Latest / Logosofia no Dia a Dia / Building Israel's Future: A Policy Platform
Transcript
- [Prompt] custom: In the past few prompts I’ve sent, we’ve talked about economic issues in Israel. And throughout the | Hosts: corn, herman [Response] Corn: This one's a bit different — it comes from Hannah, actually. She's been listening to us go through economic issues, urban planning, religion and state, education, all these areas where we keep landing on the same conclusion: the fixes aren't that complicated. The policy levers are sitting right there. And her question is basically — why aren't you two the ones writing the party platforms? If you were launching a new party for the Knesset, what would you actually put forward? Something you could hand to a candidate and say, here's how you fix the country. Geopolitics and war-related issues aside — those are their own category. But everything else. So that's what we're doing today. We're building the platform. Herman: I love this because it forces us to stop diagnosing and start prescribing. We've spent three hundred episodes pointing at problems. Hannah's asking for the document. The thing you could actually take to a candidate. Corn: Which is terrifying, because now we have to be coherent. Herman: But here's the thing — Israel's governance crisis isn't left versus right. It's institutional design failures that no existing party bundles together in one coherent package. The common thread across housing, cost of living, education, and religion-state is that small, well-designed policy changes could unlock massive improvements. The levers exist. They're just not being pulled. Corn: We're proposing five pillars. Breaking monopolies and lowering the cost of living. Urban planning and housing reform. Religion and state — pragmatic separation. Education system overhaul. And regional economic integration through the Abraham Accords. We're leaving security out by design, not because it doesn't matter, but because it dominates every existing platform and crowds out everything else. You can't fix the country if you only talk about the things that might destroy it. Herman: And the timing matters. We're in mid-2026, post-war reconstruction period, the Abraham Accords are expanding, the housing crisis is worsening. The Bank of Israel just put out a report showing that housing prices have risen another eight percent year over year. This isn't a theoretical exercise. These dysfunctions are costing real people real money every single month. Corn: Let's start with the two issues that hit every Israeli's wallet most directly: the cost of living and housing. Herman: These are deeply connected, by the way. You can't fix one without the other. Let's start with the cost of living, because the numbers here are genuinely staggering. Israel's top ten conglomerates control over fifty percent of the economy. That's from the 2024 Competition Authority report. The food sector is the poster child for this dysfunction — three companies control seventy percent of the dairy market. Tnuva, Strauss, and Tara. A 2023 Competition Authority study found prices are thirty-five percent higher than in comparable EU markets. Corn: Thirty-five percent higher for the same basket of dairy products. That's not a supply chain issue. That's not geography. That's a cartel. Herman: It's a cartel, and it's protected by import barriers that make it functionally impossible for European dairy to compete. Non-tariff barriers — labeling requirements, kosher certification processes that are deliberately slow-walked, inspection regimes that add weeks to shipping times. The result is that Israeli families pay forty to sixty percent more than the OECD average for basic groceries. Corn: What's the fix? Herman: First, a Competition First law that automatically triggers a Competition Authority investigation when any sector reaches a fifty percent concentration ratio. Not a discretionary review — automatic. The burden shifts to the companies to prove they're not abusing market power. Second, eliminate non-tariff barriers on food imports by harmonizing with EU standards within three years. If a product is legal to sell in Germany, it's legal to sell in Israel. Third, break up vertical monopolies in food retail by separating production from distribution. You shouldn't be allowed to own the dairy farm, the processing plant, and the supermarket shelf. Corn: The vertical integration point is the one that most people miss. It's not just that Tnuva dominates dairy production — it's that they control the entire chain. So even if a competitor wanted to enter, they'd have to build production, processing, and distribution simultaneously. That's a multi-billion-shekel barrier to entry. Herman: And the Competition Authority has the power to do this under existing law — they just haven't used it. The 2024 report explicitly recommended vertical separation in food retail, and the government sat on it. Corn: Which brings us to housing. And this is where the numbers get even more infuriating. Herman: Ninety-three percent of Israeli land is state-owned, managed by the Israel Land Authority. The ILA releases land at a deliberately slow pace to maximize revenue per plot. They're not acting as a public utility — they're acting as a profit-maximizing monopoly. And because they control essentially all the land, they control the entire housing supply. Corn: The artificial scarcity is by design. It's not that Israel can't build enough housing — it's that the state chooses not to release enough land. Herman: And here's the specific mechanism. The ILA currently releases land for about forty thousand housing units per year. Population growth plus replacement demand requires roughly sixty thousand units per year. That twenty-thousand-unit annual shortfall compounds. The Bank of Israel's 2025 report estimated that this accumulated deficit is now over one hundred fifty thousand units. Corn: Fix number one is straightforward — mandate that the ILA release land at a rate tied to population growth plus a twenty percent buffer. That gets you to roughly sixty thousand units per year automatically, without annual political negotiation. You write the formula into law and you're done. Herman: Land release is only half the problem. The other half is permits. Local municipalities have veto power over planning committees, which means any NIMBY council can block high-density development indefinitely. The result is that construction happens in the periphery — where land is cheap and nobody objects — rather than in central cities where people actually need to live. Corn: This is the misconception everyone has. They think the housing crisis is about not enough construction. Construction is happening. It's just in the wrong places and at the wrong price point. Luxury towers in Tel Aviv that sit empty, or sprawling developments in the Negev that nobody wants to commute from. Herman: The fix here is two-fold. First, abolish the municipal veto power over planning committees. Local input is fine — a veto is not. Second, create fast-track zones in central cities where building permits are automatically approved if they meet pre-defined density and height standards. Tel Aviv ran a pilot of this in 2024 — twelve hundred units approved in six months, versus the previous average of eighteen months for the same volume. The model works. You just need to scale it. Corn: The Bank of Israel report you mentioned — they estimated that these three reforms combined, land release formula, municipal veto abolition, and fast-track zones, could reduce housing prices by twenty-five to thirty percent within five years. That's not speculative. That's their modeling. Herman: Twenty-five to thirty percent. For the average Israeli family, that's the difference between a mortgage that consumes forty percent of monthly income and one that consumes twenty-five percent. That's not a policy tweak — that's a transformation in household economics. Corn: It feeds directly back into the cost of living, because when housing costs drop, wage pressure eases, which reduces prices across the board. These pillars aren't independent — they reinforce each other. Herman: Which is the perfect segue to pillars three and four, because those economic reforms are necessary, but they're not sufficient. The next two pillars address the deeper structural issues that keep Israel from reaching its potential. Corn: Religion and state. This is the one that makes everyone uncomfortable, but Hannah specifically asked us to go there, so we're going there. Herman: The current system forces all Jewish citizens through the Chief Rabbinate for marriage, divorce, and conversion. This creates a de facto monopoly on personal status that disenfranchises roughly forty percent of Israeli Jews who identify as secular, plus hundreds of thousands of non-Orthodox immigrants from the former USSR who aren't recognized as Jewish by the Rabbinate but are citizens under the Law of Return. Corn: The number there is about four hundred thousand. People who live here, serve in the army, pay taxes, and can't get married in their own country because the Rabbinate doesn't consider them Jewish. Herman: The solution isn't to abolish religious marriage — that's the misconception. Nobody's proposing that. The solution is to create a parallel civil track. You want a religious wedding? Great, the Rabbinate is still there. You want a civil union? That should be available too. The 2024 Civil Union Bill proposed by Yisrael Beitenu got fifty-eight MKs in its first reading. That's a majority of the Knesset. It died in committee, but the votes exist. It's a coalition management problem, not a popularity problem. Corn: The Israel Democracy Institute polling from 2025 backs this up — sixty-eight percent support civil marriage. That's not a fringe position. That's a supermajority of the country. Herman: The same logic applies to conversion. Create an independent Conversion Authority outside the Chief Rabbinate's control, and recognize conversions performed by any recognized Jewish community worldwide. If the Reform movement in the United States converts someone, Israel should recognize that conversion. And open the Western Wall plaza to non-Orthodox prayer, as promised in the 2016 compromise that was never implemented. These are not radical proposals. They're the mainstream consensus that keeps getting blocked by coalition politics. Corn: The Western Wall thing is particularly galling because it was already agreed to. The government signed the deal, then just never implemented it. It's not a policy failure — it's an implementation failure. Herman: Which brings us to education, where the implementation failures are even more severe. Israel has four separate school systems — state-secular, state-religious, ultra-Orthodox independent, and Arab. They have wildly different curricula and wildly different outcomes. The ultra-Orthodox system receives full state funding but teaches almost no core subjects. Seventy percent of Haredi boys in grades eight through twelve do not study math, science, or English at grade level. Corn: That's not an education system — that's a workforce disqualification program. Herman: It's state-funded. The government is paying for schools that produce graduates who cannot participate in the modern economy. The fix is straightforward: tie funding to core curriculum compliance. Any school receiving state money must teach a minimum of twenty hours per week of math, science, English, and civics. You don't have to change your religious character. You don't have to abandon your values. But you do have to teach kids skills that will let them earn a living. Corn: The pushback is always that this is politically impossible because of Haredi coalition power. But the 2025 Shlav Bet pilot suggests otherwise. Twelve hundred Haredi men completed tech training. Eighty-five percent were employed within six months at an average salary of eighteen thousand shekels a month — three times the average Haredi wage. When you offer economic opportunity, communities engage. The political barrier is overstated. Herman: That pilot wasn't imposed on the community — it was designed with community leaders. The model was vocational training combined with military or civilian service, structured in a way that respected religious norms. The question is whether we scale it or let it remain a boutique program. Corn: The Arab school system is a separate problem with a similar solution. It's separate-but-unequal by design — different funding levels, different infrastructure, different outcomes. The fix is to merge it into the state-secular system with a culturally adapted curriculum. Same standards, same funding, same accountability. Arabic language instruction preserved, cultural content preserved, but integrated into a single system with equal resources. Herman: This isn't just about fairness — it's about economic growth. Arab citizens are twenty-one percent of the population but only about eight percent of the tech workforce. Closing that gap would add tens of billions of shekels to GDP. The Taub Center estimated in 2024 that full economic integration of the Arab sector would increase Israel's GDP by roughly thirteen percent. Corn: Education reform feeds directly into the economic pillars we already discussed. More skilled workers means more competition, more innovation, lower prices. The pillars reinforce. Herman: Which brings us to pillar five — regional economic integration through the Abraham Accords. And this is where the upside is enormous. Corn: The Abraham Accords have generated about three billion dollars in bilateral trade as of 2025. But the potential is estimated at thirty billion dollars annually. We're at ten percent of what's possible. Herman: The bottleneck isn't political will — it's infrastructure and regulatory harmonization. Right now, shipping goods from Haifa to Dubai takes about fourteen days because there's no direct corridor. You go through the Suez Canal or around the Arabian Peninsula. A dedicated customs-free trade corridor connecting Haifa port to Dubai via Jordan and Saudi Arabia would cut that to three days. Corn: Three days versus fourteen. That's not a marginal improvement — that's a structural transformation in trade economics. Herman: The second piece is mutual recognition of professional licenses. An Israeli engineer, a doctor, a software developer should be able to work in the UAE, Bahrain, or Morocco without re-certifying. The talent pools are complementary — Israel has deep expertise in tech and medicine, the Gulf states have capital and growing markets. You remove the regulatory friction, and you get a natural economic engine. Corn: The third piece is a joint research and development fund — we're proposing five hundred million dollars for water tech, agritech, and renewable energy. These are areas where Israeli innovation plus Gulf capital creates a natural synergy. Israel has world-leading desalination and drip irrigation technology. The Gulf states have water scarcity and capital to deploy. It's the most obvious partnership in the region. Herman: This isn't just economic — it's strategic. The deeper the economic integration, the harder it is for political conflicts to disrupt the relationship. Trade corridors create stakeholders on both sides who have a vested interest in stability. That's not naive diplomacy — that's how the European Union was built. Corn: The European Union started as a coal and steel community. Economic integration first, political integration followed. The Abraham Accords could follow the same trajectory if we treat them as an economic project rather than just a diplomatic one. Herman: That's the platform. Five pillars, each with specific policy levers. But what does this mean in practice? Let's talk about the political strategy, because a platform without a path to power is just a wish list. Corn: The unifying theme here is that Israel's problems are not intractable. They are the result of specific, fixable institutional failures. Every pillar has a clear policy lever — a law to pass, a regulation to change, a formula to write. None of this requires constitutional amendments or rewriting the social contract. It's all within the existing system. Herman: The political strategy is that this platform is designed to appeal to what the Israel Democracy Institute calls the silent majority — secular and traditional Israelis who are economically liberal, socially pragmatic, and exhausted by the status quo. The polling backs this up. Sixty-eight percent support civil marriage. Seventy-two percent support tying school funding to core curriculum. Sixty-five percent support expanding the Abraham Accords. These are not controversial positions. They are majority positions that no single party has bundled together. Corn: The existing parties slice the electorate along identity lines — religious versus secular, Jewish versus Arab, right versus left. This platform slices along governance lines. Are you satisfied with how things work, or do you want them fixed? That's a coalition that cuts across every existing divide. Herman: If you had to pick the single most impactful reform — the one lever that, if you pulled it, would ripple through everything else — it's land reform. Fix the ILA's land release mechanism, and you reduce housing prices by twenty-five to thirty percent within five years. That reduces the cost of living, which reduces wage pressure, which makes Israeli exports more competitive, which feeds into the Abraham Accords trade corridor. It's the domino that knocks over all the other dominoes. Corn: The housing crisis is the thread that connects everything. Young families can't afford homes, so they demand higher wages, which drives up prices. Talented workers leave for countries where housing is cheaper, which drains the innovation economy. The Haredi and Arab populations that could enter the workforce can't afford to live near job centers. Fix housing, and you unlock labor mobility, which unlocks economic growth, which unlocks everything else. Herman: What can listeners actually do with this? First, share this platform with local candidates — ask them which pillars they support, and don't accept vague answers. Specific policy commitments or nothing. Second, support organizations like the Israel Democracy Institute and the Movement for Quality Government that are pushing these reforms with research and advocacy. They're doing the policy work that the Knesset should be doing. Third, and this is the most important — vote for parties that prioritize governance reform over identity politics. The system won't fix itself. It requires voters to punish parties that block reform and reward parties that deliver it. Corn: If you're listening and you're thinking about running for the Knesset — or supporting someone who is — take this outline. It's a starting point. The country doesn't need more ideology. It needs better policy. Herman: Let's end with the question that started this whole episode: could this actually work? Would this platform win? Corn: Probably not in its pure form. No platform survives contact with coalition negotiations intact. But that's not the point. The point is to shift the Overton window enough that existing parties adopt pieces of it. The 2024 Civil Union Bill got fifty-eight votes without a party running on it as a central platform issue. Imagine if a party campaigned on it explicitly. Imagine if the silent majority had a political home. Herman: Israel's political system rewards fragmentation — small parties catering to narrow constituencies, extracting concessions in coalition negotiations. But the public is desperate for coherence. The IDI polling shows that the number one thing voters want is a party that offers a clear, integrated plan across multiple issues. Not a single-issue party. Not an identity party. A governance party. Corn: A party that says: here are five things we're going to fix, here's exactly how we're going to fix them, and here's the timeline. That's it. No grand ideological vision. No messianic rhetoric. Just competent governance. Herman: The thing is, the policy tools exist. The research has been done. The Bank of Israel has modeled the housing reforms. The Competition Authority has documented the monopolies. The Taub Center has studied the education system. The Shlav Bet pilot has proven the workforce integration model. The Abraham Accords have demonstrated the trade potential. All of this is sitting there, waiting for someone to pick it up and run with it. Corn: Hannah, that's the platform. Five pillars, specific policy levers, a political strategy, and a path to implementation. It's not everything the country needs — we deliberately left out security, and there are other issues we didn't touch. But it's a coherent starting point. Something you could actually hand to a candidate. Herman: The deeper point is that Israel's problems are not mysterious. They're not the result of forces beyond our control. They are the result of specific policy choices made by specific people in specific institutions. And that means they can be unmade by different choices. The country doesn't need a miracle. It needs better policy. Corn: Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact. Hilbert: In 1903, Dutch physiologist Willem Einthoven invented the string galvanometer to measure the heart's electrical activity — the first practical electrocardiograph. As an unintended consequence, his device also detected electrical interference from early tram lines in Leiden, inadvertently creating the first urban electromagnetic pollution monitor. Corn: The ECG accidentally became the world's first EMF detector. actually kind of perfect. Herman: This has been My Weird Prompts. If you want to send us your own platform ideas — or tell us which pillar you'd prioritize — email the show at show at my weird prompts dot com. I'm Herman Poppleberry. Corn: I'm Corn. Go fix something.