Daniel sent us this one — he's asking about Jerusalem's municipal politics, and it's a question that's hard to avoid if you live here. He says the city feels like it's on a catastrophic course, lagging behind other Israeli cities on quality of life, battered by endless construction, with poverty disproportionately high. Moshe Lion just won a second term while secular candidates and parties were wiped out in the last election. So he's asking: where do recent trends suggest the future may lead, and which cities in Israel are showing markedly different trajectories?
This is one of those moments where the electoral outcome and the lived experience feel like they're describing two completely different cities. He's got his second term. And yet you walk outside and it's dust, it's detours, it's businesses boarding up because the sidewalk in front of them has been a trench for eighteen months.
The city just feels unsteered. Like nobody's hands are on the wheel, and yet someone keeps getting re-elected. It's the municipal equivalent of a car driving itself into a ditch while the driver gets a standing ovation from the passengers still on board.
The passengers who see the ditch coming have mostly gotten out and walked. So let's unpack how a city this important ends up in this state. It starts with the ballot box.
And the ballot box in Jerusalem doesn't look like the ballot box anywhere else in Israel. I mean, if you took someone from Tel Aviv and showed them a Jerusalem municipal ballot, they'd think they were looking at a different country's election.
That's not an exaggeration. The municipal government here is structurally unique. You've got a coalition that's dominated by ultra-Orthodox and national-religious parties, and secular representation on the city council has been shrinking cycle after cycle. In the twenty twenty-four elections, Meretz and Yesh Atid — the two main secular-leaning lists — walked away with zero seats combined. Not a single seat between them.
That's not a bad showing. That's an extinction event. It's like showing up to a party and discovering not only are you not on the guest list, but the house you thought you lived in has been rezoned.
It wasn't a fluke. Turnout was thirty-eight percent — the lowest in the city's history. In some secular neighborhoods, turnout was in the teens. So you had a situation where the people most frustrated with the city's direction essentially opted out of the process that might change it.
Which is a self-reinforcing loop. You don't vote because you feel nothing changes, and then nothing changes because you didn't vote. It's the civic version of refusing to eat because you're too hungry.
Moshe Lion won the runoff with fifty-one percent against Yossi Havilio. Tight, but a win. And his coalition includes Shas, United Torah Judaism, and the Religious Zionist Party. These are parties with very specific policy priorities — and those priorities shape the budget.
Let me push on something here. Because I think there's a version of this conversation where we just say "Haredi parties control the budget, end of story." And I don't think that's quite right. What does that coalition actually look like in practice? How does it function day to day?
It functions through coalition agreements that are remarkably specific. These are published documents. You can go read them. They specify things like: no new development in certain non-Haredi neighborhoods, no expansion of Saturday public transit, prioritized funding for yeshiva education over secular school infrastructure. These aren't vague ideological commitments — they're line items.
It's not that the Haredi parties are running the city into the ground through incompetence. They're running it exactly as they promised their voters they would. The problem is that their promises don't include making the city functional for people outside their constituency.
That's the distinction that gets lost. The Haredi parties aren't failing at governance. They're succeeding at representing their voters. The dysfunction is a byproduct of a system where representing one segment of the population well means actively neglecting another.
Let's talk about what those budget priorities actually look like on the ground. Because I think that's where the prompt's frustration really lives. Daniel's not asking about coalition theory — he's asking why his street looks like a war zone.
The city's spending heavily on prestige infrastructure — the light rail expansion, luxury towers — while basic maintenance in a lot of neighborhoods is visibly neglected. Sidewalks, trash collection, street lighting. I pulled the numbers on parks spending: Jerusalem spends about one hundred eighty shekels per resident annually. Tel Aviv spends four hundred twenty. More than double.
One eighty per person for green space. That's the municipal equivalent of buying the cheapest coffee on the menu and then wondering why it tastes like regret. And it's not just parks — it's community centers, it's after-school programs, it's the stuff that makes a neighborhood feel like a place rather than a dormitory.
Meanwhile, the poverty rate here hovers around forty-five percent. That's from the National Insurance Institute's annual report in December twenty twenty-five. The national average is twenty-one percent. Jerusalem is more than double.
You've got nearly half the city living in poverty, and the budget's going to light rail and glass towers that mostly sit empty. But here's where I want to dig deeper — what does forty-five percent poverty actually look like on the ground? Because it's easy to say the number and move on.
It looks like families where both parents work and still can't make rent. It looks like kids going to school without having eaten breakfast. The Jerusalem Institute for Policy Research found that thirty-eight percent of Jerusalem's children live below the poverty line. That's not a statistic — that's a generation growing up with malnutrition, with overcrowded housing, with parents who are working two jobs and are never home.
There's a geographic dimension to this, right? Poverty in Jerusalem isn't evenly distributed.
It's concentrated in East Jerusalem and in Haredi neighborhoods. East Jerusalem's poverty rate is above sixty percent. In some Haredi neighborhoods, it's similar. These are communities that are structurally poor — large families, lower workforce participation rates, systemic barriers. And they're the communities most dependent on municipal services that are being underfunded.
The people who need the city most are getting the least from it. That's not just a policy failure — that's a moral failure dressed up in budget spreadsheets.
That gets to the core tension. The prompt asks whether the real problem is mismanagement, demographics, or both. And I think the answer is that they're intertwined in a way that's hard to untangle.
Walk me through that knot.
The demographic trend is real and it's accelerating. The Haredi and national-religious populations are growing faster than the secular and traditional Jewish populations. That shifts the electorate rightward every cycle. And it's not just about who votes — it's about who stays. Net secular emigration from Jerusalem has been running at about fifteen thousand people per year since twenty twenty. That's according to the Jerusalem Institute for Policy Research.
Fifteen thousand a year. That's a small city's worth of people just walking out the door, every single year. That's like the entire population of a place like Zichron Ya'akov just evaporating annually.
They tend to be higher-income, higher-tax-paying residents. So the tax base erodes, which means less revenue for services, which makes the city less attractive to the people who might stay or move in, which means more of them leave. It's a doom loop.
The people who remain are disproportionately dependent on municipal services — large families, lower incomes — which increases the demand on the budget at exactly the moment the revenue is shrinking. It's like a restaurant where the customers who order the expensive entrees keep walking out, leaving you with the customers who need the most attention and have the smallest tabs.
So now layer on the coalition dynamics. The Haredi parties have specific asks in exchange for their support: freezing development in non-Haredi areas, blocking Saturday public transit expansions, prioritizing yeshiva funding over secular education. These aren't secrets — they're published in the coalition agreements.
You have a city government that is, in effect, structurally incentivized to neglect the very things that might keep secular and traditional families from leaving. It's not a bug — it's the operating system.
That's the trap. And it's not that the Haredi population is the problem. This is where I want to be really precise, because the misconception is that Jerusalem's issues are solely because of the Haredi community. The actual problem is the coalition structure that gives specific parties veto power over policy decisions. Other cities have large Haredi populations and manage to function. Bnei Brak is almost entirely Haredi and it runs. The difference is in how the political power is distributed and what the mayor can actually do without coalition partners threatening to collapse the government.
That's a crucial distinction. Bnei Brak is homogeneous — the electorate and the government are aligned. Jerusalem is heterogeneous, but the government only represents one part of the heterogeneity. It's like having a household where five people live there but only two get to decide what's for dinner every night, and the other three keep being served food they're allergic to.
The mayor's hands are tied, but also — and this is where it gets uncomfortable — maybe the mayor's not especially interested in untying them.
Say more about that.
Lion's political survival depends on keeping that coalition intact. He's not going to pick fights that lose him the next election. So the budget reflects the coalition's priorities, and the coalition's priorities don't include making secular young families want to stay. He could, in theory, push back. He could demand more flexibility. But that would risk the coalition fracturing, and then he's out of a job.
He's rationally pursuing his own political self-interest, and the outcome of that rational pursuit is a city that's slowly bleeding the population it needs to survive economically. It's the tragedy of the commons, but the commons is an entire city.
Which brings us to the construction minefield. Because if there's one thing every Jerusalem resident can agree on right now, it's that the city is basically unlivable if you need to get anywhere.
I was trying to drive from Talpiot to the city center last week. It took forty-five minutes. That's a distance of maybe five kilometers. I could have walked faster if I'd been willing to risk my life crossing the construction sites.
The J-Net light rail expansion is the single largest infrastructure project in the city's history, and it's being built everywhere at once. The Red Line extension, the Green Line, the Blue Line — all under construction simultaneously. The Red Line extension has been delayed to twenty twenty-seven. The Green Line isn't expected until twenty twenty-nine. And in the meantime, the municipality's own twenty twenty-five annual report admits that forty percent of major roads are under construction at any given time.
That's not a city. That's an obstacle course with a municipality attached. It's like the city planners looked at a map and said, "What if we made everywhere impossible to reach, simultaneously?
There's no coordinated traffic management plan. I went looking for one. The municipality has published maps of the routes, maps of the stations, glossy renderings of what it'll look like when it's done. Nothing about how people are supposed to get to work during the seven years of construction.
It's the urban planning equivalent of announcing you're going to perform open-heart surgery on someone and then not telling them how they're supposed to breathe during the operation. "Don't worry, your heart will be great in seven years. hold your breath until then.
The misconception worth addressing here is that the light rail is a solution to traffic. It might be — eventually. But without complementary bus lane reforms and parking policies, it won't reduce congestion. During the construction phase, it's actively making things worse. And businesses are paying the price.
The Bezalel Street situation.
Case study in how not to do urban renewal. The pedestrianization project was announced in twenty twenty-two. It's now May twenty twenty-six and it's still not complete. Businesses along that route have reported revenue drops of thirty to fifty percent. The municipality has paid out twelve million shekels in compensation claims so far.
Twelve million shekels to compensate businesses for damage caused by a project that was supposed to help those businesses. That's the kind of irony you'd reject in a screenplay for being too on the nose. And let me ask — how does this actually work on the ground? If I'm a café owner on Bezalel, what does my day look like?
Your sidewalk is a trench. The construction barriers block your storefront. Pedestrians can't reach your door without walking three blocks around a detour that changes weekly. Your regulars stop coming because it's too much hassle. You're still paying rent, still paying your staff, still paying city taxes — and your revenue is down by half. Then you apply for compensation from the municipality, which takes months to process, and the check you eventually get doesn't cover your losses.
This is happening to dozens of businesses across the city center. Not one or two — dozens.
Bezalel is one street. Multiply that experience across the entire city center — Jaffa Road, King George, Agrippas — and you start to understand why people feel like they're navigating a minefield just to buy groceries.
There's something almost Kafkaesque about it. The city is tearing itself apart to build infrastructure that's supposed to make the city better, but the process of building it is destroying the city it's meant to serve. And there's no timeline, no accountability, no end in sight.
You've got poverty, demographic flight, coalition gridlock, and a city that's physically falling apart. And yet Lion got re-elected. The question the prompt is really asking is: where does this trajectory lead?
I think we need to sit with the weight of that question for a moment. Because it's not abstract. We're talking about the capital of Israel. The city at the center of Jewish history for three thousand years. And the trajectory we're describing is one where it becomes, functionally, a place that the rest of the country doesn't live in.
If current trends continue, the secular population could drop below twenty percent by twenty thirty-five. That would make Jerusalem functionally a Haredi and Arab city with a small national-religious elite. The municipal revenue base would shrink further. The poverty trap would deepen. And the city would lose whatever remains of its appeal to the kind of mixed, pluralistic population that historically defined it.
That's the catastrophic course the prompt is describing. And it's not hyperbolic. But let me ask — what does "functionally a Haredi and Arab city" actually mean? Because those are two populations that don't exactly share political interests.
It means a city where the political dynamic is primarily negotiated between Haredi parties and Arab-majority neighborhoods, with the Arab population largely excluded from formal coalition power but representing a significant voting bloc. East Jerusalem residents can vote in municipal elections but most choose not to, for political reasons tied to the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So you'd have a city where the formal political power is Haredi, the largest single demographic is Arab, and the secular Jewish population is a diminishing minority with no political representation.
That's not a recipe for stability.
It's not. And what makes it especially frustrating is that alternatives exist. Other Israeli cities are demonstrating that different governance models produce different outcomes.
Let's look at those. Because the prompt specifically asks about cities showing markedly different trajectories. And this isn't just about making Jerusalem feel bad — it's about understanding what's possible.
Tel Aviv is the obvious comparison, but the story there is more interesting than just "Tel Aviv is rich and functional." Ron Huldai was mayor for twenty-six years — an extraordinarily long tenure — and he was replaced in twenty twenty-four by Orna Barbivai. The transition was smooth. The city didn't collapse. That's a sign of institutional strength, not just one strong leader.
The system outlasts the person. That's the test. If your city falls apart the moment the mayor leaves, you didn't have a city — you had a personality cult with a zoning board.
Tel Aviv's approach is data-driven budgeting. They published a twenty twenty-five Green City plan that allocates fifteen percent of the municipal budget to climate resilience. They launched a participatory budgeting pilot in Florentin this year — residents actually get a say in how some of the money is spent. These are governance innovations that Jerusalem simply isn't attempting.
The parks budget. Four hundred twenty shekels per person versus one eighty. That's not a rounding error. That's a statement of values. It says: we believe public space matters, we believe green space is infrastructure, not a luxury.
Tel Aviv has its own problems — housing costs are astronomical, inequality is real — so let's not romanticize it. The point isn't that Tel Aviv is a utopia. The point is that it's governed in a fundamentally different way, with different priorities and different mechanisms for accountability.
Haifa is maybe the more instructive comparison, because it's not Tel Aviv. It's a mixed city with its own demographic complexities. You've got Jewish and Arab populations, religious and secular, and it's not exactly rolling in high-tech money the way Tel Aviv is.
Yona Yahav returned as mayor in twenty twenty-four after a brief hiatus. The city's twenty twenty-five to twenty thirty strategic plan focuses on mixed-use development in the port area, with three thousand new housing units designated specifically for young families.
The demographic Jerusalem is hemorrhaging. Haifa looked at the problem and said, "Let's build housing specifically for the people who are leaving Jerusalem." That's either brilliant or brutal, depending on which city you're sitting in.
Haifa's poverty rate is twenty-two percent — half of Jerusalem's. Part of that is due to a tech corridor initiative that added four thousand high-tech jobs since twenty twenty-two. The port redevelopment completed twelve hundred housing units in twenty twenty-five, with another eighteen hundred under construction. These are concrete, measurable outcomes.
They're outcomes that Jerusalem's budget structure and coalition politics make nearly impossible to replicate here. Haifa can do this because its mayor can pursue a strategic plan without having to trade away core functions to keep the government from collapsing.
Be'er Sheva is the one that really makes the case, though. And I think this is the comparison that should keep Jerusalem's city council up at night.
Because Be'er Sheva was, for decades, the city everyone made jokes about. The place you drove through on the way to somewhere else. The city that was too hot, too dusty, too far from everything.
Mayor Ruvik Danilovich has been pursuing what he calls a desert Silicon Valley strategy since twenty eighteen. The city's high-tech employment grew sixty percent between twenty twenty and twenty twenty-five. That's according to the Israel Innovation Authority's twenty twenty-six report. The Gav-Yam Negev high-tech park went from two thousand employees in twenty eighteen to eight thousand as of this year.
Eight thousand high-tech jobs in a city that most Israelis still think of as a place you drive through on the way to Eilat. That's not growth — that's transformation. And how did they do it?
They did it by making the city attractive to employers. Tax incentives, streamlined permitting, investment in public spaces around the tech park, and — crucially — housing that young tech workers can actually afford. A two-bedroom apartment in Be'er Sheva costs a fraction of what it costs in Tel Aviv. So you've got young families who can work in tech and actually afford to live.
Which is exactly the value proposition Jerusalem used to have. Come here, live in a city with history and character and affordable housing, and build a life. But Jerusalem's lost that. The housing that's being built is either luxury towers aimed at foreign buyers or Haredi-focused developments. There's no "young secular family with a tech job" housing strategy.
Here's the number that should make Jerusalem's city hall very uncomfortable: S and P Maalot upgraded Be'er Sheva's municipal bond rating to double-A minus in twenty twenty-five. Jerusalem's was downgraded to A plus in twenty twenty-four.
Be'er Sheva is a better credit risk than Jerusalem. Let that sink in. The capital of Israel, the city at the center of three thousand years of history, is financially less trustworthy than a city in the Negev that most of the country ignored for decades. That's not just embarrassing — it's a flashing red warning light.
The common thread across Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Be'er Sheva is mayoral autonomy. These mayors have coalitions, but they're not held hostage by any single faction. They can pursue long-term strategic planning without having to trade away core functions to keep the government from collapsing. And they all have tax bases that include high-income residents — which Jerusalem is steadily losing.
The contrast is clear. The question is whether Jerusalem can learn anything from it. Or whether the structural obstacles are so deeply embedded that learning is impossible.
The structural obstacle is that Jerusalem's political incentives don't reward the kind of reforms that worked in Be'er Sheva. Danilovich could invest in high-tech because his coalition supported economic development. Lion's coalition has different priorities — and those priorities are reinforced by demographic trends that make the coalition more secure with every election cycle.
It's a perfect storm. The people who want change leave. The people who stay vote for continuity. The coalition locks in policies that accelerate the departure of the people who want change. Rinse and repeat. It's almost elegant in its awfulness.
The Knesset could intervene. There was a Finance Ministry report in twenty twenty-five that recommended a fifteen percent increase in Jerusalem's municipal grant — a fiscal equalization measure to account for the city's high poverty rate. It wasn't adopted.
Wasn't adopted because...?
Because fiscal equalization is politically unsexy and Jerusalem's representatives in the Knesset are largely from the same parties that benefit from the current municipal arrangement. Nobody's incentivized to change the formula.
The city's own political representatives at the national level have no reason to fix the problem. The municipality has no reason to fix the problem. And the residents who want it fixed are leaving. That's not a policy failure — it's a policy success for the people who designed it. The system is producing exactly the outcomes it's built to produce.
Which brings us to twenty twenty-eight. The next municipal election is the inflection point. If Lion wins a third term with the same coalition, expect accelerated secular flight and deeper poverty. The trajectory becomes basically locked in.
— and this is where the prompt's underlying question lives — is there any plausible path to a different outcome? Or are we just describing a slow-motion train wreck that everyone can see coming and nobody can stop?
There are grassroots movements organizing right now. Hafuch — which means "reversed" — is a group focused on getting secular and traditional voters to actually show up. Ir Meusharet, "sustainable city," is pushing for specific policy reforms around transparency and budget allocation. They're small, but they're real, and they're building infrastructure for twenty twenty-eight.
What does that infrastructure look like? Because "get out the vote" is easy to say and incredibly hard to do.
It looks like neighborhood-level organizing. Volunteer coordinators in specific buildings. WhatsApp groups that track who's voted and who hasn't. Rides to polling stations. It's unglamorous, labor-intensive work, and it's the only thing that actually moves turnout numbers in municipal elections.
The turnout problem is the linchpin. Thirty-eight percent in the last election. In a city with a forty-five percent poverty rate, a lot of people have checked out entirely. Convincing them that their vote matters is a heavy lift when the evidence suggests otherwise. You're essentially asking people to believe in a political process that has given them zero reasons to believe.
But the math isn't impossible. Lion won with fifty-one percent in a low-turnout runoff. If secular and traditional voters had turned out at the same rate as Haredi voters, the result could have been different. The electorate isn't as monolithically right-wing as the election results suggest — the results reflect who showed up, not who lives here.
That's an important corrective to the narrative. The city isn't doomed by demographics. It's being shaped by turnout differentials and coalition mechanics. That's a governance problem, not an inevitability. And governance problems can, in theory, be solved. The question is whether the political will exists.
Governance problems can, in theory, be solved. The question is whether the political will exists — and whether the people who've been burned by the system can be convinced to give it one more try.
For someone living in Jerusalem right now, or watching from the outside, what's actually actionable? If Daniel is listening and thinking, "Okay, this is depressing, but what do I actually do?
The twenty twenty-eight elections are the next real opportunity. And municipal elections are won on the ground, not in the headlines. Community council meetings — the va'adot rishoniyot — have real power over local planning decisions. They're poorly attended. Showing up to those meetings is one of the few ways an individual can actually influence how their neighborhood develops.
For people outside Jerusalem, twenty twenty-eight is worth watching as a bellwether. If Jerusalem can't reverse this trajectory, it tells you something about the limits of urban governance in Israel more broadly. If it can, it becomes a case study in how to pull a city back from the edge.
The structural reform that would actually change the equation is fiscal equalization from the Knesset. The current formula penalizes Jerusalem for its poverty rate — the city has high needs and a shrinking tax base, and the national government isn't filling the gap. That fifteen percent grant increase the Finance Ministry recommended would be a start. But it requires political pressure that doesn't currently exist.
Because the people who suffer most from the status quo are the least politically organized.
That's the oldest story in politics, unfortunately. The people who need the system to change are the people with the fewest resources to force that change.
Let me try to synthesize this. Jerusalem's municipal dysfunction isn't a simple story of mismanagement or demographics. It's a feedback loop. The coalition structure locks in budget priorities that neglect the services and quality-of-life investments that might retain secular and traditional families. Those families leave, eroding the tax base and shifting the electorate further toward the parties that benefit from the current arrangement. The construction boom — the light rail, the luxury towers — consumes the city's attention and budget while making daily life worse for residents. And the national government has no political incentive to intervene.
That's the diagnosis. The prognosis depends on twenty twenty-eight.
The treatment, if there is one, is turnout. The single biggest variable that could change the outcome is whether the forty-five percent of Jerusalemites living in poverty, the fifteen thousand people leaving every year, and the secular voters who stayed home in twenty twenty-four decide that this time it matters.
It's a tall order. But the alternative is the catastrophic course the prompt describes — a Jerusalem that becomes, functionally, a city the rest of Israel visits on Yom Yerushalayim and then goes home.
That's the open question worth sitting with. Can Jerusalem break this cycle without a fundamental change in its demographic composition, or without a Knesset intervention that nobody in power wants to deliver? I don't know the answer. But twenty twenty-eight is going to provide one, whether we like it or not.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In the Simpson Desert, a nineteen seventy-three field guide misidentified the upside-down jellyfish Cassiopea as a freshwater species, claiming it had adapted to desert waterholes. The error persisted through three editions before being corrected in nineteen eighty-nine by a marine biologist who pointed out that the nearest ocean is over five hundred kilometers away and the jellyfish would have had to evolve legs.
...right.
On a jellyfish.
I'm now going to spend the rest of the day thinking about a jellyfish walking across the Outback.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop. You can find every episode at myweirdprompts dot com, and if you want to support the show, leave us a review wherever you listen. We're back next week.
