Who’s Afraid of Einat Wilf?

First, full disclosure: I volunteer with Einat Wilf’s Oz party – I’ve followed Einat’s eye-opening analyses for years, find her one of the most innovative, insightful, and brutally logical thinkers on all things Israel and anti-Israel, and was thrilled when she reentered politics.  

And that’s why I’ve spent the last few months nudniking my friends (or rather the few who still take my calls) about Einat’s Oz party. And I get one of three reactions:  

One is epiphany. My friend hears one of Einat’s takes and scales fall from the eyes – some issue that had always seemed an intractable balagan suddenly becomes clear, obvious even, and eminently solvable. (Keep reading and I’ll get to some examples).

The second reaction (which should probably be first since almost everyone has it) is some variant of “I don’t care who she is and I don’t care what she says no &%@#* new parties!”.  This is a 100% valid reaction and I’ll get to this one too in a bit.

I’ll start though with the third reaction because it’s the one that led me to write this blog. The third reaction is this: My friend hears me out and then, studiously avoiding every single word I’ve just said, manhandles the conversation over to one of the standard political shouting-points that we Israelis live to argue about.   

This reaction puzzled me until a few days ago, while irritably driving a family-member to a much-too-long-postponed-so-now-it’s-an-emergency-that-needs-a-specialist-clinic-3-hours-of-rush-hour-traffic-away-and-costs-literally-TWELVE-times-what-doing-it-on-time-would dental procedure, the asimon dropped: That third reaction is dentophobia – fear of dentists (yes its a real word – I just looked it up).   

Einat Wilf is the dentist of 2026 Israeli politics.  

We all blow-off the dentist checkup. Why? Because no dentist ever told anyone anything they wanted to know. Who wants to know that something’s rotting in your mouth and how much it’s going to hurt and cost to fix it and how even worse it’s going to get if you don’t?  

Same with Einat Wilf. Unlike any other party-leader I’ve heard (and I think I’ve heard them all), Einat relentlessly pushes hard truth at you. As far as I can tell she is completely unique among our current candidate crop in both (a) the analytical clarity to step back and see the biggest of big pictures, and (b) the uncompromising intellectual honesty to step forward and shove it in your face – where we are, how we got here, where we’re rapidly heading, where we absolutely must go instead, and what it’s REALLY going to take to get there.  

And since we’re talking about a too-much-sweets-and-no-flossing big picture, my third-reaction friends understandably want back to regular old Israeli avoidance-politics where nobody makes you look at rotten teeth and make real choices about fixing them, they just ask you to choose between parties that tell you to chew on the other side and parties that tell you how soup and yoghurt are actually nicer than food anyway.  

OK so what parts of Einat’s big picture make your friends change the subject on you? Well pick any of the three concentric circles that define Israel’s future – our internal society; our conflict with the Palestinians; our place in the wider world, and Einat’s going to have something new, different, and disturbing to tell you about it. 

1) Internal society: While everyone agrees that a divided Israel does not survive, and every politician – from the ones who genuinely crave solidarity to the ones who’ve built entire their careers around destroying solidarity – sloganizes endlessly about solidarity, Einat shows that non-solidarity is a feature and not a bug of our current system. And that’s because Israel’s most basic structures – education, social welfare, military service, etc. – have mutated to become almost exquisitely optimized to destroy solidarity. And what that means is that nothing less than difficult and radical overhaul is going to get us out of this.  

And so rather than the bandaids and verbiage offered by the conventional parties, the Oz platform prescribes deep structural change. For example, unifying the self-destructively divisive (not to mention insanely wasteful) four separate public education systems into a single core that encompasses every Israeli child regardless of background. 

And for another example, instituting a completely new model of national service in which every 18 year old (man, woman, Jewish, Arab, religious, secular, no exceptions, no special treatment) goes through a single IDF induction process and puts on the same IDF uniform every morning for 3 years regardless of what service they then spend the rest of the day giving their country (and convincingly shows how this happens without ever needing to lock up thousands of draft dodgers).

2) Our conflict with the Palestinians: Einat’s big picture of “pursue peace – based on Arab embrace of Zionism” and “settlement only under sovereign rule” profoundly disturbs both my “lefty” and “rightie” friends as it exposes the fallacies underlying the foundational truths of both camps.   

It pops the “leftie” fallacy that Israeli occupation is a primary cause of the conflict and that therefore it’s largely in Israel’s power to end the conflict. And that’s because Einat shows with depressingly copious and incontrovertible data that the core conflict actually has nothing to do with the occupation (or with anything else that Israel does) but is the toxic effect of an ideological cause which only the Palestinians have the power to change.

And it pops the “rightie” fallacy that while you-can’t-have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too rules every other inch of our planet, it somehow skips Judea and Samaria and so it’s perfectly rational to build Israeli cities there without the Knesset of Israel ever deciding that the land they are built on is the sovereign territory of Israel.   

(And having popped the dead-end strategies of both, she further embarrasses by showing what a real strategy looks like: A long-term reality-based plan that achieves peace by actually focusing on undermining the actual obstacle to peace).

3) Our (perilous) place in the wider world: Einat makes you understand how our enemies have succeeded in shifting the war to destroy Israel from the military front where we know how to win and they don’t, to the international-isolation front where THEY know how to win and WE don’t. 

And so, for the first time in our history, Israel is actually outclassed in a war and is losing it badly (all while our leaders are still largely oblivious to what’s even going on). A bit like Churchill in the 1930s, Einat has spent decades shouting from the rooftops about how exactly this was coming – while Israel slept, our enemies were methodically constructing a massive and tightly integrated war-machine of disinformation, institutional-capture, and mass-manipulation – ready to pull the trigger on October 7.  

Einat’s dentist diagnosis on this one is NOT that all is lost – it’s not all lost and she has a clear, detailed, and achievable plan for turning the tables and (leveraging the fact that truth is mainly on our side) ultimately prevailing in this new war. But it’s a real plan and a serious plan which means root canals and implants – not spending more on teeth-whitener like every other Israeli politician is telling us is all we need (and scarily, seems to be what most of them genuinely believe).

Ok and finally to “No &%@#* new parties!”:

To be clear, everyone who says there’s no place for new parties is 100% correct – new parties almost always fall below the electoral threshold, taking their voters with them. And as we saw in the last election, losing even a few sane votes can have catastrophic consequences.  

And that’s why Einat has made clear that Oz will NOT run as an independent party if polls show a risk of falling below the threshold.

So why doesn’t Oz just merge with a larger party now and be done with it? (And why should you still take the time to learn more?). Three important reasons:

1. Now is not the time to merge. Being Israeli, Israeli party-leaders don’t make final merger decisions until the absolute-last-minute. And the absolute-last-minute is weeks from now (12 midnight on September 7 to be exact –  the ballot registration deadline). 
2. Once you join a larger party, you don’t present your own ideas anymore, you present those of the larger party (hence the expression “party line”). And, so far at least, there IS no larger party willing to hold hard dentist-truths and realistic solutions up to the public (which is why Einat founded Oz in the first place).
3. And third, since Einat believes the hard truths (as well as the realistic and ultimately positive Oz vision and solutions that address those truths) are literally do-or-die for Israel at this critical moment, it would not help anybody to dilute them within a larger party prematurely. It is the ideas that are important, not which party ultimately ends up running with them.

So between now and September, the Oz plan is this: Do everything we possibly can to put Einat’s unique vision and solutions into the national conversation, and to continue to grow the (already large) base of people who are exposed to and resonate with it.  

That way, even if Oz does end up merging with an existing party, its insights, vision, and solutions will already be widely known and on the agenda. And of course, the larger the support-base that Oz brings to its merger, the more the merged-party’s platform, priorities, and post-election coalition demands will reflect those of Oz.

So my humble request to anyone reading this: Einat is currently conducting a round of “Chugei Bayit” (living-room meetings), some of which are in English.  No matter which party you currently align with (or if you are one of the many people who don’t find themselves aligning with any of the major parties), please consider coming to one.  

It won’t necessarily be the most cheerful talk you’ve ever heard, but it may well be one of the most interesting – and actually one of the most important.   

Visit the Oz website (https://www.ozparty.co.il/en/join) to be updated on the next one in your area.