“As a democracy, [Israel] is at stake. I’m not saying the problem is coming here tomorrow, but the trend is very, very, very dangerous.” With these words, spoken last April, Benny Gantz set the tone for his year-long bid to become Israeli prime minister. Such foreboding rhetoric was a recurrent feature of the Gantz campaign: in the same press conference he compared his rival Benjamin Netanyahu to the Turkish president Tayyip Erdogan; on another occasion, channeling Churchill, he promised to fight Netanyahu “in the streets, in the town squares, in the neighborhoods, in the schools, in the media and the courts.” This sense of existential urgency — of a collective future on the line — seemed at once to match events and outstrip them. Outwardly, Israel has undergone a year of incredible upheaval — three deadlocked elections, Parliamentary logjam, a prime minister on trial for corruption. And yet, following from abroad, the overwhelming feeling has been one of dissonance; of an urgency detached from reality.

I felt this dissonance most acutely towards the end of March, when, for a brief moment, we appeared to be watching Israel slip from ethnocracy to formal dictatorship. The election at the beginning of the month had resulted in yet another stalemate, with neither Gantz nor Netanyahu having an unimpeded path to the required sixty-one-seat Knesset majority. The prospect of a fourth election loomed — but was swiftly quashed by the incipient COVID-19 pandemic, which has now killed over a hundred Israelis and forced the country into lockdown.

The first sign that Netanyahu might exploit coronavirus for antidemocratic ends was the news that the Shin Bet, the Israeli secret service, were tracking citizens’ digital data in order to trace infections. This kind of surveillance, normally weaponized against Palestinians in the West Bank, was suddenly being deployed against Jews on the other side of the Green Line. And as the virus began to spread, so too did the scale and severity of the emergency measures. First, the Justice Minister Amir Ohana shuttered the courts, indefinitely adjourning Netanyahu’s trial and preventing any judicial scrutiny of the powers he’d afforded himself. Then the Knesset speaker Yuli Edelstein suspended Parliament entirely, before choosing to resign rather than call a vote on his replacement. In 972 Magazine, the lawyer Michael Sfard described the events as a “coup in broad daylight”: in a matter of days, and using only legal process, Netanyahu had effectively dissolved Israeli democracy, allowing him to wield power unchecked.