Amcha Yisrael
Amcha Yisrael — the people of Israel. The phrase sounds self-evident until one asks who is actually contained in that “people,” who may enter it, under what conditions, and what happens to those whom the security of the community places outside its political horizon. That question has become newly urgent because Israel now occupies a peculiar strategic position: too strong to be defeated, yet perhaps too weak to produce the conditions of a durable victory.
Since October 7, much of the Israeli debate has focused on intelligence failure, deterrence, technological overconfidence and the collapse of the old conceptzia. But there is another possibility that deserves attention: a state that has lost confidence in its ability to predict its enemies may try to compensate by reorganizing space.
Before October 7, certainty was supposed to come from intelligence, deterrence and the assessment of enemy intentions. After October 7, distance itself increasingly appears as a source of security. Threats must be pushed farther away, infrastructure destroyed before it approaches the border, strategic depth widened and the space available to hostile capability reduced.
At the tactical level this is understandable. A state whose border has been catastrophically breached will naturally seek greater defensive depth, but the deeper problem begins when a tactical instrument becomes a substitute for a strategic or political answer.
Then a subtle conversion takes place. “We cannot know with sufficient confidence what the enemy may do” becomes “the enemy must be farther away.” Distance requires controlled space, controlled space requires presence, and presence generates new security requirements that in turn justify continued control.
No secret expansionist plan is necessary for this logic to operate. The mechanism can generate its own reasons for extension, because a buffer zone then becomes more than territory: it becomes uncertainty translated into geography. The less confidence a state has in prediction, the more space it may seek to control instead.
This is where Ofer Winter becomes unusually revealing. Winter presents October 7 as the result of distorted concepts and intellectual arrogance, attacking a system in which decision-makers became so certain of their own understanding that they effectively told the enemy what the enemy wanted.
Yet his political answers include rejecting Palestinian statehood, encouraging Palestinian emigration from Gaza and imposing territorial costs on enemies who initiate war. The juxtaposition matters more than the party platform itself because Winter identifies an epistemic failure and answers it geographically.
He recognizes the danger of a system that misread the enemy, but his proposed correction does not establish a new political relation. It changes the spatial conditions under which the other side is permitted to exist and act, preserving the expectation that sufficient control over territory, capability and access can turn a political problem into an administratively manageable one.
The most consequential successor to a failed conceptzia may therefore come not from those who still believe in it, but from those convinced they have escaped it. Personnel, language and doctrine can change while a deeper structure survives.
Winter has named his movement Amcha Yisrael — People of Israel, and here the name begins to do more work than electoral branding. The party deliberately includes the Arab-Israeli activist Yoseph Haddad, whose presence signals that the political “we” need not be ethnically absolute and that an Arab citizen may enter Amcha Yisrael if his relation to the state satisfies a particular political criterion.
But that produces a revealing contrast. The boundary of political belonging no longer runs simply between Jew and Arab; it runs between the subject admitted into the common order and the population interpreted primarily through security, territory, migration and potential threat.
One Arab may enter the cabinet while another Palestinian population may appear principally as a spatial problem. That is not necessarily a contradiction. It may be the emerging logic itself, in which the decisive distinction is no longer identity alone, but admissibility.
Once security is organized this way, location acquires political force. A person need not be treated coercively because of something he has done; it may be enough that he occupies a space regarded as relevant to future risk, so that responsibility for action gives way to the operational meaning of place.
This is where the geographical answer to October 7 becomes politically dangerous. The state begins not only to confront hostile acts but to reorganize the conditions from which hostile acts might emerge. Security moves from conduct toward topology, but topology has no natural stopping point.
Missiles cross buffer zones, drones reduce the value of distance, tunnels ignore surface boundaries, and new technologies continuously alter what counts as strategic depth. Every spatial solution can therefore produce a demand for another spatial solution, because uncertainty does not disappear; it is merely displaced.
This reveals the deeper paradox of Israeli power. Israel possesses overwhelming capacities to prevent conventional defeat: it can destroy infrastructure, eliminate commanders, penetrate hostile territory and repeatedly restore local military superiority. What those capabilities do not automatically provide is an order that no longer requires their repeated use.
Military superiority can prevent defeat without producing victory, and superiority can even become a reason not to confront the difference between the two. If control can always be restored through another operation, there is always one more operation available before political transformation becomes unavoidable.
Strength can buy time, reduce immediate danger and restore initiative. But precisely because it can do these things, it may also postpone the moment at which the limits of military power must be acknowledged, leaving Israel with a problem stranger than weakness: it may be too strong to be forced to change.
This is why reducing the present crisis to Netanyahu would be inadequate. A different prime minister can inherit the same deeper structure, and Winter is important precisely because he presents himself as a rupture with the assumptions that preceded October 7 while demonstrating how easily a personal rupture can coexist with structural continuity. But there is another layer now entering the campaign, and it may be even more consequential. Netanyahu has begun warning that a fragmented right could bring a “fascist” left to power, and the term matters less as an ideological description than as a political function.
The opponent is no longer merely wrong, dangerous or incompetent. The opponent becomes the possible carrier of catastrophe, in a vocabulary increasingly familiar from the American culture war, where political adversaries are often transformed into existential figures: not people proposing another policy, but forces through whom social collapse, persecution, betrayal or death may arrive.
In Israel, that vocabulary enters a far more combustible environment. It intersects with the memory of historical catastrophe, the lived trauma of October 7, the language of existential threat and a political culture in which security is never purely metaphorical. The result is a semantic chain in which “the left,” “Oslo,” loss of control, national betrayal and death can begin to reinforce one another. At that point elections cease to be merely a contest between programs, because voting becomes an act of protection against catastrophe.
The absurdity of the language is already visible. Political opponents can be called fascists, violent settler extremists can be described as a metastasizing cancer, and Haredi leaders can compare the state or its institutions to North Korea. These terms do not form a coherent ideological map, and they do not need to.
Their function is different: they identify maximum threat. Political language stops describing disagreement and begins assigning apocalyptic roles, making semantic excess not a failure of precision but a mechanism of mobilization.
This is where Amcha Yisrael acquires its most unsettling meaning. A political community is not defined only by those who belong to it; it can also be defined by the figure from which it must be saved.
Once that structure takes hold, the border of the community is no longer merely territorial. It becomes moral, existential and affective, dividing those who must be protected from those who can be cast as possible carriers of the catastrophe threatening the common world. The political advantage of such a structure is obvious. It converts uncertainty into loyalty, disagreement into danger and electoral fragmentation into existential risk, but it also creates a profound vulnerability: a community organized primarily around protection eventually requires a permanent source of danger.
If the threat weakens, the political intensity of unity weakens with it. The enemy therefore becomes not merely external to the community but functionally necessary to its reproduction, because the common “we” gains coherence through the figure of what must never be allowed to prevail.
That is why the phrase Amcha Yisrael now deserves to be read as more than the name of a party. It names the question currently passing through Israeli politics: who belongs to the people, who may be admitted into the common order, who is rendered as a security problem, and who must occupy the role of the figure from which the people are saved.
Israel is too strong to be defeated by its present enemies, and that strength is real and indispensable. But strength sufficient to prevent defeat is not necessarily strength sufficient to produce victory, while a political system capable of postponing that distinction indefinitely may begin to depend on the very threats it claims to overcome.
The deepest danger is therefore not simply that Israel will misread another enemy or miscalculate another border. It is that political belonging, security and catastrophe may become fused into a single structure in which the community can no longer imagine itself without the figure of someone whose victory would mean its end.
The “people of Israel” may then need more than a border. It may need an Antichrist.
Yochanan Schimmelpfennig
