The Crossroads That Doesn’t Look Like One

Suitcases are being packed with a question. This election should be the answer.

On October 27, Israelis vote. The choice on the ballot is which party. The choice beneath it is whether the covenant that holds this country together still holds.

Lately, almost every conversation I have with professionals and entrepreneurs ends in the same quiet place. Not in anger. Not in slogans. In logistics.

A European passport renewed “just in case.” A job offer abroad kept warm. A discreet look at schools in another time zone. Nobody announces it. It comes up between the main course and dessert, in a lowered voice, as if saying it too loudly would make it real.

These are not people who dislike this country. They love it. They serve in it, invest in it, build businesses in it, and raise their children to feel responsible for it. And they are quietly preparing for the possibility of leaving their own home.

Almost no one says, “We’re going.” They say, “We’ll see after the election.” Their suitcases are packed with a question, not yet a certainty. That is what should worry us most.

The numbers behind the feeling

Long-term emigration has risen sharply since 2022. Between 2023 and 2025 alone, roughly 235,000 Israelis left the country for a year or more. Within that number is a sharper one — the Israel Innovation Authority found that about 8,300 high-tech workers, roughly 2.1% of the sector’s entire workforce, relocated abroad between October 2023 and July 2024 alone. High-tech accounts for a fifth of Israel’s GDP and roughly a quarter of state revenue from income tax. And a recent Channel 12 poll found that nearly one in four Israelis said they or a relative would consider leaving if the current coalition were reelected — not a prediction, but a warning shot from people who are still deciding. A country can absorb emigration; every open society loses people. What it cannot easily absorb is losing the people who build, invest, and pay for everything else — at the exact moment antisemitism abroad is rising and the case for staying should be getting stronger, not weaker.

Why this moment doesn’t look dangerous — and is

The economy functions. The army performs wonders. The shekel is strong. The cafés are full. By every visible measure, life is good. But we, of all peoples, should know better than to trust only what is visible. October 7 taught us that by the time some threats become undeniable, the choices available to us have already narrowed. The same principle applies to a quiet exodus: a country doesn’t weaken on the day trust breaks. It weakens years later, when too many of the people who build, serve, and sustain its institutions have decided their future lies elsewhere. There is a tipping point, and no siren sounds when we cross it.

What’s actually being rewritten

The social contract isn’t fraying on its own. It’s being rewritten, law by law, in the final days of the outgoing Knesset. These are just a few examples:

• A Basic Law declaring Torah study a foundational value — widely understood, by supporters and opponents alike, as cover for preserving blanket military exemptions.
• In the same stretch of legislation, the Knesset moved to freeze arrest and prosecution of ultra-Orthodox draft evaders, past and future — struck down by the High Court a day later for treating one segment of the population differently under the law — while quietly extending mandatory service back to 32 months for soldiers who had been promised discharge at 30. Less time asked of those who already serve. An attempt, in the same breath, to excuse those who don’t.
• A law stripping the attorney general’s legal opinions of their binding force, letting ministers simply reject them — taking effect in January 2027, after voters have already cast their ballots. This is the one that matters most: it removes one of the only standing checks on executive power, on a timeline designed so the electorate can’t weigh in on it directly.

Set aside what you think of each law individually. Look at what they say together: less time asked of those who already serve, more protection for those who don’t, and less power for the institution meant to hold government accountable for the difference. Ask what that tells the soldier at the front, the reservist leaving his business again, or the family carrying the load at home.

The instinct behind judicial reform wasn’t invented from nothing. A concern that unelected gatekeepers had accumulated too much power over elected governments is one serious people can hold in good faith. The problem was never that the question got asked. It’s that the answer, in practice, has been to weaken the checks rather than rebalance them — leaving power more concentrated, not more accountable.

Covenant, not just interests

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks taught that a society holds together not merely through shared interests but through covenant — brit. Interests bind us while they coincide. Covenant binds us even when we disagree. At its root is one of Judaism’s central ideas: every human being is created b’tzelem Elokim, in the image of God, with a dignity no majority can grant and none can revoke. From that should flow equal dignity, shared responsibility, equality before the law, and rules a narrow majority doesn’t get to rewrite just because it can.

That is the choice beneath every ballot, even when no one says it aloud: a covenant state, where a shared Jewish and democratic identity binds equal duty to equal dignity for everyone — or a contract state, where power is parceled out through shifting coalition deals. There, the loudest sector extracts the most and carries the least, and what you owe the country depends on your leverage, not on the law.

The Zionist dream was never only to build a refuge. It was to build a bayit Jews would choose — measured not just by how many people it can rescue in danger, but by how many of its children want to stay, how many who leave want to return, and how many Jews elsewhere can imagine a future here.

That kind of home also needs renewal. For nearly three decades, one leadership has dominated Israel’s political life. This isn’t an argument about one leader’s talents. It’s an argument about democracy: institutions organize around the leader, loyalty competes with judgment, successors fail to develop — and the absence of alternatives becomes the argument for extending the very system that prevented them from emerging. Countries grow leaders the way they grow forests: by letting sunlight in and giving a new generation room to rise.

Four tests, whatever party you support

Israel’s electoral system has a 3.25% threshold — a vote for a party that doesn’t cross it elects no one. Vote with conviction, but vote with your eyes open. If we want the covenant, not the contract, ask any party you’re considering to commit to four things before you give it your voice:

1. One covenant of duty. At its heart is equality: every citizen carries a fair share of the load — service, work, taxes — and draws a fair share of state support in return, regardless of sector. Same benefit, same circumstance, for everyone. The form may differ; the principle can’t.
2. Limits on power. At its heart is integrity: a two-term limit for prime ministers — not because of any one person, but because of every person. A leader who clings to power stops choosing the best people and starts choosing the most loyal ones.
3. Rules changed only together. At its heart is reciprocity: the independence of the courts, the powers of gatekeepers, the balance between branches — none of it should be rewritten by whichever coalition holds 61 seats. Change it, if it needs changing, by broad or special majority, the way mature democracies protect their constitutions. The point isn’t to freeze the rules forever; it’s to guarantee that when your side loses, the rules will still be there when your turn comes again.
4. Independent accountability. At its heart is honesty: after a national catastrophe — war, terror, systemic failure — the state investigates itself automatically, through an independent commission with real powers, not at the discretion of whoever happens to be in office when it happens.

These four aren’t a trap for any single party. They’re the values worth voting by — equality, integrity, reciprocity, honesty. No party will embody all four perfectly. Vote for the one that comes closest, and hold it to keep moving in that direction.

This isn’t an argument for any party. And it isn’t an argument for voting the way you always have. Habit and tribal loyalty got us here. Values are what get us somewhere else — a country people choose to stay in, that those who left want to return to, that any Jew abroad could imagine building a life in. Not despite the war. Because it was still worth it. A ballot that elects no one changes nothing. A blank envelope changes nothing. That kind of home isn’t inherited. It’s chosen, on purpose, at the ballot box, by people who decided to stay.

What we owe each other

In our hardest hours, ordinary Israelis left their families and businesses and gave — some of them everything — to protect this home. Not for a party. Not for a politician. Because somewhere beneath all our arguments, there remains a covenant: this home belongs to all of us, and all of us bear some responsibility for it.

That covenant won’t renew itself. It’s renewed the way it was first made — by ordinary people showing up, accepting responsibility for one another, and choosing, together, the kind of home they intend to keep.