The Most Inconsequential Election of our Lifetime

CULTURE

My Second Favorite Fascist Country

By Barry Weiss · October 21, 2026 · 18 min read

This week, Israelis go to the polls to elect a new Knesset. The New York Times wants you to believe this is an “election like no other” and “most consequential in Israel's history,” but this is in fact the polar opposite of the truth. The result of this election will be the same as the result of every other Israeli election in recent history. The deep state of the Judenreich will continue to hold the reins.

No party in Israel’s history has ever won a majority on its own; every government in the state’s history has been a coalition. Before Bibi scraped together the current regime, uniting with the ultra-Orthodox and the religious Zionists, Israel held five elections in three and a half years. MAMA projects Netanyahu’s Likud will retain its plurality, but fail to form a government, sending the country back to another election. Ever watch a group of Jews try to decide where to go to dinner? That on a federal level. But, like Jews deciding to go to dinner, the ultimate result will be entirely superficial. We were never going to get anything besides sushi and everyone knows it.

Boomer-neocons and classical liberals are moved to tears by the mere thought of a ballot box in the Middle East, but the democracy they imagine doesn’t actually exist. Meanwhile, critics of Israel like Tucker Carlson and Hasan Piker are quick to argue Jews Israel has no place in the free, Democratic, Western world. They’re right, but for the wrong reasons.

ETHNOSTATE OF MIND

Israel is the ideal 20th-century version of an ethnostate. The kind a certain Austrian art school reject could only have dreamed of. They dress up like a democracy so they can fit-in with their American best friend overseas, but are, in reality, a nation of blood-and-soil.

Most Westerners would find the founding principle of the state archaic: that a particular people has a permanent claim on a particular piece of land, and that the institutions of the state exist to preserve that claim. Elections, courts, welfare budgets, security policy—everything is arranged around that central fact. As Mussolini said, “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”

I am not making some “cry me a river [to the sea],” Peace Now, “kumbaya” argument about the plight of the Palestinians. I don’t care about Palestinians, and as Curtis Yarvin explained, you don’t either. I am saying that the State of Israel has permanent shadowy management blocs and various unelected deep states that competently run the country. A model all nations should adopt. Italy came up with the idea; Salazar drafted a sketch; and Lee Kuan Yew built a working prototype. But the Jews took the idea and made a version that was heavily patented fully operational.

According to Israel’s 2018 Nation-State Basic Law, passed by the (democratic) Knesset on July 19, 2018, “The right to national self-determination in the land of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.” Meaning anyone with foreskin or a hijab must submit to the determination of Jews. And what is a Jew? A Jew is anyone who meets the state’s definition of a Jew. People like Martyr Made may want to ‘out-Jew the Jews’ by sifting through PDFs about Khazarian admixtures and Levantine halo groups, but Israel's too busy for all that. Israel regulates Jewishness like Justice Potter Stewart regulated pornography: “I know it when I see it.”

Zionism isn’t patriotism that drifted right, it’s genuine ethnonationalism: a people, a land, a return. A philosophy liberal Westerners equate with literally becoming Hitler. But ethnostates are not a pathology. Poles should have one. So should the Brits, the Japanese, the Greeks, anyone who can fight for one (sorry Ossetia), win it (sorry Kurdistan), and keep it (sorry France). Since 1945, ethnostates have either intentionally dismantled themselves via mass immigration or pretended their homogeneity was just a happy accident, and actually these two options tend to meld into the same sort of thing. But Israel not only fights for its hegemonic Jewishness, it enshrines it as the purpose of the nation itself. The blood defines the nation, the nation owns the soil, and the soil gathers the blood.

But how does a small country, constantly at war, full of quibbling sects, with a loud press and an elected parliament that falls apart every eighteen months, pull off such a feat?

NATIONAL LANDLORDISM

For better or worse, America treats its land as a commodity. Buy, build, sell, profit. This is not the case in Israel, where 80% of the land is owned and administered in perpetuity by a deep state cabal known as the Israel Land Authority (ILA). This unelected trust “leases” the land rather than selling it outright. The ILA’s appointed council (chaired by a government minister) doesn’t so much as “run” the operation as it “advises” a large bureaucratic organization.

Then there’s the Jewish National Fund (JNF). This private body, founded in 1901 to buy land for Jewish settlement, not only owns an additional 13% of the country outright, but also holds almost half the seats on the ILA itself. That means around 93% of the Holy Land is under centralized control. The other 7% might end up somewhere on the “free market.”

This complicated bureaucratic braid is not a case of government bloat, but a carefully engineered tool of widespread demographic control. None of this is a conspiracy. Israelis are well aware that ILA and JNF members aren’t on their ballot sheets. These organizations don’t turn over when governments change; they answer to the “national interest.” Is that national interest, the state interest, the religious interest, or the ethnic interest? The answer is yes. Israel understands that there’s no Holy Land without land, which is why you’ll never see a Zestimate on the Negev Desert or a for sale sign on King David’s Tomb.

In the United States, you get to live anywhere you can afford. But residence inside Israel doesn’t work that way. Communities are legally permitted to screen applicants for “social suitability,” and can reject anyone who doesn’t fit in. Arabs are kept out of Jewish neighborhoods, Jews are kept out of Arab neighborhoods, and even secular Israelis are kept out of neighborhoods which are too religious. Israeli housing discrimination puts even the worst examples of American “red-lining” to shame.

THE SUPREMEST COURT

Everyone knows a free society requires a fair court system based on a foundational constitution. This is basic democracy. Well, Israel has no constitution. It was supposed to write one and never got around to it. Instead, it has a set of “Basic Laws,” passed piecemeal like ordinary legislation and meant to eventually be bundled up into a constitution sometime before the Messiah arrives.

In 1995, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the Basic Laws were, like, pretty much a constitution, and that they could strike down any legislation that violated them. Yup, in the 1990s, the Israeli Supreme Court granted itself supreme authority over any laws that had, in their legal opinion, bad vibes.

Zooming in, the appointment system for the judiciary gets even less democratic. The Supreme Court seats 15 judges who are chosen by a nine-member committee: three sitting justices, two cabinet ministers, two members of the Knesset, and two representatives of the Israel Bar Association (an unelected NGO-like professional guild with its own unelected bureaucratic apparatus). A Supreme Court appointee needs seven of the nine votes, so with the high court itself having three votes, the court itself can block anyone they don’t want sitting with them.

Even though fifteen sit on the court, nearly every case is heard by a panel of just three justices appointed by the Court President. The routine panels are generally filled by lottery, but the important ones are hand-selected. This was confirmed in a Hebrew University study that found justices picking their own panel partners for strategic reasons rather than at random. The Jewish Press went further, finding that former Court President Miriam Naor would routinely stack settlement cases with anti-settler justices, while the one justice who lived over the Green Line was basically on PTO.

Inside the Israeli Attorney General’s office, “legal advisers” are posted to every ministry, and these unelected advisers are able to bind elected ministers to the advisers’ interpretations of court rulings. This got completely out of hand in 2025. Bibi’s cabinet voted to fire Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, and comically, the Court froze the firing.

Not for nothing, Bibi’s coalition tried to patch this bug. In July 2023, before October 7, the Knesset passed a law stripping the Court of the power to cancel government decisions as “unreasonable.” Massive protests ensued defending the deep state, and on January 1, 2024, the Court, for the first time ever, struck down one of their own “constitutionally binding” Basic Laws. The Court ruled against the very checks and balances which enshrine and limit its own judicial power. Basically, the Court ruled that the Court was impervious to democracy.

THE IDF, MOSSAD, AND SHIN BET

The defense minister is the part of the security state you’re allowed to argue about. He’s appointed, mocked, fired, and replaced on a regular basis.

Out of the limelight are the Mossad (international intelligence), the Shin Bet (domestic intelligence), and Aman (military intelligence). Because there’s only so many shekels to go around, these deep state agencies vie for power by not only spying on the enemy but also spying on each other. This isn’t a weakness, but it creates an immune system where every branch is terrified of fucking up and being called out at the proverbial dinner table.

The lower and middle ranks of these agencies are a cross-section of the country. But the chiefs, generals, and directors are lifers, trained from birth and engineered to be a self perpetuating vanguard. For most of Israel’s history, that pipeline ran through the old secular Sabra, elite, Ashkenazis who have been in Israel since pre-1948 that would make a 19th-century Prussian field marshall proud. These Sabras are essentially Israel’s WASPs, an elite class of “white” founding stock who consider themselves the Mayflower Jews of the State. After arriving in the 1920s, they created and constituted what would later become Israel’s tripartite intelligence apparatus. In 1948, they welcomed in Ashkenazi Holocaust survivors, but considered them weak, traumatized, and therefore unfit for high level Jewish espionage. The same attitude was applied to the waves of Mizrahi and Sephardic immigrants who they felt were better suited for administrative janitorial work. Over time, intermarriage and assimilation has blurred these castes, but it is still rare that a truly high ranking General or Chief of Intelligence Services isn’t from purebred Sabra stock. The exceptions mostly prove the rule. Shaul Mofaz, born in Iran, ran the army and then the defense ministry, and Gadi Eisenkot, son of Moroccan immigrants, was Chief of Staff. But they both adopted the Sabra ethos, the idea that a select group of elites must shepherd the unsabrafied masses.

FREEDOM OF CERTAIN SPEECH

Measuring Israeli citizens’ rights against the American Bill of Rights would leave your democracy-believing boomer uncle confused at best. I’ll say it plainly: Israel is not a free country, and they do not have anything that resembles the First Amendment.

Much like their public, the Israeli press is notoriously loud and combative, which fools people into calling them free. But the Israeli Overton window is narrow, and in the rare situation where a media outlet drifts past its borders, the state will censor and intervene. At virtually any time the military can override the press. Entire political ideologies can be banned outright (communists and anti-Zionists were once banned, and even today, Kahanism and its far-right media organs are often outlawed). This is all in addition to a massive soft-power operation of shadowbanning and suppressing stories that threaten the Israeli elite’s narratives (no MAMA will not mention how the Israeli public was literally the test run for the Pfizer jab).

Even Israel’s political borders double as ideological borders. Noam Chomsky was turned back at the Jordanian border in 2010; a Code Pink activist was deported in 2018; Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar were barred from entering in 2019; and in May 2026, right-wing YouTuber Tyler Oliveira was blocked upon arrival at Ben Gurion Airport. Your right to enter Israel depends on what you think of it.

The online right in America likes to complain that Christians are kept out of Israeli places Jews can go, but this mostly runs the other way. On the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism, Jewish visits are allowed only a few hours a month and Jewish prayer is strictly forbidden. A Christian American tourist can easily access many areas and religious sites that Jews are forbidden from entering. Separate, and not even trying to be equal.

THE ISRAELI CASTE SYSTEM

Israel gets two things from India: its refined petroleum and its racial caste system. To the outside observer, there are only Jews and Arabs, but every Israeli understands that no two Jews are created equal. Each ethnic and religious bloc is accommodated according to their needs, and prioritized according to their ability. They are placed in distinct social rungs which serve and advance the national project above all else.

The Mizrahim and Sephardim have high birth rates, but despite generations of successful assimilation, pure-blooded “Easterners” are still excluded from the technocratic centers of power. Their dedicated political party, Shas, trades their compliance for welfare benefits and religious entitlements.

The Russian-speaking former USSR immigrants still operate like a 1920’s ethnic mafia. In exchange for reliable military manpower, they are given Russian-language media, political representation, and a police force that looks the other way when they break the occasional leg. (Editor’s note: There has been extreme pressure for MAMA to endorse former Moldovan citizen Avigdor Lieberman for this election. For fear of doxxing our friend, we are holding off… for now.)

The Dati Leumi (Religious Nationalists) are the infamous settlers. They, especially the Americans and Anglos who make aliyah from the US, Canada, UK, South Africa and Australia, are the most capable people in the country. Educated, wealthy, plugged into foreign capital, largely Americanized, ferociously ideological, and far more serious about the idea of a Jewish state than the secular Israeli who drifts through Haifa never thinking about the purpose of… his country. The Dati Leumi are woven through the middle ranks of the bureaucracy but more or less absent in the upper echelons.

And yet despite all this potential, this group is also bought off for almost nothing. A paved road to a settlement or an extra IDF detachment at a hilltop caravan over Shabbat. The few of them in the Knesset are zealots, but their devotion to the project is so total they never ask for little in return. The most capable bloc in Israel gets aimed at the frontier, told to look towards the Judean Hills and not Tel Aviv, where they might actually gain power. This is how Israel uses its people. How it gives its hardest battles to its strongest soldiers. The result is that the Dati Leumi keep taking the road instead of the reins. Until the day they sit on the land authority, the bench, and the top of the security services, they’ll keep guarding the frontier of a country they should inherit.

The Haredim (ultra-Orthodox) live in dense isolated enclaves and subsist off welfare Hashem. The men spend their lives studying (or pretending to study) Torah; the women tend to the 6.65 children they produce per capita. Everyone hates them. They don’t serve in the army, they don’t volunteer for national service, their unemployment rates are sky-high, there is rampant welfare fraud, and the Israeli taxpayer gets stuck with the bill. Cutting welfare and drafting Haredim into the IDF has driven Israel’s electoral politics since current MK and PM hopeful Yair Lapid’s father, Tommy Lapid, was first elected to the Knesset in the late ’90s.

While reviled, Haredim continue to receive funding precisely so that they remain detached from the army, the economy, and the secular society that surrounds them. The resentment is the point: even Jews need Jewish scapegoats.

At the bottom of the totem pole are Arab Israelis. A bloc far more dangerous than the Haredim despite receiving less ire. Arab citizens of Israel make up 20% of the population and climbing. They disproportionately receive welfare and commit nearly all of the nation’s violent crimes. Philosophically, they reject Israel’s right to exist more than the Haredim do, and often don’t serve in the IDF. And, since their cousins live a stone’s throw across the fence, it is not shocking that they occasionally help them commit acts of terrorism.

Israelis can rage at the Haredi scapegoats all they want and no one bats an eye, but say the same exact thing about the Arabs and you’re a racist. Why? because then the “multicultural democracy” charade falls apart. The Haredim die for Israelis' sins, while the welfare fraud, crime, and terrorism get called out by semi-banned outlets like ‘I Am the Shadow.’ Both Arab and Jew understand the arrangement; neither want integration. The state keeps them apart and lets the country argue about the Haredim instead.

THE FUTURE OF THE JUDENREICH

Israel does, in fact, hold real elections, and turn over power. Governments fall and Netanyahu himself has been thrown out and clawed his way back more than once, which is not how things go in a proper dictatorship, monarchy, or junta. The press, Overton window or not, savages the Prime Minister daily. Sephardi, Russian, Haredi, and Arab parties sit in the Knesset, where there are countless fights, personalities, and scandals. The political theater is real, but has limited implications.

Political parties, ministers, coalitions, and the fight of the week do not touch the true threads of power. The upper ranks of the IDF, the intelligence services, and the entire judiciary reproduce themselves; the land remains locked under the authority of nebulous, unelected institutions; and the population is segmented and steered to serve not the rights of the individual but the good will of the nation. This was the plan before 1948 and through today: Israelis are given a sense of agency by the visible political contest they are shown, but the real power is behind the scenes, protected and braided into such a complex loaf of challah that no one can untangle it.

This is why you demonize the Haredim instead of the Arabs. Because the real swing votes are not in Bet Shemesh or Ra’anana but in Scarsdale and West Hollywood.

Donations, investment, and, above all, the pressure American Jews put on American politicians. The Jewish-American-visionary-to-Israeli-marketer-to-Jewish-American-public-back-to-Israel pipeline is one of the most sophisticated fundraising operations in the history of the world. The most vital and delicate part of that operation is the secular, liberal American Jew whose Zionism is real but premised on Democratic, Western values. He needs Israel to be the beautiful democracy in the Middle East that lets Arabs vote, gays get married and women wear yoga pants.

A democracy under siege? No. An outpost of pluralistic liberalism? Please. The lawfare, land monopolies, conscription exemptions, and demographic engineering are all in plain view. And this is why Israel will outlast its fascist and maybe even Democratic predecessors. Georgios Papadopoulos, Benito Mussolini, and Augusto Pinochet could all be deposed or ousted, but Moshiach is yet to come. A future Fuhrer King whose throne must be kept warm until he arrives. And when he does, the public won’t need to elect him.

For all these reasons, the specific results of the impending election are almost entirely insequential. Will Bibi go to jail? Maybe, but that decision will be made by entrenched judicial authorities rather than the Israeli people. If he does go to jail, it will be a kayfabe act of ceremony equivalent to a toddler being put in timeout. Will there be investigations into October 7th? Will the Haredim be forced to serve in the military? All these questions and more will be dutifully debated by the clandestine Israeli royalty who hold power just out of view. The only question is who the figurehead will be the WWE champion who gets to wear the belt and answer the post-game interview questions. If no coalition reaches a majority, American pundits will describe Israel’s government as fractured, polarized, and stuck, but this is completely backwards. The issues at stake are of course important, but the election itself is totally irrelevant. The great irony is that the more chaotic Israel’s government appears, the more continuity its deep state maintains behind the scenes. So don’t believe the New York Times when they tell you this is the most consequential election in Israel’s history, virtually nothing is at stake.

Israel’s critics left and right say Israel isn’t a democracy and mean it as an insult. Israel’s fans say it is a democracy and mean it as a compliment. But the things they love about Israel—the cohesion, the dream, the loyalty to land and people, or dare I say blood and soil—are the least democratic pieces of the puzzle. Whether that’s a triumph of nationalism or a fraud of a democracy is beside the point. What it is, more than anything, is beautiful.