Daniel sent us this one — he's been watching Israeli politics and he's unsettled. The government just slashed the civil defense budget by eighteen percent and in the same breath expanded childcare subsidies for yeshiva students exempt from military service. Even the coalition's own voters are starting to say publicly that this feels like an insult. He's asking what happens when a country reaches that moment where the population loses trust not just in a particular government but in the entire political class — and what kinds of systems actually emerge from those revolutions. Let's dig into it.
The numbers on that budget are genuinely staggering. The civil defense budget went from two point one billion shekels down to one point seven two billion. Meanwhile the childcare subsidies for full-time Torah scholars got an extra four hundred million shekels, benefiting roughly eighty thousand families. That's not trimming around the edges — that's a direct trade-off between national security and coalition maintenance.
The timing is what makes it land like a slap. You've got reservists doing a hundred-plus days a year, their businesses collapsing, their families stretched to breaking point, and then the government says, "We're cutting the shelters budget but here's more money for people who don't serve." It's almost architecturally designed to communicate contempt.
There was a poll from the Israel Democracy Institute in April — sixty-two percent of right-wing voters now say they're dissatisfied with the government's performance. That's up from forty-eight percent in January. These are Likud voters, religious Zionist voters — the core constituency. When those numbers move fourteen points in three months, something is shifting beneath the surface.
"Beneath the surface" is the operative phrase. Nobody's in the streets yet. But that quiet sentiment — that's what Daniel is picking up on, and it's the part that's unpredictable.
The deeper problem, which the prompt puts its finger on directly, is that this isn't just about one government. The entire system frames everything in national-ideological terms. The opposition doesn't campaign on fixing potholes or shortening hospital wait times — they campaign on security and national identity with a slightly different emphasis. Benny Gantz's National Unity party, which is the most viable alternative, still runs on security credentials, not administrative competence.
It's the political equivalent of a restaurant where every item on the menu is a variation of the same dish. You can order the spicy nationalism or the mild nationalism, but you're still not getting a meal that actually nourishes anyone.
The purpose of government has shifted from serving citizens to serving ideological blocs. And that's the structural problem — it predates Netanyahu, it'll likely outlast him.
That's the setup. Israel isn't the first country to reach this kind of boiling point though. Let's look at three very different cases where mass distrust in leadership boiled over and see what happened next.
Let's start with Chile, because it's the cleanest recent example. Two thousand nineteen, the estallido social — the social explosion. It began with a thirty-peso metro fare hike in Santiago. That's about three US cents. But it wasn't about the fare — it was a crystallization point for decades of anger about inequality, privatized everything, a political class that had completely lost touch.
"The metro fare of revolution." It sounds absurd until you realize that's how these things always work. The trigger is never the real issue — it's the thing that finally makes the real issue undeniable.
Within weeks you had over a million people in the streets of Santiago. The slogan was "No son treinta pesos, son treinta años" — it's not thirty pesos, it's thirty years. By November fifteenth, the political class signed an agreement to begin a constitutional process. They held a plebiscite in October twenty twenty — seventy-eight percent voted to draft a new constitution. They elected a constitutional convention. It was one of the most democratic processes in modern history.
Then they rejected the constitution.
Sixty-two percent voted against it in September twenty twenty-two. The convention had produced a document that was arguably the most progressive constitution ever drafted — it would have recognized the rights of nature, guaranteed gender parity in government, recognized indigenous nations. And the population looked at it and said, no thank you.
What happened there? Because that's the puzzle. Mass movement, democratic process, a real attempt at systemic change — and then the public pulls the emergency brake.
A few things. First, the convention itself became a spectacle. Some delegates behaved in ways that undermined credibility — one was caught lying about having leukemia, another was seen voting in the shower during virtual sessions. Second, the constitution was extremely long — three hundred eighty-eight articles — and many voters found it ideologically maximalist. Third, and this is crucial, the "rechazo" campaign — the reject campaign — successfully framed it as a document that would replace national unity with identity politics.
The system's flexibility — the willingness to open up a constitutional process — actually absorbed the protest energy, let it exhaust itself in drafting rooms, and then the voters opted for moderation. Chile ended up with a more moderate reform path, not a revolution. Which is in some ways a success story, but also a demonstration of how existing institutions can defang a movement.
That institutional flexibility is the variable we keep coming back to. Chile's system, for all its problems, had enough give to accommodate the pressure without breaking. Contrast that with Lebanon.
Lebanon is the cautionary tale. The thawra — the October twenty nineteen revolution — started with a proposed WhatsApp tax. A tax on messaging apps. And within days you had millions in the streets across every sect, every region, calling for the entire sectarian power-sharing system to be dismantled.
The kullun yaani kullun moment — "all of them means all of them." The slogan was directed at every political leader from every sect. It was the first cross-sectarian mass movement in Lebanese history. And it failed completely.
Not just failed — the old elites absorbed it. Hezbollah sent counter-protesters. The system froze. The state is now effectively bankrupt, the currency has lost over ninety percent of its value, and the same families who've run Lebanon since the civil war are still in charge.
What's the mechanism? In Lebanon, the sectarian elites are the system. There's no independent institutional layer that can mediate between protesters and power. The banks are owned by the political families. The judiciary is captured. The army is a sectarian balancing act. There's no neutral ground where reform can happen.
In Chile, there was a constitutional tradition, an independent electoral service, a civil society infrastructure that could channel protest energy into a process. In Lebanon, the protest energy just hit a wall of entrenched patronage networks and dissipated. The system didn't bend — it just waited.
That's the nightmare scenario for any mass movement. Not defeat — absorption. The protest happens, it's enormous, it's beautiful, it's cross-sectarian, and then six months later everything is worse and the same people are in charge.
The third case is the one that actually worked, at least in the narrow sense. South Korea, the Candlelight Revolution of twenty sixteen to twenty seventeen.
This one is remarkable. President Park Geun-hye — a corruption scandal breaks. She's allegedly colluding with a confidante, Choi Soon-sil, who had no official position but was influencing policy and extracting money from conglomerates. The details are almost comical — Choi's daughter got into a prestigious university under false pretenses, there were allegations of shamanistic influence over presidential decisions.
The Rasputin of Seoul.
On December third twenty sixteen, one point five million people gathered in central Seoul — in winter, in the cold — holding candles. Families with children. It was one of the largest peaceful protests in history. On December ninth, the National Assembly voted to impeach Park. Two hundred thirty-four votes to fifty-six.
The key detail is that the system held. The impeachment went to the Constitutional Court, which upheld it in March twenty seventeen. Park was removed. A snap election was held within sixty days. Moon Jae-in won and took office. The political system itself — presidentialism with a strong executive — remained intact. What changed was leadership and norms.
South Korea didn't get a new constitution. It didn't get electoral reform. It got a demonstration that the system's accountability mechanisms actually work — that a corrupt president can be removed through constitutional process. That's not a revolution in the systemic sense. It's a revolution in the normative sense.
That's arguably the best-case scenario. The system demonstrates that it can correct itself, which restores some trust without requiring the massive uncertainty of constitutional redesign.
Here's the thing — Moon Jae-in's successor is now in power, and South Korea's political polarization is as intense as ever. The structural problems — the chaebol dominance of the economy, the winner-take-all presidential system, the regional polarization — none of that was resolved by the Candlelight Revolution. It was a personnel change, not a system change.
Across these three cases — Chile, Lebanon, South Korea — we've got three very different outcomes from essentially the same starting condition: mass distrust crystallized by a single insult-to-injury event. Chile got a constitutional process that the voters ultimately moderated. Lebanon got absorption and collapse. South Korea got a clean impeachment and a new president within the same system.
The variable that seems to determine the outcome isn't the size of the protests or the intensity of the anger. It's the flexibility of the existing institutional landscape. Chile's institutions were flexible enough to open a constitutional process. South Korea's were flexible enough to impeach and replace a president. Lebanon's were too brittle and too captured — they couldn't bend, so they just waited out the storm.
Which brings us to Israel, because this is the uncomfortable implication. Where does Israel sit on that spectrum of institutional flexibility?
It's not great. Israel has no formal constitution — the Basic Laws serve as a quasi-constitutional framework, but they can be amended by a simple Knesset majority. There's no entrenched bill of rights. The judiciary has been under sustained political attack — the reasonableness standard law was struck down by the High Court in January twenty twenty-four, but the government hasn't backed down. It's a stalemate.
A stalemate isn't stability. It's two forces pushing against each other with nothing moving. The judicial overhaul protests of twenty twenty-three were massive — the largest in Israeli history — but as I've said before, they were a "no" and never a "yes." They blocked a change but didn't create one.
And that's the problem. Mass mobilization can block things in Israel — the streets can stop legislation. But they haven't yet shown they can produce legislation. The opposition can say no to judicial reform, but it can't say yes to a constitution, or electoral reform, or regional governance.
Israel's institutions are flexible enough to be destabilized but not flexible enough to reform. That's almost the worst combination. You get the uncertainty of crisis without the mechanism for resolution.
Those cases show us what can happen when a protest movement hits a system. But what about when the revolution actually succeeds in changing the system? That's where things get even more complicated.
Tunisia is the example everyone points to — the only Arab Spring country that actually transitioned to something resembling democracy. Two thousand eleven, Ben Ali flees. They elect a constituent assembly. They draft a new constitution in twenty fourteen — a hybrid parliamentary-presidential system with strong human rights guarantees. The National Dialogue Quartet wins the Nobel Peace Prize. It's the success story.
Then Kais Saied happens. Twenty twenty-one, he suspends parliament, fires the prime minister, and rules by decree. In twenty twenty-two, he pushes through a new constitution that concentrates power in the presidency and removes most checks and balances. A referendum approved it with ninety-four percent — but turnout was under thirty-one percent.
The same constitution, the same document that was supposed to be the foundation of democratic Tunisia, just... didn't hold.
The constitution was never really internalized. The political class that drafted it — the Ennahda party, the secularist parties — they spent the next seven years fighting over everything, failing to deliver economic growth, failing to build trust in the institutions the constitution created. By the time Saied made his move, the public was so exhausted by the paralysis that a significant portion was willing to accept authoritarianism if it meant the garbage got collected.
"The garbage crisis theory of democratic collapse." It sounds reductive but it's not wrong. People will tolerate a lot of democratic messiness if their material conditions are improving. If they're not — if democracy means gridlock and stagnation — then the guy who promises to cut through the red tape starts to look appealing.
The lesson from Tunisia isn't that constitutions don't matter. It's that constitutions without institutional guardrails — an independent judiciary, a professional civil service, a depoliticized security sector — are just words. Saied was able to do what he did because there was no institution strong enough to stop him. The Constitutional Court had never even been fully established.
Tunisia is the cautionary tale for the "write a new constitution" approach. You can write the most beautiful document in the world, but if the enforcement mechanisms aren't there, it's a promissory note from a bankrupt institution.
Iceland is the other fascinating case. Two thousand eight, the financial crisis hits — all three major banks collapse, the currency tanks, the stock market drops ninety percent. By January two thousand nine, there are protests outside the Althing — the parliament — with people banging pots and pans. It gets called the Kitchenware Revolution.
" I'm not even going to pretend I pronounced that correctly.
The government falls. A new left-wing coalition takes over. And then they do something radical — they launch a crowdsourced constitutional process in twenty eleven. A constitutional council of twenty-five citizens, elected from a pool of over five hundred candidates. They draft a constitution using input from the public via social media — Facebook, Twitter, a dedicated website. It's the most democratic constitution-drafting process in history.
What happened to it?
Parliament never ratified it. It died in committee. The political class looked at this document produced by citizens and said, essentially, "Thanks, we'll take it from here." And then they didn't take it from here. The constitution remains the same provisional one from nineteen forty-four, which is basically Denmark's constitution with the names changed.
The crowdsourced constitution was a radical democratic experiment that produced a document the political class couldn't accept, and the result was...
Here's the interesting part — Iceland did reform. Just not constitutionally. They prosecuted bankers — thirty-six of them went to prison. They imposed capital controls and restructured the banks. They replaced the central bank governor. They created a special prosecutor's office for financial crimes. The system changed incrementally, through legislation and personnel changes, without touching the constitutional framework.
Iceland's economy recovered?
It recovered remarkably well. By twenty fifteen, GDP growth was over four percent. The banking system is stable. The political system is still messy — they've had multiple governments collapse — but the underlying economy and institutions are healthier than they were in two thousand eight.
Iceland's path was: don't change the constitution, change the people and the practices. It's the opposite of Tunisia's path — write a new constitution, but don't change the people or the practices — and it worked better.
Which brings us to the question the prompt is really asking. What would a democratic revolution in Israel actually look like? What are the options?
Let's lay them out. Option one: a constitutional convention. Replace the Basic Laws with a full, entrenched constitution — a bill of rights, clear separation of powers, a constitutional court with genuine independence. This is the maximalist option. It's what the judicial overhaul protests were implicitly demanding — not just "stop the government" but "build a framework the government can't break.
The challenge is that a constitutional convention in Israel would be a sectarian battlefield. Who writes it? How are delegates chosen? What's the status of religion and state in the document? What about the Law of Return? These aren't technical questions — they're identity questions that would ignite every cleavage in Israeli society simultaneously.
The risk is the Chilean outcome — you spend two years drafting a document that half the country sees as an existential threat, and then it fails at referendum, and everyone's more exhausted and polarized than before.
Option two: electoral reform. Raise the electoral threshold further — it's currently at three point two five percent, which already eliminated the smaller Arab parties from running independently. Or move to a regional representation system where Knesset members actually represent geographic constituencies instead of just party lists.
This is the one I find most interesting because it directly addresses the core problem — that the political class is accountable to party lists, not to voters. Right now, if you're an MK from a safe list position, you don't need to care what the people in your district think. You need to care what the party central committee thinks. That's the mechanism that produces ideological framing over governance.
The downside is that regional representation in a country as geographically and demographically complex as Israel is incredibly hard to design. What are the districts? Do settlements get their own districts? What about Arab-majority areas? You're redrawing the political map in a way that inevitably advantages some groups over others, and everyone knows it.
Option three: a presidential system with separation of powers. Directly elected president, independent of the Knesset, with a fixed term. This is what the American system does, and it's been proposed in Israel before.
This one worries me. In a polarized society, a presidential system can become winner-take-all in the worst way. The president claims a national mandate and then governs for their coalition only. You lose the parliamentary mechanism where unstable coalitions can be replaced without a constitutional crisis. And in Israel's security environment, a president with emergency powers is a very sharp tool.
There's also the American example itself, which is not exactly a ringing endorsement of presidential systems right now. We've watched that system strain to the point of near-collapse multiple times in the last decade.
The broader point is that no institutional design is self-executing. Tunisia had a beautifully designed constitution. Iceland had no new constitution at all. The difference was in the enforcement layer — the people in the institutions, the norms they followed, the willingness of the public to defend the rules even when the rules didn't benefit them in the moment.
What does all this mean for someone watching Israel right now? Let me give you two concrete things to look for.
The first is institutional flexibility. The most successful democratic revolutions — South Korea, Chile's moderate path — were those where existing institutions had enough give to absorb protest energy and channel it into reform. Israel's system has very little flexibility. A judiciary under sustained attack and in a legitimacy crisis. A parliament so fragmented that coalition formation is an exercise in hostage negotiation. When the trigger event comes — and it will come, whether it's a security failure, an economic shock, or a corruption scandal that can't be ignored — the question is whether there's any institution left that can catch the energy before it becomes destructive.
The second thing is the opposition's failure to offer a governance alternative. This is a structural problem, not a personnel problem. Until a political movement emerges that campaigns on administrative competence — potholes, schools, hospital wait times, building permits — rather than national identity, the cycle will continue. The current opposition parties frame their opposition in national terms because that's what the system rewards. The electoral system doesn't select for competent administrators. It selects for ideological brand managers.
This is where the local level becomes important. National politics in Israel — and in many countries — is a theater of identity. It's symbolic, it's tribal, it's about who "we" are. Local politics is where you can actually measure whether the system serves citizens. Is the garbage collected? Are the schools functioning? Can you get a building permit without a protektzia? That's where governance actually happens.
The prompt mentions that the dysfunction extends far beyond the incumbent party — that even potential opposition partners frame everything in national terms. That's the observation that matters. It's not about replacing one set of ideological warriors with another. It's about whether governance itself can become politically salient.
There's a phrase that gets used in development economics — "state capacity." It's the boring stuff. Tax collection that works. Civil service hiring based on merit, not patronage. Regulatory agencies that actually regulate. Israel's state capacity has been declining for years, hollowed out by coalition politics that treats ministries as spoils to be distributed. The civil defense budget cut is a symptom of that deeper rot. You don't cut shelter funding unless the logic of patronage has completely displaced the logic of governance.
The childcare subsidy expansion is the other side of the same coin. It's not a policy decision — it's a coalition payment. The government isn't asking "what does the country need?" It's asking "what do we need to do to keep our majority?" Those are different questions with different answers, and the gap between them is the measure of democratic decay.
The open question — and this is where I think the prompt leaves us — is whether Israel is heading toward a Chilean-style constitutional moment, a Lebanese-style frozen crisis, or something entirely its own. The answer depends on two things: whether the current quiet sentiment finds its trigger, and whether the opposition can offer a credible alternative when it does.
The next twelve to eighteen months are critical. If the government survives without a major crisis, the system will likely continue its slow decay — the budget will get more distorted, the civil service more politicized, the judiciary more besieged. It won't collapse. It'll just get worse in ways that become normal.
If a trigger event happens — and this is the thing about triggers, they're unpredictable by definition — then the quiet sentiment we're seeing in the polling becomes active sentiment. Sixty-two percent of right-wing voters dissatisfied, up from forty-eight percent in three months. That's not a blip. That's a trend. And trends that steep don't stay quiet forever.
The question is what they'll do when they get loud. Will they demand a new constitution? A different prime minister? Or will they just demand that the current government be more competent at being the current government? Because that last one — the "same but better" demand — is the most common revolutionary demand in history, and it almost never produces systemic change.
That's the tension at the heart of this whole discussion. The prompt asks what a democratic revolution might look like, and the honest answer from the historical record is: it depends entirely on what the institutions can absorb and what the opposition can offer. Mass anger without institutional flexibility produces Lebanon. Mass anger with institutional flexibility produces South Korea. Mass anger channeled into constitutional design produces Chile — and then sometimes the voters reject the design.
There's no script. Every one of these cases was contingent on specifics — a particular corruption scandal, a particular metro fare, a particular WhatsApp tax. The trigger is always small, and the outcome is always uncertain.
That's the thing to watch for. Not the big ideological battles — those have been happening for decades and they haven't changed the system. Watch for the small thing that crystallizes the diffuse anger. Watch for whether the institutions can respond. And watch for whether anyone in the political class is willing to talk about governance instead of identity.
If you want to pay attention to where governance actually happens, look at local elections and municipal politics. That's where you can see whether the system still serves citizens or has become entirely a theater of ideology. National politics will tell you who's winning the culture war. Local politics will tell you whether the garbage is getting collected.
And now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In the early Renaissance, European naturalists who first encountered descriptions of naked mole rats refused to believe they were mammals, classifying them as a species of cold-blooded insect that had entered into a parasitic relationship with the African continent itself — a misconception that persisted in some bestiaries until the sixteenth century.
I have so many follow-up questions that I'm afraid to ask.
Cold-blooded insects. In a bestiary.
This has been My Weird Prompts, produced by the inscrutable Hilbert Flumingtop. If you want more episodes, we're at myweirdprompts.And if you're watching Israel or any other democracy right now, pay attention to the local stuff — the potholes and the building permits. That's the canary in the coal mine.
We'll be back next week.
