# 285 / Editorial: Israel, Quo Vadis?
At the end of a summer in which international attention—long focused on Gaza—shifted to the catastrophic situation in the West Bank, we conclude our feature series with a nagging question: Israel, quo vadis? Israel, at present, is not on a slippery slope, nor has it lost its way: it is heading toward a specific destination, at a pace that we can only hope the upcoming elections will manage to divert. For what we are witnessing is not merely an escalation of violence by settler groups engaging in pogroms, in the absence of any serious response from the authorities: it is a deliberate attempt to shut the door on the future. The accumulation of facts on the ground and in the text of the law is aimed at making it impossible to return the illegally occupied territory to the Palestinians and to reach a peaceful settlement with them. It is a state of affairs—one of annexation, of raw domination, and thus of impossible separation—that is currently being cemented. K. will continue to document and analyze this reality in the context of the ongoing election campaign. To gauge its significance as we head into the fall, we invite you to revisit the articles we have already published, which already bore witness to a situation that has only worsened. Last April, Dvir Warshavski reported on the growing blurring of lines between settlers and soldiers and the collapse of the last institutional safeguards from a unique vantage point: that of religious Jewish activists who provide a “protective presence” for Palestinian farmers and seek, despite everything, to maintain fragile bridges between the populations. Sociologist Yagil Levy analyzes how a veritable “police army” has formed in the West Bank alongside the official military—rooted in settler communities and structurally inclined to tolerate, or even facilitate, the very violence it is supposed to contain—not by accident, but because this violence serves an annexationist agenda that leaves no room for any other political horizon. Finally, Mordechai Kremnitzer, one of the principal architects of Israel’s General Penal Code, concludes the dossier by offering—from within the very legal system he helped build—the relentless assessment of a country sliding toward illiberalism. In the recent law on the death penalty, he saw not only a “stain on Israel’s legislative record,” but the culmination of a regressive process that began more than twenty years ago—a process against which a liberal Zionist could not fail to fight, lest he find himself without a home.
Related articles
Violence in the West Bank: The “protective presence” of Bnei Avraham
On the evolution of the IDF: Interview with Yagil Levy
Israel: An illiberal democracy?
