Israeli politics has become a country running a permanent fire drill — every election is a referendum on who will keep the lights on, not on who will fix the plumbing. Daniel wrote in with a whole set of questions about this. He wants to know how right versus left became the operative political distinction in Israel, how the current status quo differs from earlier periods in Israeli history, and how it differs from other states today. He also raised this idea that Israeli politics is permanently distracted — that the macro issues of state and security eclipse the day-to-day stuff, the cost of living, the quality of education, and that right versus left isn't just a spectrum anymore, it's become almost an ad hominem attack. Right-wing parties discredit opponents solely for being left-wing, and to a lesser extent it happens on the left too.
So let's start with the obvious question — how did we get here? Because this wasn't always the Israeli way.
It wasn't. And the speed of the transformation is part of what makes it hard to see clearly. You have to go back to 1977.
The mahapach. The upheaval. Menachem Begin's Likud defeats Labor for the first time, and it was an earthquake. Labor — or Mapai, as it was earlier — had dominated Israeli politics since before the state was founded. David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, Levi Eshkol, every prime minister until Begin came from that Labor Zionist establishment. The political divide before 1977 wasn't right versus left on security. It was socialist versus revisionist Zionism. It was about economic ideology, the role of the Histadrut labor federation, the relationship between the state and the individual. Security was important, obviously — you're talking about a country surrounded by hostile armies — but it wasn't the organizing axis of politics.
And then the Yom Kippur War in 1973 shattered Labor's credibility on defense. They were the party that had won every war, and suddenly they'd been caught flat-footed. Three years later, the 1977 election realigned the entire system around security and territory. Begin campaigned on keeping the West Bank — what he called Judea and Samaria — and on a harder line against the Palestinians. That's the moment the axis tilts.
What's interesting is that it wasn't immediate. The 1980s still had a lot of cross-cutting. You had Shas emerging as a religious party that was hawkish on security but whose voters cared primarily about religious funding and social policy. You had the National Religious Party sitting in both Labor and Likud coalitions depending on the year. The right-left axis was hardening, but it hadn't yet swallowed everything else.
The hardening moment — the point where it goes from a policy debate to a moral schism — is 1993.
Oslo.
Rabin shakes hands with Arafat on the White House lawn, and suddenly the right-left divide isn't about tactics anymore. It's about legitimacy. Right-wing parties begin framing left-wing opponents as post-Zionist, as defeatist, as people who've given up on the Jewish state. The rhetoric escalates fast. By 1995, Rabin is assassinated by a right-wing extremist who believed he was saving the country from a traitor. That's the point where the ad hominem becomes literal violence.
And the thing is, Oslo didn't just radicalize the right. It also put the left in a bind it's never escaped. The left's entire political identity became the peace process. When the peace process collapsed — when the Second Intifada erupted in 2000 and Israelis were getting blown up on buses — the left's core argument disintegrated. You can't campaign on "we'll bring peace" when the other side is blowing up pizzerias. So the left shrank, and the right's framing — "we told you so" — became the default.
Then 2005. Ariel Sharon, a Likud founder, the father of the settlement movement, unilaterally withdraws from Gaza. He tears down twenty-one settlements, pulls out every soldier, and splits his own party in half. Sharon leaves Likud, creates Kadima, and suddenly the right-left axis is about one thing: territorial withdrawal versus annexation. After Gaza, the right-wing camp consolidates around opposition to any withdrawal whatsoever. The left, meanwhile, watches Hamas take over Gaza within two years of the pullout and loses whatever credibility it had left on security.
Can I pause you there? Because I think the Gaza withdrawal is actually the perfect case study for how the permanent distraction operates in practice. You had a Likud prime minister doing something that, on paper, the left had been advocating for years — unilateral withdrawal from occupied territory. And yet it didn't strengthen the left's position at all. Why?
Because Sharon framed it entirely in security terms. He didn't say "we're withdrawing because occupation is morally wrong" or "because the Palestinians deserve a state." He said "we're withdrawing because it makes Israel safer." He sold it as a strategic consolidation, not a peace gesture. And when Hamas took over and started firing rockets, the right could say "see, even when we do what the left wants, it makes us less safe." The left couldn't claim credit because Sharon had deliberately denied them the framing. It was a masterclass in controlling the narrative axis.
It's almost like he designed the withdrawal to be impossible for the left to use.
I think he did. Sharon understood that if you do a left-wing policy but justify it with right-wing logic, you actually reinforce the right-wing frame. You're saying "the only valid reason to withdraw is security." That leaves no room for the left's actual argument, which was about Palestinian self-determination and ending the occupation on principle.
So by 2010s, you've got a situation where the right-left axis has become a tribal identity. It's not about policy preferences anymore. It's about who you are. The Israel Democracy Institute ran a poll in 2022 that found sixty-eight percent of Jewish Israelis said they would not vote for a party led by someone they perceived as left-wing — regardless of policy. Not "I disagree with their security positions." Not "I think their economic plan is flawed." Just "left-wing" as a blanket disqualifier. That's not a political spectrum. That's a caste system.
And that's the ad hominem Daniel's talking about. "You're left-wing" becomes a way to end a conversation, not start one. If you're tagged as left-wing, your ideas about education reform, about transportation, about housing — they're all dismissed without engagement. Because the frame is: if you're soft on terror, you can't be trusted with anything.
I want to push on this a little, because I think the mechanism is more specific than just name-calling. There's a particular rhetorical move that gets used constantly. Someone proposes a domestic reform — say, changing the housing subsidy formula to help young families. The response isn't "I disagree with your housing policy." The response is "this sounds like something they do in Europe, and we know what happened to the Jews in Europe." It's guilt by geographical association. The left gets tarred as importing foreign, diasporic thinking that's inherently dangerous for Jewish survival. That's not just an ad hominem. That's a whole cosmology.
You're right, and it connects to something deeper in Israeli political culture — the negation of the diaspora. The original Zionist idea was that the diaspora Jewish experience was fundamentally pathological, that Jews in exile were passive and weak, and that the new Israeli Jew would be strong and self-reliant. So calling someone "left-wing" isn't just saying they're wrong about policy. It's saying they're still mentally in exile. They haven't completed the Zionist transformation. They're not fully Israeli.
Which is why the insult cuts so deep. You're not just wrong. You're not fully a member of the tribe.
The mechanism works in both directions, though it's asymmetrical. The left dismisses right-wing economic proposals as populist giveaways to settlers and the ultra-Orthodox. But the right has been far more effective at wielding the ad hominem, partly because they've been in power more often and partly because the security argument is inherently asymmetrical — it's easier to scare people than to reassure them.
So that's how we got here. But this isn't the only way Israeli politics has ever worked. Let's look at how it used to be different.
The 1950s and 1960s are almost unrecognizable from today. Israeli politics was organized around economic ideology — socialist versus capitalist, the role of the Histadrut, how much the state should own. You had fierce debates about immigration policy and who counts as a Jew. The religious-secular tension was already there — Ben-Gurion's status quo agreement with the religious parties in 1947 set the terms for things like Shabbat observance and kosher kitchens in public institutions. Security was always in the background, but it wasn't the sole axis. You could be a socialist hawk or a capitalist dove, and those combinations made sense to people.
There's a great example from the 1950s that illustrates this. The Lavon Affair — a botched Israeli spy operation in Egypt in 1954 — became a massive political scandal, but it was fought almost entirely on domestic lines. Who authorized the operation? Who covered it up? The debate was about accountability and governance, not about whether being hawkish or dovish was the right stance. Can you imagine a security failure of that magnitude being debated today without it immediately becoming a referendum on the left-right axis?
You can't. Today, any security failure is instantly weaponized to discredit whichever camp is perceived as responsible. If a soldier is kidnapped, it's because the government was too dovish or too aggressive, depending on who's in power. The Lavon Affair was debated as a question of competence and honesty. That's a completely different political vocabulary.
The 1980s saw the rise of Shas and other religious parties that cross-cut the right-left divide. Shas was hawkish on security — they weren't about to give up territory — but their voters cared about religious school funding, about yeshiva budgets, about social services for the Sephardi working class. They'd sit in either a Likud or Labor coalition if the price was right. That cross-cutting dimension has largely disappeared. Today, even the religious parties have been absorbed into the right-wing bloc on security. They don't cross the aisle anymore.
And that absorption is a key part of the story. The right figured out something the left didn't: you can build a permanent coalition by bundling security hawkishness with religious identity and nationalism. Once you've got that bundle, you don't need to compete on domestic policy. You just need to keep the security crisis front and center.
Which brings us to the permanent distraction thesis. Daniel's point is that Israeli politics is structurally incapable of addressing domestic issues because the macro security questions crowd out everything else. And he's right — but let me put some numbers on it.
The cost of living index in Israel rose four point two percent in 2025. Housing prices in Tel Aviv rose eighteen percent between 2023 and 2026. These are not small numbers. If you're a young family trying to buy an apartment in the center of the country, you're looking at prices that have nearly doubled in a decade. And what was the Knesset doing during this period? Debating judicial reform, conducting military operations in Gaza, managing tensions with Iran. All of which are real and important. But the domestic agenda simply doesn't get floor time unless it's attached to coalition horse-trading.
And the horse-trading itself is part of the problem. Domestic policy doesn't get debated on its merits. It gets slipped into coalition agreements as payoffs to keep the government together. The 2022 coalition agreement included massive increases to Haredi school funding — not because anyone thought it was good education policy, but because it was the price of Shas staying in the government. That's not governance. That's a protection racket.
The 2011 cost-of-living protests were the exception that proves the rule. You had four hundred thousand Israelis in the streets — the largest protest movement in the country's history — demanding action on housing and food prices. And for about six months, the political system had to respond. Committees were formed, some reforms were passed. Then security crises returned, and the moment passed. The structural incentives hadn't changed.
The left's failure here is instructive. After 2011, you'd think there was an opening for a party to run on domestic issues. But the left couldn't do it, because it was forced to defend its security credentials first. Every left-wing leader since Rabin has had to prove they're tough enough on security before they can talk about anything else. Yitzhak Herzog in 2015 tried to run on socioeconomic issues and got crushed because voters didn't trust him on security. The left is trapped: it can't win on security, and it can't change the subject away from security.
And the right exploits this ruthlessly. Any left-wing economic proposal gets dismissed on security grounds. "You can't trust them with the economy if they're soft on terror." It doesn't matter if the proposal is about tax reform or public transportation — the frame is already set. The ad hominem is the whole game.
Now compare this to other democracies, because the contrast is illuminating. In the United States, the right-left divide is about economics, culture war, and the size of government. Security is a subset — it matters, especially after nine eleven, but it's not the organizing axis. You can be a Republican who wants to cut defense spending or a Democrat who's hawkish on China. The axis is about the role of the state, not the survival of the state.
In European democracies, the divide is often about immigration, welfare policy, and EU integration. The French right and left disagree about pension reform and labor law. The German parties fight about energy policy and the debt brake. Security matters — especially after Russia invaded Ukraine — but it's one issue among many. In Israel, security isn't one issue among many. It's the issue that determines whether you're even allowed to have opinions on the other issues.
And that's the key structural difference. In most democracies, the stakes of losing an election are "the other party will implement policies I disagree with." In Israel, the stakes are framed as "the other party will endanger the physical survival of the state." When the stakes are existential, compromise becomes impossible. You can't split the difference on whether the country continues to exist. So every election becomes a referendum on national survival, and every policy disagreement becomes a question of loyalty.
There's a knock-on effect here that's worth naming. The ad hominem dynamic has created a political culture where policy debate is functionally impossible. If "left-wing" is a disqualifier, then left-wing ideas about anything — including education reform, transportation, environmental regulation — are dismissed without engagement. The system can't process non-security problems because the filter that determines which ideas get heard is a security filter. And the security filter rejects anything that comes from the wrong tribe.
This entrenches the status quo. If you can't debate housing policy on its merits because the person proposing it is "left-wing" and therefore suspect, then housing policy doesn't change. If you can't reform education because the reform proposal comes from the wrong camp, then education doesn't improve. The system becomes incapable of addressing non-security crises not because the crises aren't real, but because the political vocabulary for addressing them has been destroyed.
And that's where we are now. The 2026 election is coming up, and it will almost certainly be fought on security again. Iran, the Palestinians, the character of the state. Meanwhile, the cost of living keeps rising, the housing crisis deepens, and the education system — particularly in the Haredi sector, where core curriculum requirements are basically unenforced — continues to produce graduates who can't participate in the modern economy.
The demographic angle is interesting here. Younger Israeli Jews are more right-wing on security than their parents — that's been true for at least a decade. But they're also more concerned about economic mobility. They want to be able to afford apartments. They want their kids to get decent educations. There's a tension there that the current political alignment doesn't accommodate. If a party ever figures out how to be hawkish on security AND serious about domestic reform, it could realign the system again.
The problem is that the coalition structure makes that hard. To be hawkish on security, you need the religious parties. The religious parties want yeshiva funding and military exemptions. Those things cost money and create economic drag. So the bundle that makes you electable on security makes you incapable of serious domestic reform. It's a trap.
It's like trying to diet while your personal trainer keeps feeding you cake. You can't have fiscal discipline and unlimited yeshiva subsidies. You can't have a modern economy and a growing segment of the population with no secular education and no workforce participation. But the coalition math requires both.
And that's not a bug. For the parties that benefit from the current arrangement, it's a feature. The permanent security crisis is what keeps them in power. If Israelis ever started voting on potholes and school budgets, the whole coalition would come apart.
Can I add a fun fact here that I think actually illuminates something? In 2023, the Knesset held exactly three full plenary sessions dedicated to domestic economic policy. Three. In an entire year. Compare that to the British Parliament, which had over forty such sessions. It's not that Israel doesn't have domestic problems. It's that the legislature literally does not allocate time to discuss them. The calendar is the confession.
That's a devastating statistic. Three sessions in a year. So the distraction isn't just rhetorical. It's procedural. It's built into the schedule.
So that's the big picture. But I know there's a piece of this we haven't touched — the way the religious dimension gets folded into the security axis. And I think Hilbert has something to say about that.
Hilbert: Two thousand four. I was a junior policy analyst at the Finance Ministry. They had me modeling the economic impact of the Gaza disengagement — what happens to the budget if you pull out twenty-one settlements, what do you do with the evacuees, how do you repurpose the military infrastructure. Every meeting about education funding or infrastructure got hijacked by security briefings. My boss had a line he'd use: "We can't talk about school funding until we know whether we're still occupying Gaza." He said it like it was obvious. And at the time, it was.
You saw the permanent distraction from the inside.
Hilbert: I saw half of it. The other half was the Haredi parties. Every budget cycle, they'd come in with their demands — yeshiva funding, military exemption extensions, separate school systems. And they'd frame it as preserving the Jewish character of the state. Which meant it got folded into the security axis. You couldn't argue against yeshiva funding without being accused of undermining the Jewish state. So the distraction was actually a double distraction. Security on one side, religious politics on the other, both framed as existential.
That's the mechanism we were circling but didn't quite land. The religious dimension gets absorbed into the security axis by being framed as existential. So it's not just "we need to be safe from external enemies" — it's "we need to preserve the Jewish character of the state," which is also framed as survival. And once something is existential, you can't compromise on it.
Hilbert: Right. And the Haredi parties know exactly what they're doing. They're not right-wing or left-wing in any ideological sense. They're in it for the budgets. But they know the right needs them to form a coalition. So they get to set the domestic agenda while everyone argues about settlements. The 2025 coalition agreement had billions in yeshiva funding and military exemption extensions. That's not security. That's domestic redistribution dressed up as national survival.
But how does that actually work in a budget meeting? I'm trying to picture the moment where someone says "we need to fund yeshivas" and it gets reframed as a security issue. What's the rhetorical move?
Hilbert: It's almost formulaic. Someone from the Finance Ministry says "we can't afford this level of yeshiva funding without cutting infrastructure." The Haredi representative doesn't argue about the numbers. He says "Torah learning is what protects the Jewish people. You want to cut the thing that keeps us safe?" And suddenly the conversation isn't about budget allocations anymore. It's about whether you believe God is defending Israel. You can't win that argument with a spreadsheet.
Nobody can call it out without being branded anti-religious or left-wing.
Hilbert: Which is the point. The frame protects the spending. You can't audit the yeshiva budgets without being accused of attacking Torah learning. You can't question the military exemptions without being accused of dividing the nation during wartime. The security crisis is real, but it's also useful. It's a shield.
The permanent distraction isn't just about security crowding out domestic issues. It's about domestic issues being deliberately reframed as security issues so they can't be debated on their merits.
Hilbert: That's what I watched for two years. Every spreadsheet I built about school funding got buried under a briefing about Hamas. And the yeshiva budgets sailed through because nobody wanted to be the one who voted against God.
Did anyone in those meetings ever say it out loud?
Hilbert: Once. A deputy director from the Education Ministry. She said, "We're not going to fix the math scores until we stop pretending this is about security." She was gone within six months. Transferred to a desk job in Be'er Sheva.
The system punishes people who name it.
Hilbert: The system is designed to punish people who name it. That's how it stays the system.
Where does this leave us? Can Israeli politics ever escape the security-first axis? What would it take — a final-status agreement that removes the territorial question, a new party that refuses to engage on security and forces the conversation to domestic issues, or a domestic crisis so severe it can't be ignored?
The 2011 protests suggest the third option is possible but temporary. Four hundred thousand people in the streets forced the system to respond, but the response didn't outlast the next security crisis. A final-status agreement — that's been the left's bet for thirty years, and it hasn't panned out. The new party option is interesting but faces the coalition math problem. You can't form a government in Israel without engaging on security, because the parties you need to form a coalition are all defined by their security positions.
There's a fourth possibility we haven't considered. What if the security axis breaks from within? What if a right-wing leader decides that the permanent crisis is actually bad for security — that you can't have a strong military without a strong economy, and you can't have a strong economy if you're not educating your population and building housing? That was essentially Sharon's logic with the Gaza withdrawal — he framed it as a security move, but it was also a recognition that holding Gaza was unsustainable. Could a future right-wing leader make a similar move on domestic reform?
That's an interesting question. The challenge is that Sharon could sell withdrawal as a security move because it involved territory and military redeployment — things that are already in the security frame. Domestic reform is harder to sell that way. How do you frame yeshiva curriculum reform as a security necessity? You'd have to argue that the Haredi military exemptions are creating a national security vulnerability, which is actually true — you're shrinking your recruitment base — but making that argument means picking a fight with your own coalition partners.
The current trajectory suggests further entrenchment. The 2026 election will almost certainly be fought on security again. Iran's nuclear program, the Palestinian conflict, the regional instability — there's no shortage of existential threats to campaign on. And as long as those threats are real, the parties that benefit from the security axis will keep them front and center.
But the demographic shift is the wild card. Younger Israeli Jews are more right-wing on security — that's well-established. But they're also more frustrated about housing costs and economic mobility than their parents were. At some point, the gap between "I vote for security" and "I can't afford an apartment" becomes unsustainable. Something has to give.
Maybe the real question isn't how we got here. It's whether the system can ever address a non-security problem again — and what happens when it can't. If the cost of living keeps rising and the housing crisis keeps deepening and the education system keeps underperforming, eventually the security-first framing stops working. Not because the security threats go away, but because people can't live their lives.
The 2011 protests were a preview of that. The question is whether the next round of domestic pressure produces a real political realignment, or whether the system absorbs it again and keeps going. History suggests the system is very good at absorbing pressure. But history also suggests that systems that can't address their populations' basic needs eventually break.
When they break, they don't break cleanly. They break in ways that make the security crisis worse, not better. A population that can't afford housing and can't get decent education and can't see a future — that's not a population that makes calm, rational security decisions. The permanent distraction doesn't just prevent domestic reform. It eventually undermines the security it claims to prioritize.
That's the irony at the heart of this. The system sacrifices everything on the altar of security, and in doing so, it creates the conditions for its own insecurity. You can't defend a country whose citizens can't afford to live in it.
Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop for keeping us honest — and for the view from inside the Finance Ministry.
This has been My Weird Prompts. If you want to send us your own questions about politics, history, or anything else that keeps you up at night, email the show at show at my weird prompts dot com.
We'll be back soon.
