win elections. Every politician wants to win elections. Cementing begins when power tries to reshape the field itself so that every real alternative is weakened in advance, delegitimized, or presented as a threat to the nation. In such a system, the opposition still exists, but as a suspect body. Courts still exist, but as obstacles. The attorney general still exists, but as a political enemy. The media still exist, but under regulatory pressure. The police still exist, but increasingly under political influence. Society still protests, but over time it learns that protest can be absorbed, delayed, exhausted, and ground down.

In this sense, Netanyahu is not only governing Israel. He is trying to alter the very conditions under which Israel can hold its own government accountable.

The most recent and dangerous signal came when the government moved to defy a Supreme Court ruling concerning Israel’s media regulator. Formally, the dispute concerns the Second Authority for Television and Radio. Politically, however, it concerns something much deeper: whether a ruling of the Supreme Court remains a binding decision of the state, or whether it becomes merely an opinion that the government may accept or reject according to its own interest.

When a government begins to say that it does not recognize the decision of the court, this is no longer a legal disagreement. It is an attempt to shift the constitutional nerve of the state. Law ceases to be a limit on power and becomes another arena of political war.

This is precisely how democracy can decay without a dramatic final scene. It does not always disappear through tanks in the streets, banned parties, and closed newspapers. Sometimes it dies through resolutions, appointments, committees, transfers of authority, personal attacks, procedural exceptions, and the daily habituation of citizens to the idea that the rule of law is a luxury for calmer times.

Netanyahu and his coalition are producing impunity not through one grand coup, but through a series of seemingly........

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