Take a Ruler and Draw a Line: Israel Under Another Netanyahu Term

Endless war, economic collapse and a brain drain: another four years under Netanyahu require no prophecy, just a simple ruler that reveals a path to collective suicide.

Take a ruler. Place it over the past four years, then extend the line another four years into the future. That is all it takes to know what Israel will look like if Netanyahu is elected again in two and a half weeks. No prophet is needed, and I do not pretend to be one. Everything I describe here is already happening before our eyes, only at a slow or moderate pace. Anyone who extends the line honestly will discover a chain in which each link pulls the next one along. At the end lies a country facing an existential threat, whose citizens have been given the opportunity to choose: begin to repair the damage, or continue racing blindly toward the abyss.

The first link is the war. A government that lives off war needs war to survive, so it is clear that the fighting will continue: Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, and back again. This government has nothing else to offer but blood, fire and columns of smoke. And an endless war requires an endless supply of soldiers.

At the beginning of the year, reservists were promised a single round of service lasting no more than 60 days. With no conscription of the ultra-Orthodox, that promise was broken by the second month, and thousands received emergency call-up orders for 100 consecutive days. “I’ve got four newly divorced men and another nine who have been laid off,” a reserve battalion commander recently said. That is what one year looks like. Now multiply it by four, and picture the same reservist returning home for the fourth time to find his business closed, his wife ready to give up, and his children growing up without him. Meanwhile, as the government seeks to extend compulsory military service to 36 months, it will pass the law it promised the ultra-Orthodox, exempting them from service. In other words, those who already carry the burden will be forced to carry even more, while those who have never carried it will continue to avoid it.

Netanyahu himself has already given this a name. “We will need to be Athens and super-Sparta,” he announced about a year ago, speaking of an economy with “autarkic characteristics.” Anyone who has read a little history knows how Sparta met its end. It did not need to be conquered. It slowly wore itself down until it no longer had enough citizens to shoulder the burden. That is the process already underway here: the exhaustion of those who serve, their families, small businesses and public trust.

Sparta also costs money, a great deal of it. Netanyahu has asked to add some 350 billion shekels to the defense budget over the next decade, even as he boasts that Israel will wean itself off American aid. The problem is that Israel, which enjoyed overwhelming support after October 7, has lost much of that support because of the government’s actions and now faces a wave of sanctions. For now, those sanctions are coming from Europe. And if the political trend in the United States continues, the support we have grown accustomed to relying on will no longer be guaranteed there either. When exports are blocked, credit becomes more expensive, and companies and banks begin to collapse, where will the money come from? From your taxes, from cuts to education and health care, and, as the public coffers are drained, the pressure will reach long-term savings and pension funds as well. Sound far-fetched? In recent years, plenty of things that once seemed far-fetched have become law here.

Sanctions are only the economic dimension of Israel’s isolation. Israeli sports, a source of escapism for many of us, are already facing sustained calls for sanctions and exclusion from European and international competitions. When the last remaining safety net is torn away, there will be nothing left.

Meanwhile, at home, the state is ceasing to function. Crime is soaring, and hundreds of people are murdered here every year. The police force is collapsing and can barely solve any crimes, while the government fills key positions with unqualified loyalists or paid idiots. The important thing is that they belong to our own camp, because Bibism needs some way to reward those who support it. The outcome is predictable: a country where nothing is run professionally is a country of disasters. The Carmel fire, the Meron disaster, and, above all, October 7: all happened under Netanyahu-led governments, and that list is likely to double. Less than two weeks ago, a passenger plane heading to Ben Gurion Airport nearly became a weapon. Disaster was averted only thanks to a mother waiting for her daughter near the toilets. Next time, there may be no such mother, and disaster may come in the form of a plane, a bridge, a train, or one of the thousands of buildings declared unsafe whose residents continue to sleep in them at night.

And who will treat the wounded and the sick? Between 2023 and 2025, 1,369 doctors left Israel, nearly twice as many as in the previous decade. In other words, we have lost an entire hospital’s worth of doctors. Imagine your parents, at two in the morning, sitting in the corridor of an internal medicine ward, waiting for a doctor who never comes. Then it will be your turn to wait. And, as in developing countries, with no doctors available, standards will be lowered and perhaps butchers will be turned into surgeons.

Doctors are only part of the population already leaving. Around 270,000 Israelis spent three months or more abroad over the past three years, nearly 50 percent more than in the previous decade. Everyone who can will flee, and the first to leave will be the very people the country needs most: engineers, tech workers and entrepreneurs. Companies will move their operations abroad, while others will simply shut down. Those left behind will be people with nowhere else to go, and those who never carried the burden in the first place.

Now do the math. Fewer doctors, fewer engineers and fewer taxpayers, alongside more wars, higher defense spending, more debt and no aid. No economy in the world can survive that equation. If the line continues, Israel in its 90th year of independence will be a completely different country: poorer, more isolated, more divided and weaker. Countries do not fall in a single day. They keep sliding until they reach the brink.

We have already seen this ending in our own history. During the Second Temple period, when Rome laid siege to Jerusalem, the Zealots burned the city’s grain stores so that no one would have any choice but to fight to the bitter end. That was the choice made by the people who followed them. What began with the burning of Jerusalem’s storehouses ended on the cliffs of Masada, where Eleazar ben Yair persuaded those with him to kill the women and children and take their own lives.

Israel is still a democracy, and I respect everyone who thinks differently from me, including those who will vote for Netanyahu and his partners. That is how the system works, and how it should work. Whoever is elected prime minister deserves our wishes for success. Everyone has the right to choose, and even a choice that amounts to collective suicide is a legitimate choice. But that right has another side: the duty to understand what one is voting for. You can choose this government. You should simply do so with a clear mind and your eyes wide open, knowing that after October 27, no one will be able to say they did not know.

May we all have better luck.