The 10 Commandments of Israeli Politics: Commandment I: It's Security, Stupid!
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It’s Wednesday, May 13, and at It’s Noon in Israel, our mission is to bring you the sharpest coverage and deepest understanding of Israeli politics in the run-up to this year’s general elections. To that end, we’re excited to introduce a brand-new series: The Ten Commandments of Israeli Politics. Starting today, this special feature will land in your inbox every other week. We hope you enjoy!
An Israeli Centurion tank rolls past destroyed vehicles on the Golan heights during the Yom Kippur War, 1973. (Henri Bureau)
The phone rang through the night’s silence. Then another machine came to life, and then another. The telephones had been installed in every corner of the large, empty apartment and all started ringing at once, but nobody answered. The elderly woman living in the apartment knew exactly what the sound of the phone ringing meant, and she was afraid to pick up.
Then she woke up with a jolt. She sat up in bed, covered in a cold sweat. It was 4:00 a.m., and Golda Meir could not get back to sleep. “It was the same nightmare, repeating itself,” Israel’s fourth prime minister told a close friend in the morning. Together, they tried to work out what her subconscious was trying to say.
It was the summer of 1973, and Israel’s situation, or so people thought, had never been better. Golda Meir was a sharp-tongued and active politician, especially in the field of social policy. Until her dying day, she never forgot the darkest days of her life, as a young, penniless woman in Jerusalem. She had to wash the dirty laundry of all the children at her local kindergarten just so that her daughter could go there too. The experience remained etched in her memory, all the way to the top.
The number one rule of investment states, “Diversify risk.” Never put all your eggs in one basket and all your money in one place. Put some in the local stock market and some on Wall Street, some in dollars and some in bonds, some in gold and some in Bitcoin. If your investment adviser ever advises you to dissolve all your savings, sell your house, break open your mutual funds, and put all your money in a single stock—you should demand his dismissal.
But that is exactly what happens in politics. The only thing that makes modern-day Israelis different from previous generations or neighboring countries is the fact that they can replace their leaders at the ballot box. But in modern democracies, voters only cast one ballot, once every four years. All of Israel’s hopes, beliefs, prayers, and hidden fears get funneled into a single vote—or, in economic terms, into a single long-term investment in a blind trust.
An ultra-orthodox Jewish man casts his ballot at a voting station on the morning of the Municipal Elections, in Bnei Brak, 2024. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)
Did you vote for former IDF chief Benny Gantz in 2020 because he promised “just not Netanyahu” about a week before jumping into Netanyahu’s arms? As the kids say, “That’s life.” Did you vote Likud in 2003 in order to prevent unilateral territorial withdrawals, only for the hawkish Likud Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to mastermind the Gaza disengagement about a month later? In chess, that’s called the “touch-move rule.” Did you vote for a party that promised to lower taxes and ended up hiking them? Imagine a sign: “If you break it, you buy it.” There is no point calling the Central Elections Committee and demanding a new voting slip, because unlike your local department store, the returns policy here is extremely strict: no returns.
Since you only get one vote, only one consideration truly matters when you cast your vote. The second-most important consideration is not really second: it is simply not important. All around the world, voters’ main consideration is money, but not in Israel.
The word “politics” comes from the Greek polis, meaning “city.” Imagine being a citizen of Athens 2,500 years ago. You have just discovered that the fearsome Persian army is advancing on the city. There is only one small problem: The city is unwalled. Actually, there is another problem—just a teensy-tiny one: The city’s treasury is empty. “There is no such thing as public money,” said British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher two and a half millennia later, “there is only taxpayers’ money.”
But now the city needs to urgently raise money from its citizens in order to defend itself. At that exact moment, politics was born. It raised several questions: Should a family with ten children be taxed the same amount as an aging bachelor? Should the rich be taxed more heavily than the poor? Should residents of the rural periphery be taxed more than the relatively safe metropolis? And if the city is already building a wall, then why not seize this festive occasion to open a school for Athenian children?
In sum, how much money should the state take from me, and what should it give me in return? At the far-left extreme is the former Soviet Union or the old Israeli kibbutz, which followed the rule from Karl Marx: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”—in other words, 100 percent income tax. The treasury would take the fruits of your labor, but in return it would be expected to provide you food, housing, education, and healthcare. This unprecedented experiment on human beings ended in a searing failure, and nobody wants to go back to it.
On the right-wing end of the scale is the United States of America, or at least what it used to be: the land of unlimited opportunity. It was a country where a penniless immigrant could step off a ship at Ellis Island and become a millionaire within a couple of years, simply because the state did not push its grubby hands into his pockets and took basically no income tax. But the dark side of America is that it is also a land of impossible limitations: At the feet of its colossal steel and glass skyscrapers, countless homeless people go to sleep every night covered only in newspaper sheets.
This miserable reality was on clear display during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, when the most economically powerful empire in history revealed itself to be a third-world country when it came to public health, at least for those who could not afford to buy their own health insurance. Everywhere in the world, politics is conducted between these two poles, and the main question is, “To what extent do I trust the state and want it to use my hard-earned money to supply the public good known as ‘equality’?”
This is the situation almost everywhere in the world. But in one country, a Hebrew-speaking land, things work a little differently. Like people anywhere else, Israelis also care about their financial situation and want affordable housing and functioning public transport. They too are fed up with being stuck in traffic for hours, and they too wrestle with questions about the free market versus social solidarity.
But most Israelis, for most of Israel’s history, have been worried about something much greater than their quality of life: life itself. In the professional lingo, we call that “security.” A more precise definition would be “insecurity.” But if we are being honest—the right word is “fear.”
If you are in Israel, it doesn’t matter where you might be reading this article, even if you are in a Scandinavian-style apartment and sipping a cocktail. A ninety-minute drive, at most, is all that stands between you and someone who wants to kill you with a knife, gun, rocket-propelled grenade launcher, or surface-to-surface missile. Hamas’s terror tunnel squads in Gaza, Hezbollah’s elite forces training in Lebanon to conquer Israeli border villages, and armed militant battalions entrenched in the alleyways of Judea and Samaria—none of these are more than half a tank of gas away.
A border policeman looks onward at the greenhouses, from the view point of his watch tower, near the Jordan border. (Nati Shohat/Flash90)
Israelis might imagine themselves part of the West, but in the end, they are in the Middle East. Israeli parents want their children to speak native-level English, but all around them are people who speak a range of Arabic dialects. I shall never forget listening to the IDF Army Radio in the summer of 2014, during the conflict with Hamas known as Operation Protective Edge. “Next up, Beyoncé’s new hit single,” said the presenter. “But first, an update: There’s heavy traffic on Route 6 heading south because of convoys of tank transporters.” Israel in a nutshell.
Beneath Israelis’ Western exterior lurks a terrible fear: One morning they will wake up and discover that Israel suddenly stopped existing overnight. There are historical reasons for this, of course. The sovereign State of Israel was built as a safe haven to put an end to two thousand years of anti-Semitic persecution, massacres, and pogroms. Less than ninety years, the blink of an eye in historic terms, have gone by since the fires of the Auschwitz crematoria.
Holocaust survivors still live among us today, bearing the blue numbers tattooed onto their forearms by the Nazis. There is not a single Israeli who is not a descendant of Holocaust survivors, personally acquainted with Holocaust survivors, or at least educated about them in school.
From the moment of Israel’s independence, it was clear to its citizens who would have to provide security. The army of the young state was built on the scaffolding of the pre-state Haganah. The army was the key to integration; the General Staff, to politics. Mapai, Israel’s founding socialist party, leveraged its battlefield glory from the War of Independence—and its subsequent victories in the 1956 Sinai campaign and the crowning achievement of the 1967 Six-Day War—to bolster its standing. Mapai operated almost as a party with its own state; early on, officers like Moshe Dayan even attended election rallies in full uniform, long before modern “cooling-off” periods existed.
Defense Minister Moshe Dayan marched through the Lions’ Gate of the Old City of Jerusalem next to IDF Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin, in khakis. The first eight generals who entered Israeli politics all parachuted into the ruling camp. In stark contrast, Likud leader Menachem Begin was merely a former private in the Free Polish Army, and the historical exploits of the Irgun and Lehi had been practically erased from the national curriculum. Security was the ruling party’s absolute monopoly. That is why even in the 1973 elections, the Likud hardly saw any point in campaigning on security issues, as the prevailing calm along Israel’s newly expanded borders was fully credited to the ruling left-wing Alignment.
However, in 1973, Begin was joined by another former Mapai member, a hawkish reserves major general by the name of Ariel Sharon. Suddenly the Likud could also boast military ranks. The countdown toward war had begun and so had the countdown to a great electoral upheaval. But the Likud was focused back then, quite rightly in its view, on economic issues. Just one day before the outbreak of hostilities, a Likud advertisement promised war—but against “the rule of bureaucrats and nepotists.”
There is no point recounting for the millionth time how Israel sleepwalked into the war; it is enough to note that at the age of seventy-five, Golda Meir had good enough instincts to sense that something was not quite right, but she lacked the courage to bang her fist on the table. At 4:00 a.m., on October 6, 1973—Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar—the phone rang. For real this time, not in a dream. “There’s going to be a war today,” said a voice over the line. “I knew it,” said Golda and hung up.
Something inside her died when she heard the first siren. “I am only an old woman,” she later lamented. She later told a senior general a terrible secret: In the darkest days of the start of the war, she had seriously contemplated taking her own life. Little did she know at the time, but Israel’s military fortifications were not the only defenses that were about to collapse: so were the defenses of the Alignment’s grip on power.
State Election Day, 1977. Late in the evening, following the historic television exit poll, the Likud gained a majority, breaking the Labor movement’s 29-year monopoly on power. Likud supporters celebrate by holding up a photo of leader Menachem Begin. (GPO)
The electoral upheaval of 1977 represented the transfer of the role of national guardian from the Labor movement to the Likud. Since 1977, the Likud’s winning message has remained the same: cautious pessimism. Security incidents have shaped the results of most Israeli elections to date: In 1981, the bombing of Iraq’s nuclear reactor; in 1996, a wave of suicide bombings; in 2001, the Second Intifada.
As Likud Defense Minister Moshe Arens summarized: “Security is the beating heart of Israeli politics.” The most absurd thing is that after the fiasco of the Yom Kippur War, the number of generals in Israeli politics skyrocketed. Sixty-five officers have sauntered into the Knesset over the years. But for most, life in the Knesset has proven extremely frustrating. In politics, there are no captive audiences.
When newly retired IDF Chief of Staff Ehud Barak transitioned to civilian politics, Sharon warned him about the difference: 'When you kill someone in the army, he’s dead. Here... the next morning, you’ll bump into the people you’ve eliminated, alive and well and hungry for revenge, in the Knesset canteen.
In the summer of 2011, a wave of protests swept Israel without a single word about security or Iran. The people demanded social justice. It was a desperate attempt to say that it was time to talk about something else. For the first time, Israelis turned their attention away from the “jungle” and instead to the “villa” itself. To their astonishment, they discovered damp walls and outrageous electricity bills.
The next elections, in 2013, witnessed a massive swing toward parties that focused on the economy. Yair Lapid’s centrist Yesh Atid, running on the slogan “Where’s the Money?”, was just one seat away from blocking Netanyahu. But once in every few years, Israelis receive rude reminders of the purpose of their rocket shelters. Security returns to being the number one issue.
War and peace, fear and hope, were intermingled on that rainy day in December 1978, when Golda Meir’s coffin was led through the streets of Jerusalem. As the procession passed, one mother in the crowd shook her fist. “Golda!” she screamed. “Send regards to Eli, who died in the war!”
English Editor: Ari Tatarka
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