The fracture in Israeli society is not a failure of leadership or civility. It’s a war between four incompatible visions of what this country is actually for — held together by one thing, and increasingly nothing else.

Every country has arguments. Israel has something different. The debates that split Israeli society — over judicial reform, settlements, religious authority, Arab citizens, the meaning of October 7 — feel different in kind, not just degree, from ordinary political disagreement. They feel existential because they are. They are not arguments about how to pursue Israel’s purpose. They are arguments about what that purpose is.

There is one answer that every Israeli, left to right, secular to haredi, Jewish to Arab, gives the same way when the question is pushed to bedrock: Jewish survival cannot be entrusted to the goodwill of others. The state exists because it must exist. That conviction is not a policy. It is the foundation beneath every policy. It is the one thing that has held Israel together through wars, assassinations, economic crises, and political earthquakes that would have torn less constitutionally resilient societies apart.

But beneath that shared foundation, four genuinely distinct visions of Israel’s purpose have been competing since before 1948, and have never been resolved. They are not misunderstandings. They are not failures of dialogue. They are incommensurable. And they are now, for the first time, in open war with each........

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