Life is a Game of Snakes and Ladders
The game we call Snakes and Ladders was born in ancient India under the name Moksha Patam, a board designed not for amusement but for moral instruction. Virtues lifted the player upward on a ladder toward moksha, liberation from the cycle of rebirth. Vices sent the player slithering down a serpent’s back. The British carried the game home in the Victorian era, stripped it of its theology and sold it as a children’s pastime. What they kept, perhaps without realising, was its central truth: no amount of skill protects you from the next square.
The 25th Knesset voted itself out of existence on 17 July, 62 to nil, clearing the path for general elections on 27 October. It had managed what no Israeli parliament had done since 1988: serve a full four year term. In a political system where fragile coalitions routinely collapse and snap elections are the norm rather than the exception, completing the course is itself a considerable achievement. But completing the game is not the same as winning it. What matters now is what the next roll brings, and not only for Israel.
The ancient Indian board kept its snakes and ladders on separate squares. A player landed on one or the other and knew immediately whether to celebrate or brace. Modern geopolitics is less obliging. Today the snake coils around the ladder itself, and the act of climbing is what brings a player within reach of the fall.
NATO’s post Cold War expansion followed the same geometry. Each new member state was a rung upward: a broader alliance, a deeper security guarantee, a Europe more integrated than at any point in its history. Yet the very act of extending the ladder eastward sharpened the confrontation the alliance was designed to deter. The war in Ukraine did not arrive on a separate square. It arrived on the ladder itself, and the alliance discovered that the higher it had climbed, the further there was to fall.
China’s Belt and Road Initiative told a similar story in a different register. Hundreds of billions in infrastructure lending across Asia, Africa and Latin America; ports, railways and power stations that would bind the developing world to Beijing. The ladder was enormous. So was the serpent: debt distress, sovereign dependency, and a growing cohort of borrower nations discovering that what looked like a rung was in fact a coil. The climb and the constraint turned out to be the same structure.
Israel’s October election will be contested on just such a board. No party in the country’s history has won an outright majority in the 120 seat Knesset. Every government is a coalition. Every coalition is a negotiation. Every negotiation is a roll of the dice. Benjamin Netanyahu, the longest serving prime minister in Israel’s history, will stand as Likud’s candidate. The man most likely to challenge him, Gadi Eisenkot, is a former Chief of Staff who launched the Yashar party in September 2025 after splitting from Benny Gantz’s National Unity. “Yashar” means straight, honest, upright. His campaign headquarters sit above a discount supermarket at the Morasha interchange, northeast of Tel Aviv, where commuter highways cross. Channel 12 polling puts the two parties within a single seat of each other. The contest will be close, the coalition mathematics dense, and the outcome a reminder that in Israeli politics, as in geopolitics, the snake is never on a separate square.
No poll, though, captures everything a candidate carries to the board. Eisenkot’s son Gal, 25 years old, was killed in northern Gaza in December 2023. A nephew, Maor Cohen Eisenkot, fell a day later. A second nephew, Yogev Pazy, was killed almost a year on. The game of politics, like the game of geopolitics more broadly, asks its players to absorb personal catastrophe and keep rolling. Some ladders are climbed at a cost that the board itself cannot measure.
In the small hours of 17 July, after the dissolution vote, the Knesset chamber emptied. Aides gathered papers. Cameras were powered down. The board had been cleared, every piece returned to the box. Come October, 120 seats will be set out again, the dice will be shaken, and Israel will discover, as every player eventually does, that the snake was never waiting on a distant square. It was coiled around the ladder all along. In the meantime, the room sits quiet, waiting. So, for that matter, does the world.