THESE are tricky and uncertain political times in Scotland as our nation watches the contest unfold to decide who will be the next first minister. But as The National’s foreign editor, it would be remiss of me not to draw readers’ attention to another political contest far from Scotland but which by any standards should also concern us.

I’m talking about the tumultuous events underway right now in Israel, where the situation has become so volatile that some Israelis admit to finding themselves having conversations which at one time would have been unthinkable.

These conversations were summed up by the Israeli journalist Anshel Pfeffer, in a recent op-ed piece for the daily newspaper Haaretz which ran under the headline: “In Israel, A Civil War Is No Longer Unthinkable.”

At the core of such concern lies the determination of the most far-right government in Israel’s history an alliance of ultra-nationalist and religious camps, to push ahead with extremely controversial new laws that a huge swath of Israeli society fears will severely undermine one of the key pillars of Israel’s democratic system.

For months now, in a crisis that has highlighted the deep political polarisation in society, tensions have grown daily. Israel today, says The New York Times columnist Thomas L Friedman “is a boiler with way, way too much steam building up inside, and the bolts are about to fly off in all directions”.

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Let’s just be clear about what’s at stake here. As Yuval Noah Harari, professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has pointed out, were the coalition government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu able to pass these laws, then taken together “the Israeli government would have the power to pass any law it wants, and interpret existing laws in any way it likes, without checks on its power and without protection for minority rights”.

While in most democracies, the government power is checked and minority rights protected through a number of mechanisms be it a constitution or Supreme Court, none of these would apply in the proposed new Israeli legal regime.

Such is the scale of the threat in the eyes of many Israelis that they have taken to the streets in their tens of thousands. But opponents also include senior officials, not only among top judicial figures but also almost all the former heads of the security establishment including the military, the Mossad intelligence agency, the Shin Bet domestic security service and the police.

A public letter signed by 400 of these officials warned of “damage for generations”. Another public letter signed by 250 officers from Israel’s Military Intelligence’s Special Operations Division stated that “they would stop showing up for duty” should the government proceed with its autocratic judicial overhaul.

It’s a measure of how seriously top Israeli figures take this that a figure like Danny Yatom former chief of the Mossad has openly denounced what he sees as tantamount to an attempted judicial coup by Prime Minister Netanyahu.

Speaking on Israeli television news recently, Yatom said that if Netanyahu continues with his plans, then fighter pilots and special forces operatives will be able to legitimately disobey the orders that come from the government.

They “signed an agreement with a democratic country”, said Yatom. “But the moment that, God forbid, the country becomes a dictatorship” and they receive “an order from an illegitimate government, then I believe it would be legitimate to disobey it”, Haaretz newspaper cited him as saying.

Adding to the warning calls, former prime minister, defence minister and Israeli Defence Force (IDF) chief of staff, Ehud Barak, warned that Israel was facing “the gravest” national crisis since the outbreak of war in 1948 after it declared its independence, and now risked becoming a “de facto dictatorship”.

Right now, there is something akin to a political “perfect storm” brewing with this divisive issue coming as it does at the same time as separate and related plans to increase Jewish settlement activity and hand most dealings with the Palestinians to Israel’s top ultra-nationalists.

Emboldened by the dominance of Israel’s far right, Jewish settlers are increasingly taking the law into their own hands as witnessed during the four-hour spate of violence in the town of Huwara and several nearby villages recently when the settlers used attacked hundreds of Palestinians.

The settlers were said to be seeking revenge for the murder of two brothers shot dead by a Palestinian gunman, but what subsequently ensued in Huwara led one prominent right-wing Israeli commentator, appalled by the reported inaction of the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) to dub the events “Kristallnacht in Huwara.”

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As Friedman pointed out in The New York Times, right now there could not be a more combustible mix given that “Israel has never experienced a Palestinian intifada, a Jewish settler intifada and an Israeli citizen judicial intifada all at once” – all of which have unfolded since Netanyahu’s far-right government took office.

Not everyone however buys into the current threat to Israeli democracy as such.

Some like Neve Gordon, an Israeli professor of international law and human rights at Queen Mary University of London, sees it differently.

Writing recently for Aljazeera, Gordon argued that “the claim that the new government is on course to destroy Israel’s democracy would be true only in a world where Palestinians do not exist”.

He points out that millions of Palestinians in the West Bank live under Israel’s effective control but cannot participate in the political process, while hundreds of thousands of Palestinians residing in annexed East Jerusalem are “residents” rather than citizens and consequently cannot vote in national elections.

“Sure, there is democracy in Israel but it is more similar to the one that existed among whites in apartheid South Africa than it is to the democracy that currently exists in the United Kingdom or France,” says Gordon.

Agree or disagree with such thinking, there’s no doubt that the deficit of democracy is growing for both Israelis and Palestinians alike and that is a dangerous thing in a region already brittle and volatile.

Democracy requires constant maintenance, but Netanyahu and his far-right allies seem hell-bent on recalibrating it to their own nefarious ends. Israel, it would seem, is on the edge of undoing itself and that in itself should be of grave concern.