But from below there is growing another army -- an army many of whose lower officers wear a kippah, an army whose new recruits grew up in homes like Elor Azariya's and were educated in the nationalist Israeli school system that produced Azariya.
The military trial of Azariya continues to tear Israel apart, several months after it started and months before it will end in a verdict. Azariya, it will be remembered, is the sergeant who shot dead a severely wounded Arab attacker, who was already lying helplessly on the ground.
Day after day, this affair excites the country. The army command is menaced by what already comes close to a general mutiny. The new defense minister, the settler Avigdor Lieberman, quite openly supports the soldier against his Chief of Staff, while Binyamin Netanyahu, a political coward as usual, supports both sides.
This trial has long ago ceased to concern a moral or disciplinary issue, and has become a part of the deep fissure rending Israeli society. The picture of the childish-looking killer, with his mother sitting behind him in court and stroking his head, has become the symbol of the threatening civil war Pardo speaks about.
A LOT of Israelis have begun to talk of "two Jewish societies" in Israel, some even talk about "two Jewish peoples" within the Israeli Jewish nation.
What holds them together?
The conflict, of course. The occupation. The perpetual state of war.
Yitzhak Frankenthal, a bereaved parent and a pillar of the Israeli peace forces, has come up with an illuminating formula: it is not that the Israeli-Arab conflict has been forced on Israel. Rather, it's the other way around: Israel keeps up the conflict, because it needs the conflict for its very existence.
This could explain the endless occupation. It fits well into Pardo's theory of the approaching civil war. Only the sense of unity created by the conflict can prevent one.
The conflict -- or peace.
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