Luke Ford

Israel’s high-status actors do not compete for power by admitting they want it. They compete by deploying moral languages that frame their authority as necessary, legitimate, or indispensable. This is the core insight of David Pinsof‘s Alliance Theory. Moral vocabularies are not merely beliefs. They are coalition technologies. They recruit allies, discipline insiders, and justify control over institutions. Every major coalition claims to uniquely possess something that entitles it to rule. The vocabulary changes. The structure does not.
In Israel, this fight is unusually visible because the stakes are existential and the institutions are tightly coupled. The fights over the attorney general, the Shin Bet chief, judicial appointments, Haredi conscription, and renewed judicial overhaul efforts are not separate controversies. They are the same jurisdictional war refracted through different institutional terrain. What looks like a debate about democratic guardrails or Jewish sovereignty or warfighting competence is, underneath, a contest over who gets to define the state itself.
Three institutions concentrate this competition more than any others. The security apparatus, the judiciary and legal gatekeeping system, and the territorial-demographic machinery of settlement and land control are Israel’s master institutions. Whoever governs them governs the country. War policy, civil liberties, coalition durability, the balance between religion and state, and the tension between liberal and majoritarian rule all flow through these three domains. The recurring battles over judges, the attorney general, the Shin Bet, IDF command, and settlement policy are not accidental. They keep happening because the underlying jurisdictional question has not been resolved and perhaps cannot be. Is Israel primarily a liberal legal state, a majoritarian nationalist democracy, a security state under permanent emergency, or a Jewish civilizational project whose institutions should reflect religious and demographic priorities directly? Each coalition answers that question differently, and each answer expands the authority of the coalition advancing it.
The security state war runs along three fault lines. The professional security elite, comprising senior IDF leadership, the Shin Bet, the Mossad, and the defense planning apparatus, uses the language of competence, responsibility, and national survival. Its claim is that Israel lives under conditions that ordinary political logic cannot manage, and that only professionals with operational experience and institutional memory can navigate existential risk. Pinsof’s framework decodes this quickly. By framing security as a domain requiring specialized judgment, this coalition claims jurisdiction over life-and-death decisions and portrays civilian interference as recklessness dressed up as democratic principle. The October 7 failure complicated this claim severely, since the professional elite’s authority rests on a track record of competence, and the intelligence failure of that day was the most consequential breakdown in Israeli security history. The response has been a doctrinal shift rather than a retreat: the security establishment has moved from the older language of conflict management toward a doctrine of preemptive action and regional hegemony, seeking to revalidate its authority through operational success rather than defending the old framework.
The nationalist-political leadership aligned with the governing coalition deploys a different vocabulary: democratic mandate, popular sovereignty, and accountability. Its argument is that elected officials, not generals or intelligence chiefs, must ultimately control policy because sovereignty belongs to the people and not to professional castes insulated from electoral consequence. What the security elite calls professionalism, this coalition calls unaccountable power. What the generals call operational caution, politicians call hesitation or, when the charge is sharper, political interference in the other direction. The moves against Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar and the broader effort to assert civilian control over intelligence and security appointments follow this logic. They are presented not as political interference but as the correction of an existing distortion.
The third security coalition overlaps with the settler movement and the ideological nationalist right. Its language is victory, deterrence, and historical mission. It argues that restraint has been Israel’s strategic mistake and that security must be pursued with clarity and maximum force, subordinated to the broader project of Jewish sovereignty rather than to international opinion or professional caution. This coalition does not simply want to win wars. It wants security policy to serve a civilizational agenda, which puts it in tension with the professional elite even when both favor military action.
The legal gatekeeper war is in some ways the most philosophically interesting, because it exposes a foundational ambiguity in Israel’s constitutional structure. Israel has no formal written constitution. The Supreme Court and the attorney general have accumulated their authority through a series of landmark rulings and institutional conventions, most notably the Basic Laws and the Court’s 1995 assertion that it could strike down Knesset legislation that violated them. The judicial-legal coalition, centered on the Supreme Court, Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, and the network of senior legal advisers embedded across government ministries, uses the language of rule of law, checks and balances, and protection of democracy against majoritarian capture. Its claim is that in the absence of a formal constitution, robust legal gatekeepers are the only structural barrier between representative government and the partisan seizure of state institutions.
The nationalist-religious governing coalition frames this not as protection but as usurpation. Its moral language is governability, popular sovereignty, and the delegitimization of unelected elites. It argues that legal actors have accumulated power no democratic theory can justify and now exercise it to override the expressed will of voters. The judicial overhaul efforts, the attempt to dismiss the attorney general, and the pressure on the Shin Bet chief all follow the same logic: elected authority must reclaim jurisdiction from institutions that have placed themselves above accountability. Each move is presented not as an attack on democracy but as its restoration, a rebalancing away from an elite that has confused its own preferences with constitutional principle.
The liberal civic-protest movement occupies a third position. It lacks formal office and cannot hold institutions directly. Its tools are mass mobilization, the threatened refusal of reserve military service, business and investment signals, and reputational pressure on the governing coalition. Its language is democracy, civil rights, and institutional integrity. Pinsof would identify its move as moral guardianship: it cannot seize authority, but it can impose legitimacy costs on those who do, making the exercise of power more expensive for the governing coalition than the formal balance of institutional power would suggest.
The territorial and demographic war has the longest time horizon and the most irreversible consequences. The settler-religious messianic coalition uses the language of historical right, divine promise, and national destiny. Its claim is that Jewish sovereignty over the land is not a policy choice subject to negotiation but a civilizational commitment whose denial would hollow out the meaning of the state itself. Its strategy converts physical presence into institutional permanence: settlements become infrastructure, infrastructure becomes legal facts, legal facts become political realities that subsequent governments find nearly impossible to reverse. The expansion of settlement activity in the West Bank, the legal frameworks that govern land designation and building rights, and the political power of settlement leaders within the governing coalition all serve this goal of making territorial control progressively harder to undo.
Against this, the security pragmatist coalition, overlapping with liberal-national voices and parts of the professional military, uses the language of strategic restraint and international legitimacy. Its argument is that uncontrolled expansion risks the combination of international isolation and internal demographic arithmetic that would eventually force a choice between the Jewish and democratic character of the state. This coalition does not necessarily reject territorial control. It argues that territorial policy must serve long-term strategic viability rather than theological imperative. A third voice, the nationalist sovereignty bloc on the secular right, supports territorial dominance but justifies it in strategic terms, as security buffer and deterrent depth, rather than religious ones. This puts it in an uneasy middle position between the messianic bloc and the pragmatists.
The big pattern across all three domains is identical. Each coalition says: we should have authority because we uniquely possess something essential. The security elite claims expertise and warfighting competence. The governing coalition claims democratic mandate and popular sovereignty. The legal coalition claims procedural legitimacy and rule of law. The settler bloc claims historical and religious truth. The protest movement claims moral guardianship of democratic norms. None of these coalitions says: we want power because it benefits our members. All of them experience their own claims as sincere. That sincerity does not change the structure.
War and crisis amplify these forces without resolving them. National emergency elevates security language as a trump card, places legal constraints under pressure, and expands the political authority of whoever holds executive power. But crisis does not eliminate jurisdictional competition. The Haredi draft crisis has handed the security pragmatists new domestic leverage: after years of warnings about manpower shortages, IDF leadership now conditions operational readiness on a binding conscription law, placing Netanyahu in a pincer between his religious coalition partners and the military’s functional requirements. The high-net-worth and technology sectors have largely aligned with the security pragmatists, with capital flowing heavily into defense technology and security-adjacent industries in ways that create a powerful security-managerial alliance rewarding demonstrated competence over ideological purity.
The uncomfortable symmetry that Pinsof’s framework reveals is that each coalition presents its claim as categorically different from mere power seeking, and none is. The judicial coalition’s procedural legitimacy and the governing coalition’s democratic mandate are both genuine values and both coalition technologies deployed to justify institutional jurisdiction. The security establishment’s claim to professional authority and the settler bloc’s claim to civilizational truth are both sincerely held and both structurally convenient for the actors holding them. That is not a reason to treat all claims as equally valid or equally dangerous. It is a reason to read every claim with the question: what institutional jurisdiction does this moral language expand, and for whom?
The system holds because power is distributed and contested. No coalition can fully displace the others without triggering systemic backlash serious enough to threaten the whole structure. The governing coalition needs the security establishment’s operational capacity. The security establishment needs political legitimacy it cannot generate itself. The legal gatekeepers need public trust that the protest movement helps supply. The settler bloc needs governing coalition protection that requires military and legal acquiescence. These mutual dependencies are what keep the jurisdictional war from becoming a terminal crisis, even as they ensure it never ends.
Durable authority in Israel has always formed at the junctions between coalitions, where leaders can speak security and politics simultaneously, or law and nationalism, or religion and statecraft. The question the current moment forces is whether any figure or coalition can assemble that bridging capacity under conditions of ongoing war, internal fracture, and a legal and political fight that has moved each coalition further from the center of the others. The jurisdictional wars will continue regardless of how particular battles over judges, generals, or territory resolve. They continue because they are not accidents or temporary breakdowns. They are the equilibrium through which Israel governs itself.

The emergence of Israel’s New Historians in the late 1980s looks, on the surface, like a straightforward case of archival discovery. Newly declassified Israeli state documents became available, a generation of younger scholars examined them, and the founding narrative of 1948 grew more complicated. That account is not wrong. It is just incomplete. Read through David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory and the related concept of Niche Construction, the New Historians become something more revealing: a case study in how coalition security, legitimacy testing, and strategic realignment shape what counts as serious scholarship, and what gets a scholar expelled from one world and embraced by another.
Start with the environment that made them possible. Before the 1980s, the Zionist narrative of 1948 functioned as a high-cohesion coordination tool inside Israel. In conditions of perceived existential threat, internal dissent about the founding war registered as coalition betrayal. But by the late 1980s, several pressures had eased. The Cold War wound down. State archives declassified. A generation of scholars came of age without direct memory of 1948. The Oslo process generated genuine optimism about a negotiated peace. Under those conditions, the Israeli coalition felt secure enough to tolerate, and in some academic circles even reward, internal moral audit. Challenging the founding myth became a signal of intellectual sophistication and alignment with Western academic norms. That window did not last, but while it was open, it allowed the New Historians to emerge.
The three most significant figures were Benny Morris, Ilan Pappé, and Avi Shlaim. They shared an empirical starting point: the archives showed that the 1948 war was more complicated than the official narrative acknowledged, that expulsions of Palestinians occurred, that the fighting was not simply a defensive response to Arab aggression, and that Israeli leadership made choices that shaped the refugee crisis. On the facts, their disagreements were narrower than the subsequent polemics suggested. The real divergence was coalitional, not empirical. Each made a different decision about where to stand relative to the Israeli state’s legitimacy, and those decisions determined their subsequent trajectories entirely.
Morris stayed inside the legitimacy boundary. In The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, first published in 1987 and substantially revised in 2004, he documented expulsions unflinchingly and dismantled the sanitized founding story. But his political conclusion was that what happened in 1948 reflected the tragic logic of state survival under genuine threat. That conclusion kept him inside the Zionist coalition’s core claim. When the Second Intifada collapsed Oslo optimism and the coalition shifted back toward a threatened posture, Morris moved with it, becoming more hawkish and more willing to defend Israeli security measures in stark terms. His recent statements reflect persistent pessimism: no two-state solution viable in the near term, Hamas unwilling to disarm or abandon its founding ideology, Gaza likely requiring external administration rather than immediate Palestinian sovereignty. His revisionism was reabsorbed domestically because it never challenged the state’s right to exist. It only complicated the story of how existence was achieved.
Pappé crossed the boundary. Starting from similar archives, he shifted from empirical complication to moral reclassification, adopting the language of ethnic cleansing and settler colonialism and eventually supporting the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. In Alliance Theory terms, that is not a more extreme version of what Morris did. It is a categorically different move. It shifts the question from how the state came to be to whether the state has the right to be. Once that shift happens, the Israeli coalition cannot reintegrate the critic. The ideas no longer challenge the founding story. They challenge the founding itself. Pappé left Israel, eventually settling at Exeter, and found that the niche he lost at home had a robust counterpart abroad. His recent work, including 2025 lectures framing Gaza as the epicenter of international order breakdown, continues to amplify that global audience.
Why Western academia received him so well is the more interesting structural question, and it is where Niche Construction Theory adds the most. Western universities operate under coordination rules that made Pappé’s framework highly portable. The oppressor-oppressed template generates status. Insider dissent carries more weight than outside criticism, because a Jewish Israeli scholar calling 1948 ethnic cleansing provides a signal that external critics cannot replicate. And by framing the Israeli case through settler colonialism, Pappé made it legible to scholars working on Algeria, South Africa, Australia, and the Americas. His narrative plugged directly into a pre-existing global network of postcolonial critique, instantly expanding his audience and his institutional reach. The niche he lost in Tel Aviv was, in structural terms, smaller than the one he gained in Exeter.
Shlaim occupied a middle position, sharply critical of Israeli policies, especially the post-1967 occupation and the management of Gaza, yet framing them more as deviations from or continuations of colonial logic than as outright delegitimization of the state’s existence. His trajectory has been less binary than either Morris or Pappé, sustaining academic prestige at Oxford while drifting increasingly toward anti-Zionist critique. His recent Genocide in Gaza: Israel, Hamas, and the Long War on Palestine (2025) extends that drift without completing the full crossing Pappé made decades earlier. He retains something of a bridge role, though the bridge has shortened considerably from one end.
Edward Shils spent much of his career trying to explain why Western intellectuals tend toward what he called antinomianism, a disposition against the established order, against constraint, against the claims of institutions and states. His account pointed to something structural in the intellectual role itself: status accrues through critique, through the demonstration that received ideas are inadequate, through moral distance from power. That disposition does not produce uniform politics, but it does produce a systematic receptivity to frameworks that challenge state legitimacy, especially when the state in question is closely tied to Western institutions and therefore symbolically available as a target. Israel, as a liberal democracy with deep ties to American and European intellectual networks, sits in precisely that position. It is accessible, symbolically powerful, and applicable to broader theoretical arguments. That makes it a high-yield case for academic narratives in ways that most states are not.
The backlash that came after Oslo’s collapse followed the predictable logic of coalition tightening under threat. What had read as intellectual honesty in the mid-1990s read as undermining national legitimacy during a shooting war after 2000. The tolerance that the secure coalition had extended contracted sharply. Morris and Pappé had started from similar archival findings, but they had built their careers on different coalitional bets, and the environment shift revealed the difference starkly. Morris’s bet paid off domestically. Pappé’s paid off abroad.
The fight that followed, and that continues, is rarely about the facts. Most serious historians on all sides agree that expulsions occurred, that the war’s causes were complex, and that Palestinian suffering was real. The disagreement is about what those facts mean for the state’s legitimacy. Morris argues they mean something tragic but not delegitimizing. Pappé argues they mean something that calls the state’s moral foundation into question. That is not a technical dispute resolvable by more archival research. It is a coalitional dispute about the moral status of the state itself, which is why it generates the rhetoric it does and why neither side’s arguments tend to move the other.
Anyone who tries to hold both claims at once faces a structurally difficult position. The bridging strategy that would work in this terrain requires building credibility across multiple coalitions rather than relying on a single one, leading with empirical precision rather than moral positioning, separating description from endorsement explicitly enough that readers cannot collapse the two, and maintaining symmetry in moral attention without pretending that all positions are equally well-supported. It means using calibrated language instead of trigger labels that end conversations before they begin, acknowledging tradeoffs and costs rather than hiding them, and accepting that the audience for serious bridging work is neither the committed activists nor the rigid ideologues but the movable middle that feels the tension without having language for it.
That is a narrow path and not a comfortable one. It offers fewer status rewards than pure critique and weaker coalition protection than full alignment. It tends to attract attack from both sides and full embrace from neither. The scholars who survive in that position usually combine strong technical or empirical credibility with financial and institutional independence sufficient to absorb a controversy without career collapse, and the emotional discipline not to get pulled into the fight when they are misread or instrumentalized. Those conditions are uncommon. That is why bridging work is rare and why most historiographical debates in high-stakes cases like this one tend to produce heat rather than light, not because the scholars are dishonest, but because the incentive structure of the coalitions they inhabit rewards clarity of alignment over clarity of thought.