When politics turns into a contest for identity survival, democracy institutions stop being referees and start becoming weapons.

Israel’s recent trajectory, from their 2023 judicial overhaul attempt to their post-October 7 governance under wartime emergency powers, continues to illustrate a broader, unjustified political pattern. In ethnically and religiously fractionalized democracies, institutional erosion does not always show as a direct threat to democracy, but rather as a series of legally justified reforms driven by identity polarization and security crises. In highly divided societies, political actors gain electoral advantage by intensifying ethnic or religious cleavages, and once in power, they use those same class, religion, ethnicity and region differences to justify weakening institutional constraints. These divisions, when politicized, structure voter behavior, shape party systems, and deepen opposing conflicts in the name of “justice”.

This dynamic, however, is not unique to only Israel. It echoes patterns identified in other divided democracies, including India, where ethnic and religious polarization has repeatedly shaped both electoral incentives and time periods of both economic and democratic strain. As Ashutosh Varshney argued, “interethnic civil engagement can prevent violence, while its absence makes cities vulnerable to ethnic conflict”. The deeper implication of Varshney’s work is that democracy in divided societies is not sustained by institutions alone, but by cross-cutting networks that reduce the political importance of boundaries influenced by identity. When elites strategically mobilize identity divisions, conflict becomes more likely, institutions become more fragile, and the people suffer at the hand of their “leaders”.

In the case of Israel, we can see in real time what happens when political incentives move in the opposite direction of justice. The 2023 judicial overhaul proposal sought to significantly limit judicial review and restructure judicial appointments, concentrating more authority in elected majorities. While supporters framed this as restoring democratic balance, critics warned it would weaken one of the few institutional checks capable of constraining coalition-driven policymaking in a highly polarized society. The key issue has never been SOLELY towards legal reform, but rather the way reform can become embedded in an environment of intensifying ethno-religious polarization. In deeply divided societies, political elites often face incentives to mobilize support along identity lines rather than programmatic ones. Once this occurs, institutional disputes are no longer interpreted as procedural disagreements but as existential threats between groups. This shift in turn transforms courts, legislatures, and bureaucracies into symbolic battlegrounds rather than just to be ruled by the laws of the land(s) affected.

Naturally, the subsequent war following October 7th has since intensified these dynamics dramatically. Conditions under which are currently controlled by emergency governance have expanded executive authority while also reducing political space for dissent. Although this is a pattern seen in many democracies facing security crises, exceptional circumstances such as ongoing famine and war normalize exceptionally terrible governance. In Gamboa’s work, she argues that democratic survival depends on whether opposition forces adopt what she calls, “institutional strategies under constrained conditions”. She also emphasized that moderate goals pursued through institutionalized strategies are more effective at resisting democratic erosion than maximalist approaches. This insight is crucial in understanding why some democracies withstand executive overreach, while others slide towards erosion. In Israel, opposition responses to judicial overhaul efforts combined mass protest with institutional challenges, but when factoring in the wartime context of current times, this has shifted the balance of power towards the executive. When human survival crises dominate political attention, courts and legislatures often struggle to sustain coordinated resistance, especially when the executive frames institutional checks as obstacles to national survival.

Identity polarization increases electoral incentives for majoritarian consolidation, which further weakens institutional constraints, increases mistrust, and deepens polarization. Although democracy formally persists, its internal balance becomes increasingly asymmetrical. Political competition has long involved the strategic mobilization of religious identity, which in turn has affected institutional independence and minority protections. Where cross-cutting ties are weak and identity becomes the primary axis of political competition, democratic institutions are more vulnerable to erosion through majoritarian consolidation rather than overt collapse. The concern is not simply institutional reform in isolation, but the interaction between reform, identity polarization, and security narratives. When the courts are framed as partisan actors and political opponents are framed as existential threats, institutional checks lose their legitimacy, even if they remain formally intact at surface level enough to continue their operations towards the government’s own goals.

All in all, the war brought on to Palestine by Israel illustrates a broader claim about democratic erosion in ethnically and religiously fractionalized societies: institutions do not fail first without change that contributes to their own political incentives. Once identity-based polarization becomes the dominant mode of political competition, even long-running, well designed constitutional systems struggle to maintain equilibrium. The danger is not that democracy or human rights disappear overnight, but that they slowly reorganized themselves around permanent crisis governance. While elections continue, courts operate per usual, and legislatures meet, the underlying logic of accountability shifts from universal citizenship to chaos centered around group-based, unaided survival. The citizens of Palestine continue to suffer at the hands of a war that is bigger than their individual contributions to their own society, they are merely pawns in an evil game of political chess.