IT’S inconceivable, some will steadfastly argue. For sure – they will admit – there are serious political differences and divisions. But civil war? Never.

Admittedly, it takes a considerable leap of the imagination to think of Israel at war with itself. Almost from the very first day of the Jewish state’s foundation in 1948, the story of Israel’s evolution as a country has been told through the prism of solidarity. Countless historical novels and movies – from Leon Uris’s Exodus to Cast a Giant Shadow starring Kirk Douglas and based on the life of Israel’s first modern general, Mickey Marcus –have helped consolidate that notion.

As the story usually goes and verging as it sometimes does on the mythical, it’s a tale of the small but plucky nation with its back to the wall fending off belligerent Arab neighbours singularly hell-bent in running Jews into the sea and wiping Israel off the map.

I’ve no doubt that some within the Middle Eastern neighbourhood would settle for nothing less, but those of a more civilised and realpolitik disposition know that another solution has to be found. But if finding that solution has always been complicated, it’s now even more so.

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Long before October 7 last year and the Hamas attack and seizure of hostages, hundreds of thousands of Israelis were regularly taking to the streets in pro-democracy protests.

This past week they were back. At one point there were some 350,000 citizens on the streets of Tel Aviv, a number Israeli newspaper columnist Alon Pinkas noted was the equivalent of about 2.4 million people in Britain or 12m Americans “gathering in the same place for the same cause.”

With every such protest, the crackdown by prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government and increasingly politicised police gets more brutal, and not for the first time talk of political upheaval potentially leading to an actual civil war is nervously mooted.

This is not as far-fetched as it sounds. How can it be when Israel’s own leaders past and present, have referred to it or warned about it? As far back as March last year, Israeli president Isaac Herzog (below) acknowledged how the country was being torn apart.

“Israel is in the throes of a profound crisis. Anyone who thinks that a real civil war, of human life, is a line that we will not reach has no idea. The abyss is within touching distance,” Herzog warned.

Meanwhile, in June, as the war in Gaza raged, Netanyahu was at pains to stress that there “is one war that cannot be and must not be – there will be no civil war.”

But just last month one of the prime minister’s predecessors, Ehud Olmert, in a Haaretz op-ed, again turned Netanyahu’s point on its head insisting that Israel’s greatest threat lies from a “Judeo-messianic sector” within the country.

“Appropriate weapons have already been distributed to militias obeying the leaders of this messianic camp. The day is not far off when these militias will use the weapons they received to remove us as well, the ‘leftists’, the ‘collaborators with Hamas’, the ‘Shin Bet operatives’ and other security officials,’ Olmert warned.

Again, for those doubtful that such a scenario could ever unfold, it’s worth remembering as Ramzy Baroud, the US-Palestinian journalist and editor of the Palestine Chronicle recently pointed out, that Israel was in fact founded through armed conflict and has been sustained in the same way.

Like many commentators – including Israelis – he reminds us too that barely a month after its establishment, the State of Israel

was on the brink of civil war, with two of its most famous leaders, David Ben Gurion and Menachem Begin, facing off in the ultimate power struggle that became known as the Altalena Affair. It’s named after a cargo ship that was bringing in badly needed weapons for the new State of Israel to help fight Arab armies opposing it.

But what then ensued was a violent confrontation between the newly created Israel Defence Forces (IDF) under Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, and the Irgun Jewish paramilitary group led by Begin.

Bne Gurion saw Begin’s militia as a threat to the new Israeli government and was willing to spill Jewish blood to establish his authority and order an attack on the ship.

When the shooting finally stopped, 16 Irgun men were dead along with three IDF troops and the incident had brought the new State of Israel to the brink of civil war.

For many in Israel those events when “Jew killed Jew” remain difficult to talk about, but that did not stop Netanyahu (below) at a recent memorial service for the Altalena Affair drawing a parallel between the anti-government protests currently raging across Israel and the violent confrontation in those early days of the State’s founding.

(Image: PA)

Netanyahu might have used his speech as a call for solidarity, but many Israelis continue to see him and his accommodation of ultranationalist right wingers in his government coalition as the real threat to Israel’s unity.

It’s hardly surprising then that references to the Altalena Affair have taken on a fresh resonance in Israel these days as the war in Gaza opens up fissures and divisions that have long remained tense.

As Ramzy Baroud also highlighted in his recent article, one of those divisions derives from the relationship between Israel’s political and military establishments.

“There has been an unwritten contract that gave army generals a special and often a central seat in political decision-making.

The likes of Ariel Sharon, Ehud Barak and others, including the main founder of Israel, David Ben Gurion, all reached the helm of Israeli politics because of their military affiliations,” observed Baroud.

“However, Netanyahu changed all of this when he began to restructure Israel’s political institutions to keep the military marginal and politically disempowered. In doing so, he basically violated the main pillar of Israel’s political balance, which started in 1948,” Baroud added.

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It’s against this precarious backdrop that Israel’s protests are playing out right now. This then is no longer an internal conflict over Gaza and the hostages or about Hamas or Hezbollah, but one that has the political future of Israel at its heart, a point reiterated by former PM Ehud Olmert.

“We are determined to respond forcefully against all our external foes, but the biggest danger facing Israel, the one truly threatening the state’s existence, undermining its stability, economy, unity and identity, is the danger from within, which most of us are not attending to,” concluded Olmert in his recent Haaretz op-ed.

And so then a day of reckoning is likely coming, not least for Benjamin Netanyahu. That there will be more political upheaval before his demise though is a given. As for a civil war? It really isn’t beyond the realms of possibility.