The Atlantic is one of the few sites these days where I actively go looking for something to read instead of waiting for the algorithm to serve me my daily ration of rage. Yesterday I read Graeme Wood’s extraordinary piece on the vast political and demographic challenges Israel faces ahead of its Oct 27 election. It’s the best piece I’ve read on how Israel has evolved from its secular, liberal founding vision into a country increasingly shaped by religious nationalism and the political right.
I highly recommend reading the whole thing, but if you don’t have the appetite for 10,000 words and just want the gist, I’ve distilled my biggest takeaways below.
(I’m also testing out a Substack series where I share worthwhile articles and offer my own mini book reports. Partly to encourage a more regular writing practice, partly to force myself to read more intelligent commentary instead of letting the internet spoon-feed me another steaming bowl of influencer vomit.)
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Here’s the roughly 800 word version of The Atlantic piece:
Wood spent months interviewing Israeli generals, politicians, religious leaders, settlers, and civilians to get a sense of the current political climate. In short, it’s not great. The consensus among the security people is that contrary to what you may think, nobody’s really losing sleep over Iran. Apparently, nobody’s really losing sleep over Hamas, either.
Wood argues that Israel's deepest problems are actually the unresolved arguments over what Israel’s future is supposed to be.
One illuminating exchange came from Zohar Palti, who served as Mossad’s head of intelligence from 2011 to 2016:
“If you speak with the generals, the security people who invest their lives in this issue: What is the essential threat to Israel? No one will say, Something from the outside.”
They do not fret about Iran or Gaza or Syria, he said. The real problems lie within—negotiating the divide between the secular and the religious; incorporating into the state the one-fifth of the Israeli population that is non-Jewish and Arab; and figuring out how Israel will govern itself.
Essentially, Israel knows how to fight its enemies but has a much harder time figuring out how to live with itself.
So how did Israeli society end up in such a bleak place?
