‘Israeli society is heading for civil war and the country must take steps to counter it’, former Mossad chief Tamir Pardo stated last week, in his first public remarks since stepping down as the spy agency director in January. ‘The internal threat must worry us more than the external threat,’ he told a press conference. ‘If a divided society goes beyond a certain point, you have, in extreme circumstances, a phenomenon like civil war. To my regret, the distance to that point is shrinking. I fear that we are going in that direction.’ Pardo said. He added that there was more to unite than divide but some in Israel sought the intensity that came with division, and ‘there are some for whom it’s comfortable to emphasise that which divides and not that which unites. I can’t put my finger on a group or a leader. It exists within all the country’s groups.’