National Triage

English calls it the emergency room. Hebrew calls it the triage room, and the name has the virtue of candor, since it warns whoever walks in that someone will decide the order of treatment. On Sunday, Herzog handed Gadi Eisenkot the mandate to form what the opposition has christened a national emergency government, designed for the security and the recovery of all of us. By the logic of our language, every emergency government begins by deciding who will be heard first. Arabs make up a fifth of our population, more than two million people, and they have waited for years at the back of that line, with no voice in the triage room. The new government owes them that voice.

In February, on Kan radio, Itamar Ben-Gvir showed what happens to those left outside the room when he defended his record on policing with a figure he was proud of, “there is twenty per cent less murder in the Jewish sector.” Good news for Herzliya. He blamed the killing in Arab towns on the attorney general and on forty years of neglect, although the annual number of victims in Arab society has nearly doubled since he took charge of the police, at the end of 2022. The count for 2026 reached 197 last week, slightly below the record pace of 2025. A minister who boasts about one sector and outsources the other sector’s dead has already triaged the country’s citizens, and the government he belongs to does not include a single Arab party to challenge that triage.

The back of the line has names. On February 3, 2025, a masked man walked into a clinic in Kafr Yasif, in the Galilee, and shot and killed Abdallah Awad, a thirty-year-old pediatrician from Mazra’a, as he was treating a mother and her two children. The police promised to find the killer, and more than a year later the doctor’s father told CNN that the family had heard nothing from the investigators. He believes his son was mistaken for someone else, and he counted him among the collateral damage, the term armies use for civilians killed in an attack aimed at a military target. An Israeli father needed military vocabulary to explain his son’s death in a doctor’s office, and he chose well, because in war hardly anyone answers for the civilian who is hit, and in Arab towns the rule is almost the same. In 2025, only eight per cent of violent deaths of Arab citizens ended in formal charges, compared with fifty-five per cent in Jewish communities. In a real emergency room, a doctor on duty who chose patients by their origin would lose his license, and our police have been working in that order for years.

The same triage is now at work at the door of the new government. Ra’am and the Joint List sent nineteen members to the Knesset on mostly Arab votes, and their endorsement completed the sixty-seven recommendations that won Eisenkot the mandate. Within the same bloc, Avigdor Liberman warned that he would under no circumstances accept a government that depended even on the abstention of the Arab parties, and on Friday he proposed talks with the ultra-Orthodox, who had backed Netanyahu or abstained. In Liberman’s triage, those who abstained were called in by name, and the Arabs who endorsed Eisenkot were left in the waiting room, forbidden even to abstain.

Liberman justifies the veto by pointing to the Arab parties’ refusal to label Hamas explicitly as a terrorist organization, although they have condemned the October 7th massacre more than once, and the right-wing reader will say that a country attacked in that way cannot depend on people who hesitate before that word. Eisenkot’s plan requires that recognition from anyone who enters the government and keeps the Arab parties outside, with no ministers at the table where policy on Hamas is decided. A veto that reaches even the silence of these lawmakers is aimed, then, at the voters who sent them to the Knesset. I am fairly sure that Liberman has no wish to prolong the government of Netanyahu, with whom he has ruled out any alliance. Even so, the veto leaves Eisenkot dependent on the thirteen ultra-Orthodox seats, which together with the bloc’s forty-eight make sixty-one, the narrowest possible majority, and, if that route fails, it opens the way to a new election with Netanyahu as caretaker prime minister, a danger Eisenkot himself has pointed out.

Eisenkot has promised “creative and unconventional” steps, and none would be as unconventional as triaging by severity, the way every hospital does.