As Israel gears up for a national election in October, the country is living with two seemingly contradictory truths: we are a society that ranks near the top of the world in internal polarization and, at the same time, near the top in solidarity. That contradiction is worth examining for our people and as the world faces the start of a polycrisis reshaping the West.

In the 1990s, when Americans were asked what they thought of people on the opposite side of the political aisle, the common answer was: good people, wrong views. Ask that question today, and the answer has flipped: they are simply bad people. Societies have always faced internal disagreements, but now a difference of opinion has become the sole determinant of a person’s moral character.

How did we get here? The world has become more complex than ever, while our attention — our most important resource — is in retreat, worn down by a digital environment built to exhaust it. Our need for certainty, meanwhile, hasn’t changed at all. We now live with a tragic asymmetry: as reality expands, our capacity to understand it is shrinking. 

Under these conditions, the ideas that win are the ones offering maximum certainty for minimum attention. That is how the politics of blame takes hold.

Blame is the weak man’s shortcut to fulfilling our basic human need for understanding. Real problems are difficult to solve; blame is not difficult at all, and it feels like insight even when it explains nothing. That confusion has always had a worst version: blaming the Jews. Historically, when a society reaches for that, it is a sign that the society is already in decline. 

Aside from antisemitism, Israel is experiencing many of the same fractures as its Western allies. What Israel has that most of the West does not is the love-hate paradox. Israelis are capable of hating each other over who they voted for and, in the next moment, are ready to die for one another. Whereas other democracies experience polarization as corrosive, the damage in Israel stays at the surface.  

That bedrock of Israeli society is more solid than it looks. So when Israelis reach the ballot box, what will the fight actually be about? Not ideology. Not policy. Psychology.

Israelis are entrenched in a battle between grievance and anxiety. On the right, the Likud continues to carry the memory of Ben-Gurion’s government bombing the Altalena. Mizrahi Israelis remember the 1950s, when their families were sent to transit camps by Labor-led Israel. Religious Zionists remember the 2005 disengagement from Gaza. 

The center-left is carrying anxiety, not about the past but the future. They look at the current coalition and see real power given to their nightmares: fundamentalism and corruption. They look at the demographic numbers ahead and worry that the future belongs to the groups they trust least.

Neither side is wrong to feel what it feels. The grievance is real memory; the anxiety is real math. What makes this different from an ordinary election is that both sides are reacting to their pain while still feeling bound to the same country and each other, which is exactly what makes the hatred survivable.

We also benefit from being an ancient people and the lessons that come from millennia of building our shared society. Flavius Josephus described the destruction of the Second Temple as a consequence of political polarization among the Jewish people. Our historic response was the creation of the Talmud, which built a culture of listening in the face of disagreement. Whether that same culture can serve as an antidote to a crisis that has since gone global is worth asking, even if the answer isn’t yet clear.