Over the years, Israel has imported many aspects of American culture, most of them bad: conspicuous consumption, oversized cars, income gaps, polarization, and now the concept of the “deep state.”
Deep state (or as it’s pronounced in Hebrew, “dip-stet”) refers to the conspiracy theory that unseen, unelected, and unregulated enemies of the government are secretly sabotaging its policies or politics.
In the US, it was typified during the 2016 presidential election campaign by the claim that Hillary Clinton, the Democrat then running against Donald Trump, was operating a sex trafficking ring from the basement of a Washington pizzeria. The fact that the pizzeria didn’t even have a basement did nothing to stop the conspiracy theory from spreading. Trump won that election.
In the US, deep state talk comes mostly from conspiracy theorists, whose numbers are growing but nowhere near a majority. Meanwhile, in Israel, “dip-stet” refers to anyone who doesn’t support Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu completely and unconditionally. The term has replaced the hated “Left,” which also refers to anyone who doesn’t support Netanyahu completely and unconditionally—though Israel’s actual political Left is almost nonexistent.
“Dip-stet” targets include the police, state prosecutors, the Israeli Security Agency, which is the country’s internal security service, the Mossad intelligence agency, the attorney general, even the army— and especially the Supreme Court.
It’s a way of vilifying critics, even official ones whose job is to investigate, charge, and try suspected criminals, most of whom were appointed by Netanyahu and his government. It’s an ad hominem approach: attacking people instead of refuting their claims.
So, when two senior Netanyahu advisers are arrested on suspicion of secretly accepting money from Qatar in exchange for influencing Israeli policy, Netanyahu doesn’t need to counter the charges in public; he simply invokes the “dip-stet” and declares the two advisors are its innocent victims. He even called them “hostages,” sparking a huge outcry from the families and supporters of the 59 actual Israeli hostages still held by Hamas terrorists in Gaza nearly a year and a half after they were taken on Netanyahu’s watch.
In turn, Netanyahu’s opponents automatically reject anything he says or does, claiming that it’s all politically or personally motivated and bad for the nation. That’s the flip side of such polarization.
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It’s almost ironic that there is, in fact, a kind of state within a state operating in Israel: a large segment of society that rejects almost everything about the nation except for huge sums of money it receives from the state budget.
It could be called the “black state” (“blek-stet”?), referring to the black suits and hats worn by ultra-Orthodox Jewish men. Many study Torah through adulthood instead of working, living on government subsidies. With three separate parties in the Israeli Parliament, they are key members of Netanyahu’s coalition.
These coalition members represent about one million ultra-Orthodox Jews who refuse to serve in the military at a time when Zionist-Orthodox and secular Israelis have carried an impossible burden of months-long reserve duty during a multi-front war. Many have been killed or wounded, while others have lost their jobs, their businesses, and increasingly, their families. A clear majority of Israelis now demand that the draft exemption be abolished to “spread the load” more equitably.
Netanyahu doesn’t bother to respond to that. Instead, defending the hundreds of millions of shekels allocated to ultra-Orthodox schools and academies, he claimed that this segment of society receives less than one percent of the state budget, even though they make up 13 percent of the population.
Israel’s right-leaning Kohelet think tank, aligned with Netanyahu’s views (and not the “dip-stet”), disclosed a completely different picture.
Reviewing the numbers, Kohelet determined that this year, non-ultra-Orthodox Jewish Israelis will pay $86 billion more in taxes than they’ll receive in government services. In contrast, ultra-Orthodox Israelis will receive $5 billion more than they pay in.
Israel’s polarization is now so extreme that the Netanyahu government is completely and joyfully beholden to a financial black hole, dressed, appropriately, in black, while branding much of the taxpaying, terrorist-fighting citizenry as traitors and enemies. In other words, as dip-stet.
Israel’s economy cannot sustain financing an ever-growing segment of the population that chooses not to work and also refuses to share the defense burden.
And if financing the ultra-Orthodox is unsustainable, the expanding hate-filled polarization is even more so.
Israel’s internal situation is gloomy, but many Israelis are stepping up to try to fix it. Among several grassroots movements, one called The Fourth Quarter claims to be the largest, with 11,000 members and 180,000 supporters. (Full disclosure: My son Haggai is a key activist.)
The movement takes its name from a historical phenomenon: societies tend to crumble between their 75th and 100th years. It happened in the US, twice in ancient Jewish history, Argentina, and elsewhere. The theory goes that once a nation turns 75, its people no longer hold personal memories of the founding ideals. If new ones are not created, society can fail.
Unlike other protest groups, The Fourth Quarter does not advocate for or against specific policy issues. Instead, it works to unite people who prioritize national unity with the aim of overcoming polarization. The hope is that, together, they can work out compromises on divisive issues.
First, though, the group advocates structural reforms, like strengthening the Parliament and weakening judicial overreach. Under intense questioning, group leaders admit that their timeframe for change is up to 10 years.
Does Israel have 10 years to fix what’s wrong? This may be the most important question its public and leaders face today.