Matti Friedman to J’lem rally: We risk turning into Lebanon, but won’t let it happen

At the rally outside the President’s Residence in Jerusalem, where thousands have turned out for a larger-than-usual protest, Canadian-born Israeli author and journalist Matti Friedman says Israel, potentially, could turn into a failed state like Lebanon, torn apart by corruption and internal division. But, he insists, this will not be allowed to happen.

He recalls his military service at an outpost in the southern Lebanon security zone, when he and his colleagues looked out over a country that had fallen apart, and where “a collection of groups were fighting over the spoils of a collapsed state… We didn’t realize that this could happen to Israel.”

He lambasts the role of Itamar Ben Gvir, a figure from “the violent margins of Jewish extremism” as the minister responsible for the police, and describes Bezalel Smotrich as a minister from “the messianist edge of the settlement movement who controls the nation’s purse strings and the Civil Administration.”

Also citing the political cracks that the overhaul has created within the IDF, Friedman says, “Everyone who knows Lebanon knows where this can lead.”

“But there is a difference between us and Lebanon,” he says, “and the difference is us. We, all the citizens, all the ethnic groups, all the streams that believe in the joint good…. all of us born into a national movement that created miracles and that taught us that reality is strong but that our will is stronger.”

“Lebanon is a possibility. But we will not let it happen,” says Friedman. “We see a different future and that is the future that will be.”

Also speaking in Jerusalem, former justice minister Tzipi Livni castigates the coalition for “not only cutting off the branch of equality” on which Israel rests, but “poisoning the roots” of Israeli morality.

She also denounces Jewish extremists “harming Arabs and burning Palestinian villages,” actions which “shame the entire Jewish people.”

These kinds of actions are “a small indication of the state they have in mind for us,” she says.

Israel must place “borders before corruption. And borders that will give security and peace. Facing supremacy and fascism, we’ll put morality,” she says.

Livni says the current domestic rift “can be healed” but not by softened drafts of legislation that “paper over the cracks.”

Rather, she urges that the Knesset legislate the sentence from the Declaration of Independence that the Jewish state “will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.”

That commitment covers “the widest common ground,” she says, even though there are those in this government who do not endorse it. But if they are not prepared to legislate to this effect, “there will be a government that will do so. And if those are our principles, we can live together,” she says, “and thrive.”