Latest / Logosofia no Dia a Dia / Why Flag-Planting Beats Policy in Israeli Politics
Transcript
- [Prompt] custom: In Israel, we see a rising, concerning trend of extremist far-right politicians. Although the fringe | Hosts: corn, herman [Response] Corn: Last week, Tzvi Sukkot — forty-one years old, Knesset member from the Otzma Yehudit faction — filmed himself walking through an Arab city in northern Israel planting Israeli flags. No policy announcement, no legislative proposal, no constituency service. Just a camera, some flags, and a deliberate provocation. And the same week, Ben Gvir shows up at an intercepted flotilla to taunt activists for the cameras. Herman: Right, and these aren't backbench nobodies shouting from the margins. These are members of the actual governing coalition. Sukkot sits in the Knesset with real voting power. Ben Gvir is the national security minister. This isn't fringe theater — it's what the coalition produces when governance takes a back seat to performance. Corn: Which is exactly what Daniel's getting at with this prompt. He wrote in about this rising trend of far-right politicians who offer essentially zero substantive policy, and he's asking how a system like this perpetuates itself — and what, if anything, could break the cycle. His concern isn't just that these figures are openly racist, which they are. It's that the voters who put them there demand nothing from them in terms of actual governance. No economic plan, no social policy, no infrastructure agenda. Just flags and provocations and nationalist signaling. Herman: The thing is, Daniel's not wrong to be alarmed. What we're watching is a structural phenomenon, not a personality problem. You can't explain Sukkot by saying "well, he's an extremist" and leaving it there. The question is why the system rewards that, why it keeps producing more of them, and whether there's any off-ramp. Corn: That's the puzzle we're going to unpack. Not whether these politicians are bad — that part's obvious to anyone paying attention. The real question is what set of incentives makes performative extremism a winning electoral strategy, and what that does to a country over time. Herman: The first thing to notice is how unusual this is, structurally. In most democracies, when far-right figures gain power, they at least have to pretend to care about policy. Look at Marine Le Pen in France — whatever you think of her, she spent years developing an economic platform, a social welfare agenda, however threadbare. Hungary's Fidesz delivered actual tax breaks and family subsidies alongside the nationalist rhetoric. There's a transaction: voters get the flags, but they also get something tangible. Corn: Whereas here, the transaction is... just the flags. Nobody's even pretending there's a second part. Herman: Smotrich controls the Finance Ministry, which in any normal country would mean he's responsible for, you know, the economy. But his legislative record is almost entirely symbolic — national identity bills, judicial overhaul measures, settlement expansion funding. Where's the housing policy for young families? Where's the cost-of-living agenda? It's not that his policies are bad — it's that they barely exist. And the voters who put him there don't seem to mind. Corn: Which is the part Daniel keeps coming back to. The demand side. You can't just blame the politicians when the electorate is actively rewarding the absence of substance. Herman: Right, and that's where the perennial distraction comes in. Israel has been in a near-constant state of security crisis — or at least security framing — for decades. When the public conversation is always about existential threats, about who's sufficiently hawkish, about who'll be toughest on enemies real or perceived, then economic competence becomes a secondary concern. It's not that voters don't care about the cost of living. It's that their voting behavior says nationalistic signaling matters more. Corn: You get a voter base that treats governance as a side project. And politicians who've figured out that provocation pays better than policy. Herman: That's the mechanism in a nutshell. The media covers a flag-planting stunt for days. A housing reform proposal gets a paragraph on page seven. The incentives couldn't be clearer. Corn: The media loop is only part of it. The deeper structural engine is coalition math. Netanyahu's current government sits on sixty-four seats — that's a majority of exactly four. Every faction in that coalition, no matter how small, holds veto power. If Otzma Yehudit walks, the government collapses. Herman: Everyone in the room knows it. Smotrich and Ben Gvir don't need to govern effectively. They don't need to pass meaningful legislation or manage their ministries competently. They just need to stay in the coalition and keep threatening to leave. That threat is their entire leverage. Netanyahu can't discipline them, can't sideline them, can't even ask them to tone it down — because if they bolt, he loses his majority. Corn: The narrowness of the majority inverts the normal power dynamic. In a healthy coalition, the prime minister manages his partners. Here, the partners manage the prime minister. Ben Gvir shows up at a flotilla to taunt activists, and Netanyahu can't say a word about it publicly — because Ben Gvir's six seats are the difference between governing and new elections. Herman: The electoral threshold makes this inevitable. Israel's threshold is three point two five percent — one of the lowest among established democracies. That means tiny factions can enter the Knesset with relatively few votes, then extract disproportionate concessions during coalition negotiations. Raise the threshold to five percent, and suddenly Otzma Yehudit has to merge with someone, dilute its brand, negotiate internally. But at three point two five, the micro-party strategy works perfectly. Corn: You've got a structural setup where fringe factions are guaranteed leverage. But that only explains the supply side — why these politicians can operate this way. The demand side is what Daniel's really probing. Who's voting for this, and why don't they want policy? Herman: The answer traces back decades. Israeli right-wing voters, particularly in settlements and development towns, have been conditioned by a security-first framing that treats nationalistic signaling as the primary political currency. This isn't new — it's been the dominant mode of Israeli politics since at least the Second Intifada, arguably longer. When every election is framed as a referendum on who will be toughest on security, economic competence becomes a luxury good. Corn: Development towns are the clearest case. These are communities that objectively need infrastructure investment, job creation, better schools. But the political messaging they receive isn't about any of that — it's about who will stand firm against the Palestinians, who will defend Jewish identity, who won't capitulate to international pressure. The material needs are real, but the voting behavior follows the symbolic battle. Herman: Which creates a perverse incentive. If you're an ambitious politician on the right, and you notice that substantive policy work gets you zero electoral reward while a single provocative stunt gets you wall-to-wall coverage and a bump in the polls — what do you do? You optimize for the stunt. Sukkot didn't accidentally film himself planting flags. He understood exactly what the media ecosystem would do with that footage. Corn: The flotilla thing is even more stark. Ben Gvir showed up, said some things for the cameras, and left. There was no operational role for him there. The navy had already intercepted the vessel. He contributed nothing to national security. But he got the headline, he got the clip, and his base got the dopamine hit of seeing their guy own the libs, or whatever the Hebrew equivalent is. Herman: The phrase is probably less polite. But the mechanism is the same. And what gets crowded out is everything else. Smotrich has been finance minister for years now. Can you name a single economic reform he's championed that wasn't about settlement funding or judicial politics? Corn: I genuinely cannot. Herman: Neither can most Israelis. His legislative record is almost entirely symbolic — the nation-state bill, various judicial overhaul measures, funding allocations tied to West Bank expansion. These aren't economic policy. They're identity politics with a budget line. Meanwhile, housing costs keep rising, the cost of living keeps climbing, and the finance ministry is being run as an annex of the settlement enterprise. Corn: You get policy atrophy as a direct consequence of the incentives. When the system rewards provocation over governance, the people who rise are the ones who are good at provocation and uninterested in governance. And the ones who might actually want to govern — they don't get the airtime, they don't get the base, they don't get the leverage. Herman: This is where the three mechanisms converge. The coalition math gives the fringe veto power. The voter base demands symbolism over substance. The media loop amplifies the stunts and ignores the policy work. It's a self-reinforcing triangle — each part makes the other two worse. Corn: The Sukkot flag video is almost a perfect case study of all three at once. He's in the coalition because Otzma Yehudit's seats are essential. His voters see the flag-planting as strength, not as the absence of a legislative agenda. And the coverage it generated was probably orders of magnitude more than anything he's actually done in committee. Herman: That's how the system produces these figures. But what does it do to the country? Because the knock-on effect are where this gets alarming. The first casualty is policy capacity itself. When governance becomes a secondary concern for long enough, the state's ability to actually govern starts to erode. Corn: The judicial overhaul crisis of twenty twenty-three is the exhibit A here. That consumed the country for months — massive protests, general strikes, international condemnation. And what was it actually about? A fight over who controls the courts. Not a single shekel of economic relief for ordinary Israelis. Not one housing reform. The entire national conversation was consumed by a symbolic battle over institutional power while actual governance ground to a halt. Herman: That's the vicious cycle Daniel's worried about. Poor governance fuels public distrust. Distrust fuels demand for more radical figures who promise to smash the system. Those figures get elected, governance gets worse, distrust deepens. The judicial overhaul wasn't a detour from the real work — it was the real work, because the real work of governing had already been abandoned. Corn: Which brings us to Daniel's phrase — "uneducated boorishness." It's a harsh term, but it names something real. As politics becomes purely tribal and performative, voters disengage from policy complexity. Not because they're incapable of understanding it, but because the entire political ecosystem stops asking them to. When the choice is framed as "strong leader versus weak leader" rather than "this housing plan versus that housing plan," the bar for what qualifies as political competence drops to the floor. Herman: That lowers the barrier to entry for candidates. Sukkot is forty-one years old. Before entering the Knesset, what was his legislative experience? What had he built, managed, or reformed? The answer is effectively nothing — and that's not a bug in his political brand, it's the feature. He wasn't elected despite having no policy background. He was elected in a system where policy background is irrelevant to electoral success. Corn: You get a spiral. Voters demand less, so parties offer less, so the talent pool gets shallower, so governance gets worse, so voters get more cynical and demand even less. Each cycle makes the next one worse. Herman: The third knock-on effect is international isolation, and this one has a dark irony baked in. As figures like Ben Gvir and Smotrich gain visibility, Israel's diplomatic standing erodes — you see it in strained relations with European governments, in the rhetoric at the UN, in the way even friendly administrations have to distance themselves from the coalition's more explicit provocations. Corn: Here's the paradox. That external pressure gets weaponized domestically. Every critical editorial in the New York Times, every stern statement from the EU — it all becomes evidence of "the world against us." The international backlash doesn't weaken these figures. It confirms their narrative. They point to the condemnation and say, see, they hate us no matter what we do, so why bother moderating? Herman: It's a perfect closed loop. Provoke the world, get condemned, use the condemnation to prove you need to provoke harder. There's no off-ramp built into that logic. Corn: This is where the comparison to other nationalist movements gets instructive. You mentioned Hungary and Poland earlier. Fidesz under Orbán — yes, they used nationalist rhetoric, anti-immigrant messaging, all of it. But they also delivered tangible economic populism. Tax breaks for families, utility price caps, pension increases. There was a transaction. The flags came with something in the other hand. Herman: Same with PiS in Poland. Whatever you think of their illiberal turn on the judiciary and media, they introduced a major child benefit program — five hundred zloty per child per month. That's real money in working-class households. The nationalist signaling was paired with material delivery. That's why their base stuck with them through multiple elections. Corn: Israel's far-right offers neither half of that formula. They don't do economic populism — Smotrich's budget priorities are overwhelmingly tilted toward settlement expansion, not toward cost-of-living relief for development towns or working-class families in the periphery. The people voting for performative nationalism are, in material terms, voting against their own economic interests, and getting nothing back but the performance. Herman: That's what makes Daniel's question about breaking the cycle so difficult. In Hungary or Poland, if you wanted to challenge the nationalists, you could run on economic competence — say, we'll keep the benefits but govern more cleanly. In Israel, the nationalists aren't even delivering the benefits. They've skipped straight to pure symbolism. So there's no policy ground to outflank them on — you'd have to create it from scratch. Corn: Which means the counter has to come from within the right itself. The left can't out-nationalist these people, and trying would be both futile and grotesque. The only sustainable alternative is a right-wing politics that actually governs — that offers security credibility plus economic competence. Gideon Sa'ar tried something like that. Naftali Bennett gestured toward it. Neither broke through, but they showed the shape of the path. Herman: Whether anyone can walk it — that's a different question. Herman: The question becomes what levers actually exist. And I think there are three worth taking seriously, even if none of them are easy. The first is the media feedback loop. Right now, Israeli news outlets cover a flag-planting stunt like it's a major political event. Live segments, panel discussions, days of follow-up. A Knesset committee doing actual legislative work on housing or infrastructure gets a thirty-second mention. Corn: The incentives for the outlets are obvious. The stunt gets clicks, the committee hearing doesn't. But the consequence is that the media is effectively subsidizing performative extremism. Every minute of coverage is free advertising for the next stunt. Herman: It doesn't have to be that way. Editorial decisions are choices. You could cover the stunt briefly — "MK Sukkot filmed himself planting flags in an Arab city today" — and then pivot to a substantive segment on his actual legislative record. What has he proposed? What committees does he serve on? What's his attendance rate? Force the conversation onto the terrain of governance rather than spectacle. Corn: The pushback you'll hear is that this is asking journalists to ignore news. But the stunt isn't news — it's content. It's manufactured for exactly the coverage it receives. Denying it that coverage isn't censorship, it's editorial judgment. You're choosing not to be a distribution channel for someone's PR operation. Herman: The second lever is harder but more fundamental. The only sustainable counter to performative nationalism is a right-wing alternative that actually governs. The left cannot out-nationalist these figures, and trying would be both futile and grotesque. But a center-right or right-wing movement that combines security credibility with economic competence — that's a different proposition. Corn: Sa'ar and Bennett both attempted versions of this. Bennett's Yamina pitched itself as religious Zionist but also technocratic — he had actual policy plans, a governing record from the brief coalition he led. It didn't hold, but it demonstrated that the voter base isn't monolithic. There are right-wing voters who want competence alongside conviction. Herman: The problem is structural. A serious right-wing alternative would need to peel voters away from Likud and the religious Zionist parties simultaneously, which requires navigating the security consensus while offering something tangibly better on the economy. That's a narrow path, and the coalition math we talked about makes it even narrower — because any new faction just fragments the right further. Corn: Which brings us to the third lever, the one everyone knows about but nobody can seem to touch: electoral reform. The three point two five percent threshold is an open invitation to micro-parties. Raise it to five percent, and suddenly Otzma Yehudit has to merge with someone or risk extinction. Regional representation would force politicians to actually deliver for constituents rather than running on national symbolism. Herman: A regional system would tie a Knesset member's reelection to actual outcomes in their district — jobs, schools, infrastructure. You can't campaign on flag-planting when your constituents are asking why the local clinic closed. Corn: The people who'd need to pass electoral reform are the ones who benefit from the current system. That's the catch. The coalition depends on these micro-parties. They're not going to vote to eliminate themselves. So you'd need either a massive public demand for reform or an external shock that reshuffles the entire political map — neither of which seems imminent. Herman: Which doesn't mean these levers aren't worth naming. Part of what Daniel's asking is whether the system is permanently stuck, and I think the answer is no — but the path out requires at least two of these three things happening simultaneously. Media norms shifting, a credible governance-oriented right emerging, and electoral reform becoming unavoidable. Each one is hard. All three together is a generational project. Herman: Where does this leave us? I keep coming back to a uncomfortable question. Can a system that rewards provocation ever reform itself, or does it take some kind of external shock to break the cycle? Corn: That's the tension, isn't it? The people with the power to change the rules are the ones who benefit from the rules staying exactly as they are. The coalition math, the media incentives, the voter expectations — every piece of this is locked in by people whose careers depend on the lock. Herman: External shocks are not something you wish for. The last thing anyone should want is a crisis severe enough to reshuffle the entire political map. That's not a policy preference, it's a disaster scenario. Corn: The alternative is that the spiral continues on its current trajectory. And what Daniel's prompt really forces us to confront is that Tzvi Sukkot isn't an anomaly. He's not some weird outlier who slipped through the cracks. He's the logical endpoint of a system that has spent years optimizing for spectacle over substance. The system is working exactly as designed. It's just that what it's designed to produce has nothing to do with governing a country. Herman: The question is whether Israeli voters will eventually demand more. And I don't think that's a foregone conclusion either way. There are countervailing pressures — the cost of living isn't going away, the housing crisis isn't going away, the actual material needs of actual families aren't going away. At some point, the gap between what people need and what politics offers becomes too wide to ignore. Corn: The question is when "at some point" arrives, and what the country looks like by the time it does. Herman: Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact. Hilbert: In the late Victorian period, botanists studying the New Zealand sundew Drosera binata discovered that its tentacles secrete a fluid containing formic acid and a proteolytic enzyme nearly identical to animal pepsin — meaning this South Island plant essentially digests its prey using a simplified version of the same chemical mechanism found in the human stomach. Corn:...so it's got a stomach on its leaves. Herman: That's unsettling. Corn: If you want to understand why Israeli politics feels broken and what could actually fix it, this episode gave you the map. Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop. This has been My Weird Prompts. Find us at my weird prompts dot com, and if you've got thoughts on this one, email the show at show at my weird prompts dot com. We'll be back soon.