The Long Brief: The Unfinished State
A field brief on Israel’s constitutional vacuum, the judicial fight it produced, and the choices the country now faces after October 7.
Shalom, friends.
Picture three Israelis in the same living room shouting the same word — “democracy” — and having absolutely nothing in common. One means “the Court saves us from these lunatics.” One means “61 seats means I get to govern, not the Bar Association.” One means “I sat in a cockpit over Rafah while you blocked highways in Kaplan, you don’t get to lecture me about the rule of law.” Now add October 7, an ongoing war on multiple fronts, a shattered sense of trust, and a judicial system that wrote itself into the role of final guardian without anyone ever signing at the bottom.
We’ve spent years screaming about “coup,” “dictatorship,” “reform,” and “resistance,” while the real story sat in plain sight: Israel has run for nearly eight decades without a completed constitutional order. The High Court filled the vacuum by turning Basic Laws into a de facto constitution. The political class outsourced its hardest fights to that court and then woke up furious that it actually used the power they handed it.
This brief lays out the architecture, the fault lines, and the choices that now demand decisions instead of slogans.
The Unfinished State
How Israel’s Half-Built Constitutional Order Collided With Judicial Activism, Political Power, and the Aftershocks of October 7
Israel runs a modern state with only a partial operating manual. There’s no formal constitution. No second legislative chamber. No presidential veto. No federal structure. No entrenched, enumerated bill of rights. Power concentrates in one place: a Knesset majority that controls the government. That majority is checked by a single institution—the High Court—whose authority grew not from a founding pact nor Knesset bill, but from layering judicial decisions onto other judicial decisions time and again.
Into that vacuum the Court turned itself into the guardian of “democratic norms.” It stepped into every gap the founders left open. It interpreted Basic Laws as constitutional chapters, reviewed legislation and appointments, and treated almost any government act as fair game for judicial scrutiny. No popular referendum ever approved that role. No Basic Law spelled it out. The Court claimed the authority on its own. Governments lived with it because they preferred to avoid hard fights.
The reform clash that exploded months before October 7 sits on that architecture. It didn’t appear out of nowhere. It is what happens when a single-chamber parliamentary system, with no written constitution and no entrenched limits, collides with a Court that has taken on the job of final arbiter over almost everything. Every actor can wrap itself in “democracy.” The government says it has the votes. The Court says it protects rights and the system’s basic conditions. Protesters point to majoritarian excess. Coalition supporters point to unelected elites blocking the will of the people. All of them use the same word and mean different things.
So now we have a half-built constitutional order that has met a government determined to reset the balance in favor of the elected branches, and a Court determined not to surrender the powers it accumulated.
There is no agreed rulebook to settle the fight. That is the heart of the crisis.
The Constitution Left on Hold
The founders promised a constitution and then parked the promise. The UN Partition Plan and Israel’s Declaration of Independence both assumed a formal constitution would follow statehood. The Declaration even set a date—no later than October 1, 1948. History had other plans. Between 1948 and 1950, Israel fought for survival, absorbed waves of immigrants, and tried to stitch together a population drawn from Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa under a single flag.
David Ben-Gurion made the core choice. He viewed security, immigration, and state-building as first-order tasks and saw a written constitution as a luxury that could fracture the young state. He worried that a formal charter would freeze ideological disputes before the country had found its footing, and he wanted maximum freedom of action for the executive while the state learned to walk. He did not hide his view. For him, the real work came after independence, not in a ceremonial text.
Religious–secular divides made the calculus even harder. For the Ultra-Orthodox parties, the Torah already served as the only legitimate constitution. Any human document that contradicted halacha was unacceptable. Any one that matched it was redundant. Secular Zionists aimed for a civic charter with clear separation between rabbinic authority and state authority. That clash threatened to split the political system, exactly when the state could least afford internal war. Ben-Gurion preferred to choose a messy status quo to an early schism inside the Jewish world.
Borders and identity were also up in the air. The 1949 armistice lines were not accepted as final. Jerusalem’s status remained contested. The futures of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza were unresolved. Locking borders and definitions into a constitution while the map and the refugee question were both live would have been reckless. So the leadership left those questions open on purpose.
Ambiguity became a survival tool.
The Harari Resolution of June 1950 turned that instinct into a formal doctrine. Instead of a single constitutional document, the Knesset agreed to enact Basic Laws chapter by chapter. These would eventually be assembled into a constitution “when the committee completes its work.” No deadline. No ratification rules. No special majority. It looked clever at the time. Israel would get foundational laws and avoid a civil war over identity in its first years.
Over the decades, that “interim” model calcified. Basic Laws multiplied but retained the status of ordinary statutes on paper. They were passed by whoever held a majority in that Knesset, with no supermajority, no referendum, and no explicit hierarchy over regular laws.
Administrative Chapters Become Constitutional Pillars
For a long time, Basic Laws looked harmless. In the 1950s through the 1970s, they focused on institutions: the Knesset, the government, the judiciary, the army. They were treated as regular legislation. No doctrine said they were higher than other laws. The Harari vision of an eventual compiled constitution drifted to the margins while wars and economic survival dominated politics.
The character of the Basic Laws changed in 1992. The Knesset passed Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty and Basic Law: Freedom of Occupation. For the first time, a Basic Law set out individual rights—dignity, privacy, property, freedom of movement—and included a limitation clause that spoke of the “values of the State of Israel” and proportional interference by later laws. The language echoed foreign charters. It did not expressly say courts could strike down Knesset statutes. It explicitly shielded pre-1992 laws from review under its terms. The votes were thin—dozens of MKs in a 120-seat chamber, passed late at night, with very little public attention. Nobody sold them as a revolution.
The revolution arrived in 1995 anyway. In the Bank Mizrahi decision, the Supreme Court declared that these Basic Laws had constitutional rank and that the Knesset, when it passed them, acted as a constitutional assembly. The Court announced that it could now invalidate laws that violated Basic Laws. It was Israel’s Marbury moment without a written constitution to point to. The justices did not rely on a public act of ratification. They inferred hierarchy from the label “Basic Law” and the subject matter.
In the years that followed, the Court expanded that doctrine. It read missing rights—equality, free speech—into the broad term “dignity.” It extended review beyond the two 1992 laws to earlier Basic Laws, even where no limitation clauses existed, by inventing its own tests. It treated the assorted Basic Laws as the chapters of an unwritten constitution and itself as the court of that constitution.
Politicians and the public did not mount a direct assault on this shift at first. Many Israelis liked the idea of stronger protection for rights after decades without a formal bill of rights. The Court enjoyed high prestige, particularly among secular and centrist elites. But the democratic deficit was baked in. No special procedure had ever distinguished Basic Laws from regular statutes. No popular vote or broad supermajority had declared them supreme law. The Court elevated them on its own.
That move planted the seeds of backlash, especially among those who already felt distant from the judicial and legal establishment.
Expansion Without a Mandate
Aharon Barak personified the Court’s transformation. As justice and then chief justice, he argued that every government act falls under law and that no sphere is beyond judicial reach. Under his influence, Israel’s Supreme Court tore down traditional barriers of justiciability and standing. Political questions became legal questions. Almost anyone could petition on almost anything.
Cases that once would have been dismissed as “political” now landed squarely in the Court’s docket. Military policies, coalition agreements, budget tools, social compromises—the Court ruled on them all.
The exemption of Haredi yeshiva students from conscription, which governments had managed for decades as a sensitive political arrangement, entered the courtroom. The Court pushed the Knesset to legislate the arrangement, then struck down versions of that legislation as unequal.
Equality, though not written as a Basic Law right, arrived through judicial interpretation. The result was real pressure on a long-standing national compromise and escalating anger in Haredi and traditional communities.
At the same time, the Court reshaped standing.
Public-interest NGOs and individual activists gained direct access to the bench even without personal harm. That turned the Court into a permanent address for policy fights. A small, motivated group with funding and legal backing could drag nearly any contested issue into judicial review.
The reasonableness doctrine became the Court’s most flexible instrument. It moved from policing extreme administrative abuse to re-weighing government decisions in detail.
The Court blocked appointments it found unreasonable, including key ministerial posts such as Aryeh Deri’s return to the cabinet.
It has intervened in natural gas policy. Budgets. Emergency regulations. Security decisions. And more, on the grounds that officials had not balanced interests correctly.
In practice, that let judges substitute their judgment for elected ministers while maintaining the language of administrative law.
There were benefits, to be sure.
In a system with no second chamber and no entrenched rights, the Court provided real oversight against corruption and arbitrary power.
It helped protect minorities, exposed shady deals, and forced the state to justify its actions. Many Israelis, including those who lean right on security, came to trust the Court more than the Knesset on questions of clean governance.
The costs came due in the periphery.
National-religious communities saw the Court as an obstacle to their project in Judea and Samaria, as it struck at settlement regulation laws and ordered outposts dismantled in favor of dubious Palestinian land claims.
Haredim saw an Ashkenazi, secular elite attacking their way of life on conscription, conversion, and education.
Large parts of the Mizrahi public felt the same class distance.
The Court became a symbol of an old ruling elite.
For those constituencies, It looked less like a neutral guardian of democracy and more like a political actor whose ideology did not match their own.
By the early 2000s, Israel had one of the strongest high courts in any democracy, with reach into almost every area of public life, based mainly on its own case law. It had filled the constitutional vacuum with judge-made principles. That made a later political pushback almost guaranteed.
Politics Outsources the Hard Calls
From Bank Mizrahi in 1995 until the mid-2010s, Israeli politics did not mount a frontal attack on the Court.
Fragmented coalitions made coordinated institutional change almost impossible. No major party held a majority. Governments relied on patchwork alliances that feared different things.
Secular centrists feared losing rights protection. Religious and nationalist parties feared a stronger Court unless they controlled appointments. So nobody moved.
Instead, politicians learned to offload their hardest fights. The Court became the country’s referee on identity wars. Conversion standards, the Haredi draft, route decisions for the security barrier, settlement evacuations, immigration rules, even extreme candidate disqualifications—these landed on the justices’ bench.
Ministers could tell their base they tried, then blame the Court when a choice proved explosive. That pattern suited everyone in the short term.
Resentment still grew.
Each time the Court struck down a law touching settlements, religion, or coalition engineering, right-wing and Haredi politicians accused it of attacking “governability” and thwarting the will of the majority. Left-wing politicians praised it, so long as it matched their ideology.
Bills to curb judicial review and raise strike-down thresholds appeared regularly and died just as regularly. The energy for change existed but never reached a critical mass.
Netanyahu’s indictments dragged the entire judicial fight into a personal arena. Beginning in 2019, the Attorney General filed three cases: Case 4000 (alleged quid pro quo with Bezeq/Walla), Case 2000 (recorded conversations with Yedioth Ahronoth’s publisher), and Case 1000 (gifts from wealthy acquaintances). The charges were wrapped in the language of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust, but the underlying facts were thin—political conversations treated as criminal schemes, standard media-politics barter inflated into corruption narratives, and personal gift-giving from friends recast as illicit influence. After years of hearings, cross-examination gutted key prosecution witnesses. The state has already dropped the central bribery count in Case 4000 and quietly walked back large portions of Case 1000. What remains looks nothing like the dramatic headlines that launched the indictments.
Supporters saw the legal apparatus as targeting a center-right prime minister through novel legal theories that had never been applied to any other politician. They noted the timing, the selective enforcement, and the unmistakable scent of a bureaucracy trying to discipline an elected leader it disliked. They watched prosecutors argue that favorable media coverage—a commodity impossible to quantify or verify—could constitute “bribery,” while ignoring that Israel’s (to say nothing of every other Western nation) entire media-political ecosystem runs on access, pressure, and negotiation.
Opponents claimed the cases proved the rule of law. They insisted that no prime minister can accept cigars or talk about coverage without crossing ethical lines.
But ethics are not criminal law, and the trial has made that distinction unavoidable.
With each collapsed witness and each judicial hint that the core bribery theory was overbuilt, the prosecution’s moral narrative has shriveled.
Clearly though, the indictments supercharged (even if they did not create) the judicial crisis.
A weakened prosecution and a dragged-out trial convinced many Israelis that the legal system had been captured by elites willing to stretch doctrine to remove a leader they couldn’t defeat at the polls.
And for the government’s critics, the cases became the one pillar left standing against a coalition they feared would neuter judicial independence.
Netanyahu even floated the idea of a preemptive pardon to Herzog, a constitutional safety valve that would let Israel drop the farce and return to governing. The left claims to welcome a pardon—but only if Netanyahu quits politics. That conditional enthusiasm gives the game away: the indictments were always a ladder to force out a pol that they couldn’t beat at the polls.
The indictments became a mirror. One side sees lawfare masquerading as justice. The other sees justice threatened by electoral power.
The truth that emerged from the witness stand shows the charges never matched the criminal rhetoric around them. And the trial’s slow unraveling only sharpened the determination to rewrite a system that wielded extraordinary power without democratic restraint.
Around that divide, concepts such as an override clause and changes to the Attorney General’s powers became part of a survival game. At the same time, the political system showed signs of deep fatigue. Four elections in two years, creative budget tricks later struck down by the Court, and fragile unity governments all signaled a structure straining under its own weight.
A Coalition Tests the Limits of an Unwritten Order
The November 2022 election produced a coalition with a stable majority and a shared grievance list against the Court and legal bureaucracy. Figures like Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, long critics of judicial activism, now sat in the inner circle. Coalition agreements openly promised judicial change.
Justice Minister Yariv Levin’s plan in early 2023 translated years of position papers into concrete legislation. It aimed to give elected officials control over judicial appointments, sharply limit the Court’s ability to strike down laws, bar review of Basic Laws, create a broad override with 61 MKs, restrict reasonableness review, and turn ministry legal advisers into political appointees whose opinions would no longer bind ministers.
From the government’s vantage point, this was not a coup, it was repair work. They argued that Israel’s appointment system was unique in giving sitting justices and Bar Association representatives effective veto power over new justices. They pointed to other democracies where governments pick judges. They noted that no other Western democracy gives a high court such sweeping review without any override or constitutional amendment process. They saw reasonableness as a vague tool used to cancel policies and appointments that offended the justices’ personal worldviews, including key moves on religious representation and governance. They saw legal advisers as an unelected guild blocking political agendas as the coup.
The key problem lay in scale, sequencing, and context. The reform package moved fast, without meaningful buy-in from opposition parties or professional bodies. It bundled necessary debates—on standing, on reasonableness boundaries, on appointments—with moves that would leave a government holding almost unchecked power in a system that already lacks many brakes. It came from a coalition whose leader was on trial, with ministers who openly wanted to tilt the system for ideological reasons, in a society already polarized.
Opposition forces reacted with fury. Hundreds of thousands took to the streets week after week. High-tech leaders threatened to move money abroad. Reserve pilots and other elite reservists declared they would not serve if the overhaul passed in full, arguing they sworn loyalty to a Jewish and democratic state and feared that one pillar would collapse.
For the first time, IDF readiness and cohesion became part of an internal constitutional fight. That alone carried enormous strategic cost as enemies in Tehran, Gaza, and Beirut watch these domestic ruptures closely.
President Isaac Herzog tried to broker a middle ground. Talks stalled. Hardliners in the government insisted that a vocal minority could not dictate the country’s constitutional structure. Hardliners in the protest camp insisted that a simple Knesset majority had no right to rewrite that structure alone.
In July 2023 the coalition passed the first major piece: a Basic Law amendment blocking courts from using reasonableness to review government and ministerial decisions. Opposition MKs boycotted the final vote. Petitions hit the Court within hours. Reservist protests escalated. Internal warnings about war readiness grew louder.
Then came October 7 and Hamas’ atrocities. Internal politics froze. Netanyahu and Gantz formed an emergency coalition. The overhaul paused. The country shifted from constitutional fever to national trauma.
The pause did not solve the underlying problem.
War revealed deeper failures of governance. Of oversight. And raised new questions about accountability.
The Supreme Court, in January 2024, took its own historic step and struck down the reasonableness amendment itself, ruling that the Knesset had violated the basic structure of the system.
The Court announced that even Basic Law amendments are subject to review in extreme cases.
That ruling hardened positions.
For those already angry at the Court, this was pure proof of hubris: unelected judges canceling an amendment to a Basic Law.
For opponents of the overhaul, it confirmed the Court as the last line against elected overreach.
War might have delayed the next round. But it certainly did not cancel it.
By 2025, the coalition had already returned to the judicial selection question and renewed moves against the Attorney General’s independence, even as petitions on those moves queue up for judgment in 2026.
Repairing Distortions Without Collapsing the System
Beneath all of the shouting, there is a sober reality: Israel does need reform.
The question is whether reform strengthens the system or hands victory to one camp by dismantling the other’s defenses.
Some targets are straightforward. Justiciability and standing are outliers by global standards. A model where any activist can drag any policy into the High Court, with no need for a concrete injury, invites judicial micromanagement and encourages politicians to avoid decisions. Setting real standing rules and defining categories of disputes that stay political would narrow the channel to what courts do best: law, not policy.
Reasonableness can be trimmed. A narrow standard that catches extreme, corrupt, or plainly irrational decisions is compatible with democratic governance. A broader standard that lets judges re-weigh almost every cabinet decision is not. Codifying a strict, limited form of reasonableness is a rational step.
But a few elements sit close to the fault line where structural repair blurs into structural rewrite, and they require precision, not panic.
An override mechanism is one of them. Israel needs one—not as a battering ram but as a relief valve. A 61-vote threshold, in this country, is not the rubber stamp critics pretend it is. Coalitions fracture, factional discipline evaporates overnight, and no prime minister can count on every hand in his own bloc. In a fragmented Knesset with half a dozen ruling-party satellites, an override at 61 is a high bar in practice. It forces a governing coalition to hold together under intense scrutiny. In that sense, an Israeli override resembles the actual political terrain here far more than the imported nightmares activists like to cite. The danger is not the override itself; the danger is treating it as a substitute for judgment. An override must work as a stability tool, not a license for whim.
Judicial appointments follow the same logic. The current system lets sitting justices and the organized bar preserve ideological continuity that voters never chose. Reform is legitimate and necessary. But the answer is not to hand the keys exclusively to the coalition. A structure that gives the majority real weight while requiring some opposition participation (though not a veto) would correct the imbalance without turning the Court into a partisan trophy. Each segment of the political spectrum wants influence. Fine. The center is often a better place for it. But no one should have a monopoly. If both sides can be forced to touch the same steering wheel, the judicial system will look more like the Israeli public.
The Attorney General and the ministry legal advisers demand similar recalibration. The existing system grants them sweeping, quasi-executive authority with almost no democratic oversight. When a legal adviser can freeze an entire ministry’s policy because he “won’t defend it in court,” something is off.
Ministers must be free to govern, and legal advisers must advise, not rule. Reforming their status—making their opinions non-binding and enabling ministers to select advisers aligned with their policy mandate—is not an attack on the rule of law. It restores the basic principle that elected officials set policy and lawyers help execute it. At the same time, the AG’s core independence in criminal matters should remain intact (so long as they aren’t a party to it). A government should not be able to throttle investigations into its own conduct. That balance can be legislated with clarity instead of left to bureaucratic custom and the whims of future jurists.
Speed and method matter as much as content. A coalition that tries to rewire the system in one frantic session sends a clear message: this is about advantage, not architecture. The sheer size and persistence of the protest movement against it showed that legitimacy is a strategic asset in constitutional change. Any package that half the country views as a smash-and-grab cannot work.
The line, then, is not between reform and status quo. It is between reform that answers real distortions in a way the system can absorb, and reform that dismantles the few checks that exist without building replacements.
Toward a Real Constitution: Choices After October 7
The crisis exposes the unfinished business leftover from the founding. A country that fights wars every decade and runs a G-20 class economy cannot still function on interim rules. The ease with which Basic Laws can be drafted and amended by a simple majority invites every coalition to treat the constitution as a menu.
We have already seen branches edge toward open conflict. We have seen the army, business elites, and Diaspora networks pulled into legislative battles because no stable rules exist. That is not sustainable.
One path is a genuine constitution-making project. That could mean electing a constitutional assembly or convening a national convention that includes parties, mayors, professionals, and community representatives. It could produce a draft to be ratified by referendum. The advantage is focus and public ownership. The obstacle is political fear: every camp worries that a constitution might lock in losses on religion–state issues, minority rights, or territory.
Another path is to complete the Basic Law architecture in a disciplined way. A Basic Law: Legislation with real entrenchment, clear amendment procedures, and defined strike-down rules would at least stabilize the rules of the game. Basic Laws on rights, identity, and institutions could be cleaned up, clarified, and given special status—say, higher majorities or passage in two Knessets—to shield them from opportunistic tinkering.
A third path is a “thin constitution” first. That approach would deliberately focus on structure—branches, elections, review, emergency powers—while leaving the most explosive value conflicts for later (historically this is something Israelis have done but oftentimes regret). It would not settle every question of equality, religion, or collective rights, but it would stop the branches from going to war over who writes the rules. Perfect? No. Workable? If people gather in good faith.
Whatever model Israel chooses, it must deal directly with the phrase “Jewish and democratic.” A serious constitution will have to state both parts explicitly and show how they coexist. The Nation-State Basic Law of 2018 asserted the Jewish national character, but skipped equality language and fed Arab fears and liberal frustration. A future text could place that law in a broader constellation that includes individual rights for all citizens while affirming the special bond between the state and the Jewish people.
Comparative models offer tools, not templates. Canada shows how a charter and an override can coexist under strong political norms. Britain shows the limits of relying only on tradition. The United States and France show how stronger executive checks or bicameralism can restrain parliaments. Israel will have to pick and adapt elements that fit a small, highly mobilized, deeply divided society with real enemies on its borders and inside them.
October 7 adds weight. The failures that led to that day involve more than the Court or the Knesset, but they underline a point: bad governance in Israel kills people. A blurry division of responsibility between cabinet, security chiefs, and oversight bodies helped create an environment where warning signs were missed and strategic focus drifted. A sharper constitutional order cannot guarantee competence, but it can define who holds which keys, who answers for which failures, and how the public can demand answers.
There is a window here. The war reminded Israelis that they share a fate. It broke illusions on both sides. Protesters saw that national cohesion matters as much as judicial doctrine when rockets fall. Coalition loyalists saw that the same reservists they cursed in Kaplan are the ones flying into fire. Whether that window leads to a constitutional project or closes with renewed bitterness is a political choice, not a law of nature.
Rebalancing the State or Repeating the Crisis
Israel lives with three intertwined problems: a constitutional vacuum, a Court that expanded into that vacuum without a clear mandate, and political actors eager to exploit the vacuum for partisan gain. None of the branches can safely hold unchecked power. The status quo is already untenable. The attempted cure of 2023 proved the point by nearly breaking the system.
A sane way forward holds a few principles.
Write the rules. Whether through a full constitution or a hardened set of Basic Laws, the powers and limits of each branch must be defined with real procedures for change. Judicial review should rest on clear text, not judicial inference alone. The Knesset’s authority to amend Basic Laws should be strong but not casual. Emergency powers, inquiry commissions, and civil-military relations need written frameworks.
Balance the checks to match the country’s actual structure. Israel is a unicameral parliamentary state without federalism. That reality means the Court and the legal bureaucracy carry more weight than in larger, more layered systems. Curtailing them without installing alternative checks—extra readings, supermajorities, second-chamber review, time delays—tilts the system toward raw majority rule between elections. That path tempts every camp, and would be a gift to anyone waiting for Israel to weaken itself from the inside.
Secure judicial independence while demanding accountability. The Court should not pick its own successors indefinitely. Elected representatives should sit in the driver’s seat on appointments, but they should not drive alone. A committee that forces coalition and opposition to agree on at least some justices would better match the country’s pluralism than the current club model or a pure spoils system. The Court should narrow its use of doctrines that turn judges into super-ministers, but it must retain tools to block corruption, discrimination, and raw abuse.
Rebuild trust. Half the country sees the Court as an ideological project. The other half sees the current coalition as a threat to basic freedoms. No legal architecture can function if both sides view the other as illegitimate. Political leaders, especially on the right, have an opportunity here: they can push serious reform, but they need to show that their aim is a stable, Jewish, democratic state—not a one-time chance to neuter their rivals. Leaders on the left have a parallel duty: to admit that judicial activism went too far and that the right has valid complaints.
The stakes extend beyond legal theory. Israel’s ability to wage long wars, hold a fragmented society together, and keep international backing depends on a sense that the system, for all its flaws, is lawful and legitimate. Investors, allies, and young Israelis deciding whether to stay or leave all read the same signals.
The choice in front of Israel is stark and simple. It can treat the recent crisis as a warning and finish the job the founders started, creating a constitutional order that reflects the country as it is: Jewish, democratic, armed, argumentative, and not going anywhere. Or it can keep lurching between judicial overreach and political backlash, each side trying to win once and for all in a game with no final victory.
The first path requires leadership and restraint. The second requires only inertia and anger. History suggests Israel is capable of the braver choice. The question is whether its leaders and public are ready to stop improvising and write, at last, the rules of the house they already live in.
— Uri Zehavi · Intelligence Editor, Israel Brief
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