In Israel, every party is a village

In his recent book On the Edge, data analyst and writer Nate Silver offers one of the most useful lenses I’ve found for understanding people and cultures: two very different worlds he calls the River and the Village. Silver uses this framework to describe how information, institutions, and influence operate across many fields. Here, I want to apply it to Israeli politics.

The River is a fast, open current of public conversation, where ideas compete in real time, the best arguments can rise quickly, and newcomers can make an impact without decades of insider ties. Think of it as the fast lane: open, competitive, and driven by timing and execution rather than hierarchy.

The Village is the insider’s network: built on trust, hierarchy, and a shared history. Decisions are shaped through backchannels, alliances, and long-cultivated influence. Think of it as the back room: closed, slow-moving, where loyalty and seniority count more than speed or merit.

In a healthy democracy, both worlds matter. The River keeps leaders connected to the public mood and forces agility. The Village offers institutional memory and guardrails against reckless change.

In Israel, every party is a Village

In the United States, the River and the Village are rival arenas that operate side by side. In Israel, there is no such contrast. Our entire political landscape – across the spectrum – is a single sprawling Village, built on the banks of a River that no longer runs.

Every party, whether left, right, or center, operates through insider networks, closed candidate pipelines, and decisions made in small rooms. Advancement depends far more on loyalty and personal alliances than on merit, performance, or public resonance. Even leaders who enter politics on a burst of River-like energy quickly abandon those currents and adapt to the Village’s operating system once inside.

Benjamin Netanyahu is often portrayed as a disruptive force. In reality, he is arguably the most accomplished Village politician Israel has ever produced. His defining instinct is not disruption but preservation: maintaining coalitions, preserving optionality, and delaying difficult choices for as long as circumstances allow.

And here’s the twist: every politician over the past decade that has promised to unseat Netanyahu the Villager has gone out of his way to prove his own Village credentials. Even Naftali Bennett – by temperament, Israel’s most naturally River-minded senior politician – has increasingly gravitated toward consensus-oriented causes that broaden appeal but do not fundamentally challenge the institutional operating model.

From the outside, Israeli politics can look noisy, even chaotic. But beneath the surface, the mechanics of power are uniform: parties and their “strategic advisors” speak mostly to each other, reward those already inside the circle, and move slowly to respond to shifting realities. The River’s energy is nowhere to be found. And without it, the Village sits comfortably on its dry riverbank, mistaking the absence of current for stability.

The one place where the River still runs

If Israeli politics is overwhelmingly Village, one major sector of Israeli society still operates like a River: the technology sector.

In tech, ideas are tested in real time, success is measured by results, and incumbents are challenged regularly.

Having spent seven years in Israel’s executive branch followed by seven years immersed in the technology sector, I am struck by the contrast. The gap between how Israel competes globally in innovation and how it governs itself at home is enormous.

The lesson is not that politics should mimic startups. It is that Israel has already demonstrated the cultural capacity for River-style behavior. We simply have not translated those instincts into politics.

The price of having no River

When an entire political system operates like a Village, the costs are felt in every major decision and, most tellingly, in the non-decisions.

A purely Village politics is slow to recognize new realities and even slower to adapt to them. That may keep insiders comfortable, but it leaves the country exposed when events move faster than the Village can process them.

In Israel, we have seen the consequences:

• Education reform delayed for decades to avoid short-term risk.
• National crises – like the recent multi-front war – managed with minimal transparency, in part to avoid upsetting carefully balanced coalitions.
• Innovation in governance dismissed as a gimmick, rather than a necessity.

Meanwhile, outside politics, the rest of the country is moving at River speed. Our tech sector and parts of civil society iterate, adapt, and act constantly. The mismatch is jarring: we can build world-class companies in a few years, but meaningful political reform takes decades, if it happens at all.

Without a River to challenge the Village, the political system becomes self-reinforcing. The same people, the same networks, and, most problematically, the same methods dominate, regardless of whether they are meeting the public’s needs. And because no River exists to create public pressure in real time, the incentives for speed, adaptation, and bold decision-making are almost nonexistent.

Let the River flow

Israel doesn’t need to abolish the Village. Any serious governing system needs institutions, expertise, and guardrails against reckless decisions. The Village can provide those. But a system composed only of a Village becomes slow to react, resistant to change, and increasingly detached from the environment it is meant to govern.

What keeps other democracies adaptive is not better people, but a different equilibrium: The River and the Village operate side by side. But in Israel, that equilibrium doesn’t exist. As a result, pressure builds outside the system rather than reshaping it from within.

The next generation of successful Israeli leadership will need to be bilingual: fluent in the River’s speed and openness, and the Village’s competence and execution. Pure River leadership is reckless. Pure Village leadership is stagnant. Israel has plenty of Riverian figures and plenty of Villagers. What it lacks are translators. The challenge is finding leaders who can operate in both worlds.

But that is not what this election offers. The major contenders for national leadership may differ in ideology, temperament, and experience. They may disagree on policy (actually, not that much). But they operate within the same institutional ecosystem, speak the same political language, and respond to the same incentives. Those incentives are overwhelmingly Village.

Which is why, regardless of who wins, the outcome is likely to remain the same: a politics that manages itself while struggling to engage with the reality around it.