An Ultra-Orthodox Jewish person is dragged from a road by Israeli police during a protest on Sunday against army recruitment Based in Israel, Henry reports on the war in the Middle East, terrorism, Israeli politics and life in the Palestinian territories 5:00am BST The green light had been given; the mission was ready to go. At an Israeli base deep inside Gaza, the soldiers of the Givati Infantry Brigade’s Rotem Battalion were preparing to embark on a combat patrol.

Yet upon opening the door of their Namer armoured personnel carrier, they refused to enter. Despite the increasingly frustrated entreaties of their commander, the operation was ultimately scrapped.

Why? Because, according to multiple reports on the August incident, there was a female paramedic inside the armoured vehicle, and for the troops involved, who came from Israel’s Ultra-Orthodox community, this was a far bigger problem than the risk of being mortally wounded by Hamas.

Sixteen were subsequently sentenced to military detention, an outcome that provoked deep resentment in the highly religious federation of sects also known as the Haredim.

After all, it has been pointed out, these young men were at least willing to fight for their country – albeit on the condition that the military made accommodations for their strict theological rules.

By contrast, tens of thousands of other Haredi refuse outright, citing a higher duty to a life of intensive prayer and scripture study.

As the country approaches what has been billed as a crossroads election, this is one of several critical fault lines in Israeli society which some fear have the potential to tear it apart.

The prospect of an inconclusive result on Tuesday, Benjamin Netanyahu trying to hang on as prime minister, or indeed a replacement government led by Gadi Eisenkot that attempts to crack down on West Bank settler violence, could each act as the match to the tinderbox.

These combined crises, plus the economic strain of rising military spending, potentially put Israel at risk of not just societal fracture but civil war, according to a classified Central Intelligence Agency assessment reported at the start of the month.

The alleged report, supposedly written by the agency’s Red Cell, a unit tasked with challenging prevailing intelligence assumptions, has so far only been reported by Dropsite News, an outlet that is consistently critical of the Israeli government, and has not been confirmed by the US government. However, for some independent analysts, such a warning is not unreasonable.

Beth Oppenheim, a policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said the country was now so polarised that, whether Mr Netanyahu managed to cling on to power or not, there was likely to be a backlash from the other side. “There are huge existential questions for the country’s future at stake in this election,” she said.

“It’s a real scope for conflict and civil unrest between religious and secular.”Bnei Brak is a major Haredi community near Tel Aviv This week, 42 Haredi men were arrested at Ben Gurion Airport, accused of evading the draft.

Earlier in the month, a major riot tore through the city of Modi’in after military police tried to arrest one suspected draft dodger.

In post-Oct 7 Israel, where it is typical for reservists to serve more than 100 days a year, often on the front line, it is a controversy so bitter that to some extent it has reset dividing lines of party politics.

But on the streets of Bnei Brak, a major Haredi community near Tel Aviv, the young men concerned warned against it.

“If the military police come down here and try to drag men out of the Yeshivas, there will be an explosion,” Gavriel Weinberg told The Telegraph. “I’m 26, and I’ve got two kids – I study the Torah. It won’t work.”A 19-year-old called Israel agreed.

“They sent me my draft papers, but I ignored them,” he said. “I’m not worried about it.”Meanwhile, Israeli violence in the West Bank reached unignorable levels last week after Heidi Levine, a Washington Post photojournalist, was beaten so savagely by settlers she nearly lost a finger.

The next day, a delegation of European diplomats was also attacked in the occupied Palestinian territory, while the 78-year-old mayor of a small French town was allegedly struck with an iron bar.

In the liberal strongholds of Tel Aviv, Haifa and Herzliya, middle-class Israelis look on appalled, furious that the communities which, in their view, act so brazenly against the national interest, whether by depriving the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) of manpower or tarnishing Israel’s reputation abroad, appear to do so under the cover of increasing government patronage.

Many mutter darkly about leaving the country for good if another Netanyahu-led government emerges following next Tuesday’s vote.

More probable, perhaps, is a return to the mass demonstrations that gripped Israel in 2023 over Mr Netanyahu’s attempts to weaken the judiciary, a movement that found its successor in the “bring them home” rallies that called for the hostages’ homecoming to be prioritised rather than defeating Hamas.

During the final month of the election campaign, The Telegraph has visited multiple communities that were once on Israel’s fringe, but are now at the heart of the debate about its future.

On a windswept hilltop between Jerusalem and Hebron, 12 national-religious Jewish families and their supporters were celebrating the formal inauguration of Israel’s newest West Bank settlement.

Named Gad Natan after two Old Testament prophets, the collection of prefabricated dwellings situated above the vineyards and olive groves of the nearby Palestinian villages was, the inhabitants said, intended as a “seed” for a much larger conurbation in the future.

Religious Zionist Party volunteers campaign during the inauguration of the new West Bank settlement of Gad Natan To the background noise of children playing in a mini funfair and a religious-themed rock band on the temporary stage, the new settlers spoke of the need to keep up the pace of Israeli development in the West Bank. Chovav Rapport’s father was born in Cardiff, where he still has family. A father of four at 29, he works for the IDF in Be’er Shiba.

“The main challenge is more building,” he said. “We have to keep going.”He confided that he may vote for Bezalel Smotrich, the Religious Zionist Party finance minister who, since 2022, has used his executive power to affect a revolution in settlement building in the West Bank. Alternatively, he may vote for Mr Netanyahu’s Likud.

Ms Oppenheim argues that Mr Netanyahu’s Likud, which is not traditionally associated with the national-religious settler movements, has been taken over by national-religious ideology in the last few years, which would explain why Mr Rapport felt comfortable choosing either Mr Smotrich or Mr Netanyahu.

Mr Rapport’s shortlist echoed that of nearly all the settlers who spoke to The Telegraph at Gad Natan that day.

At the inauguration, Orit Strock, the Religious Zionist minister of settlements, spoke on stage about the need to kill off the Oslo Accords, the deal brokered with the Palestinians and Jordan by Yitzhak Rabin, the former prime minister, who was subsequently assassinated by a religious nationalist activist. The Oslo Accords were a series of agreements in the 1990s designed to set the framework for a negotiated two-state solution, which determined interim zones of municipal and security control within the West Bank between the IDF and the Palestinian Authority.

Orit Strock, the Religious Zionist Party minister of settlements, poses for a photograph during the inauguration festivities Dvir Glasser, a 28-year-old school counsellor, said he would probably vote for Mr Smotrich because he supported his ideas about the “transfer” of Palestinians out of the West Bank.

He takes out his phone and opens Google’s chatbot. “You know, I just asked Gemini ‘what should we do about the Palestinians?’, but Gemini is too kind! They hate us.

“Should they be transferred?” he added. “We prefer that they choose to go. We’d support that.”Mr Eisenkot, formerly Israel’s top soldier, has promised to crack down on what he described as “Jewish terror” in the West Bank, the widespread spate of anti-Palestinian violence perpetrated by a minority of settlers.

However, several incidents this summer, such as the so-called “siege of Qusra”, where violent settlers appeared able to defy and deter soldiers from removing illegal outposts, suggest that a concerted effort in this direction could quickly escalate into intra-Israeli violence.

Last week military sources said the army was reinforcing troops in the West Bank to guard against a surge in settler violence and the rapid establishment of more illegal outposts to thwart a future government’s plans to clamp down on the practice.

A few days later, at a trendy converted warehouse in Tel Aviv port, talk of Palestinian transfer – a polite term for ethnic cleansing, in the view of critics – was also in the air. Only this time among a younger, more urban crowd.

This was a campaign Q&A event for Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) leader and the national security minister in Mr Netanyahu’s government.

Also a religious nationalist who grew up in a West Bank settlement, he is often lumped together with Mr Smotrich by the diplomatic corps and foreign press.

However, he represents a distinct ideological tradition – one that is little understood abroad: that of Meir Kahane, the ultra-nationalist rabbi whose Kach party was banned from the Israeli elections in 1992 for inciting racism and which was later designated a terror organisation by the US.

It is, essentially, a Jewish supremacist worldview, and it has found a charismatic, rambunctious new exponent in Mr Ben-Gvir, whose party is polling better than that of Mr Smotrich.

In Tel Aviv, he garnered cheers by boasting about how tough he had made conditions for Palestinian prisoners – although he didn’t mention his most eye-catching policy, a so-far failed attempt to surround one prison with crocodiles – and how many guns he had allowed into the hands of Israelis.

He delights in releasing videos showing him taunting Palestinian prisoners, often convicted terrorists, in their cells.

Supporters cheer Itamar Ben-Gvir during a rally in Tel Aviv last week In one of his most recent videos, he tells the man to his face that “god willing” he will be hanged – a major new policy of his, symbolised by the shiny little noose he wears on his lapel.

Hershy Kelner, who emigrated to Israel four years ago, said he regarded Mr Netanyahu as a moderate whom Mr Ben-Gvir was – just about – keeping on the right track.

“I want Israel to get more right-wing,” he said, citing the 2023 murder of teacher Lucy Dee and her two daughters by Palestinian terrorists in the West Bank as an important factor in his political outlook.

“If they want me dead, I don’t want to live with them. I want them out.”An 18-year-old from Beit Shemesh, who gave only his first name, Gavriel, agreed that the prime minister would be “left-wing” without the Otzma Yehudit leader.

Amid the beer and hot dogs on the fringe of the Tel Aviv event, he explained that he also believed that the Palestinians as a people should be removed. “The idea that giving them more land makes them peaceful is a fraud,” he said.

A shopper in Tel Aviv examines a key chain bottle opener in the shape of a gun decorated with a photograph of Itamar Ben-Gvir Before the national security minister went on stage, his female spokesman explained to the handful of international journalists that her party leader had no interest in speaking to us – and didn’t care what we thought about it. “His priority is the Israelis in that hall,” she said.

In fairness, nearly all the other party leaders have also determinedly ignored the foreign media during this election campaign.

But it is the explicit relish with which Mr Ben-Gvir and Mr Smotrich - both of whom have been personally sanctioned by Britain - disdain international opinion that creates a clear dividing line with the non-religious nationalist right, which keeps a wary eye on international opinion.

Mr Netanyahu, after all, delights in his reputation as the “Trump whisperer”, his supporters telling anyone who will listen that while many Israeli politicians speak English, “Bibi speaks American”.

For liberal Zionists, the ideological descendants of David Ben-Gurion and fellow Labor pioneers who founded Israel, this election is a nauseous mix of hope and dread.

It is common to hear the more affluent liberals talk of emigrating if another, as they see it, extremist government gets in.

Bezalel Smotrich speaks at an event marking the inauguration of another Israeli settlement in the West Bank last month A Kan News poll in August found that 12 per cent of Israelis said that the election result would affect their decision whether to emigrate, while a third knew someone who had left during the previous two years. Such data should, of course, be treated cautiously.

However, Ms Oppenheim suggested Israel after October 2026 might be different.

“A lot of people are waiting to see what happens,” she said. “It wouldn’t be at all surprising if there was quite a big exodus after this.”Exodus or riots – either way, the tensions and trigger points between Israel’s Right and liberal-centrist camps are plain to see.

But there are also fault lines within the right that are potentially just as momentous for Israel’s social fabric.

The issue of Haredi enlistment, or non-enlistment, in the IDF has stoked deep resentment among religious nationalists. The latter community over-contributes to the military effort.

Between October 2023 and 2025, 34 per cent of IDF soldiers killed in action were religious nationalists, despite the community making up around 17 per cent of Jewish Israelis.

Moreover, religious nationalists are deeply religious themselves, yet feel the Haredim look down on them as religiously inferior.

Recent comments from Rabbi Dov Lando, the spiritual leader of the Ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism party, which supported Mr Netanyahu’s coalition until July, cannot have helped.

The 96-year-old blamed the young men being killed on the battlefield for their own deaths, suggesting they should not have been fighting in the first place.

“They are being killed because their rabbis teach them twisted Torah,” he said, according to Channel 12.

Yehoshua Pfeffer is an Ultra-Orthodox rabbi who supports the Haredi Public party, a new grouping which aims to better integrate the Ultra-Orthodox community into Israeli life by encouraging a larger proportion of young Haredi men to join the army, while allowing the most gifted scripture students to stay in the yeshivas. The party’s supporters have faced threats from the mainstream Ultra-Orthodox community.

An Israeli soldier walks past a religious group in central Israel earlier this month Nevertheless, they hope to make an electoral breakthrough next week.

Rabbi Pfeffer told a public meeting in Tel Aviv on Thursday that a young religious nationalist man had recently approached him to admit he had “a dark spot in his heart” towards the Ultra-Orthodox, because of the enlistment issue.

“He said: ‘Rabbi, I have hatred towards the Haredi.’ This is an unsustainable situation.”Moti Leitner, the 33-year-old Haredi Public leader, is now publicly challenging the mainstream Ultra-Orthodox rabbinical leadership, which broadly opposes enlistment, to grasp the nettle.

His party accuses them of leaving a “vacuum” of leadership over the issues of army manpower and social integration, leaving the way open for young rioters of the type who smashed up Modi’in this month.

“We must free ourselves from them if we are ever to make any real change,” he told the meeting.

Before sitting down, Mr Leitner made, arguably, a radical choice for a Haredi politician.

With passion, and to some surprise, he chanted “Am Yisrael Chai”.

It broadly means, “The people of Israel live”, a solidarity slogan associated with the strength of the Jewish nation, not specifically the state of Israel. These days, however, it is often used in a nationalist context.

It was almost as if Mr Leitner was trying to drag his ever more populous community across the societal fault line and into the Zionist mainstream – by the scruff of the neck, if necessary.

And it should not be forgotten that Israel’s claim to be the only real democracy in the Middle East is a meaningful one.

Despite the rancour and alleged corruption of recent years, it still has the institutions and, crucially, political culture to allow it to navigate its internal differences peacefully. Whether it does so remains to be seen. But it begins from a much stronger place than all of the countries that neighbour it.