The recent events surrounding the protests of the Jerusalem Faction, the calls to “remove all restraints,” and the discussions about the mass surrender of draft evaders in order to overwhelm the prison and enforcement systems should concern every citizen of Israel. Not only because of the roadblocks and disruption to public order, but because they expose a deeper phenomenon: the emergence of a fundamentalist worldview that sees the state as a foreign entity, and at times even as an adversary.

The state’s instinctive response to such situations is usually one of force: more arrests, stricter enforcement, harsher penalties. There is a certain logic to this. No state can tolerate organized lawbreaking. Yet history teaches us that when dealing with fundamentalist movements, force alone rarely solves the problem. In some cases, it actually strengthens it.

Fundamentalism feeds on a sense of siege. It requires an enemy to justify its........

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