Whenever people ask me whether the elections we’re scheduled to have in 2026 will be the ones that “finally turn the tide” and create change, I tell them I doubt it. That’s not because Israel doesn’t need change or because change will not come, but because it’s still too early.
It’s useful here to recall 1973 and 1974 — the era after the disastrous Yom Kippur War. Though Golda Meir was at the helm when the calamity unfolded, she was re-elected after the war. It was only after the Agranat Commission (the sort of commission that Benjamin Netanyahu is refusing to appoint) lay the blame squarely at the feet of the IDF leadership—and largely “acquitted” the political echelons—that all hell broke loose, and Golda was soon forced to resign.
Golda Meir was replaced by Yitzchak Rabin, thus continuing the long line of Labor leaders who had run the country since its founding in 1948. And then Rabin won re-election. One might have wondered, back then, “is change never going to come?”
Yet it did. In 1977, Menachem Begin became the first person to unseat Labor after the founding party’s 29 year run, and in many ways, with only brief interruptions, that Likud “run” has continued since then. If 1973 is any indication, change comes not in the first elections or perhaps even in the next, but when the voices and visions that offer something different have ripened.
What are the new, emerging visions for Israel? Who are the people behind them?
Today’s guest, Reuven Taub, is one of the key players. Israel’s malaise is not just about politics, Taub argues in our conversation today—it’s about our essential understanding of who we are and what we’re doing in this region. The Ehud Barak notion that we are the “villa in the jungle”—outsiders who must protect ourselves at all costs against the jungle that surrounds us—is an idea that has expired and that now causes damage.
It’s time to rethink everything, argues Taub. Our geopolitical posture, Israel’s socio-political vision and the Jewish state’s national story—all to energize a new period in our history.
The grandchildren’s generation is intent on re-founding Israel, and today, we hear part of that vision.
To read Reuven Taub’s recent Times of Israel blog post, “Intelligence may not be the only 1973 failure we are repeating,” click here:
For more information about Alenu (and its Hebrew website), click here. To support the work of “Alenu”, you can click here.
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Reuven Taub lives in Jerusalem and is a father of three. He is reservist combatant in the Sayeret Matkal special forces unit, and a graduate of the Hesder Yeshiva in Kiryat Shmona. After completing his regular service in the IDF, he joined the civilian sector, and while studying for a degree in Philosophy, Political Science, and Economics (PPE) at the Hebrew University, he was a founding partner in establishing “The Crucible for Leadership”. In addition, he was responsible for developing and managing the Gideonim Program for heads of leadership institutions in Israel. Over the past half decade, Reuven has served as VP of Operations at StatRap.
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One of the questions that people ask me more than anything else after they hear a podcast or they read a column or they just talk about Israel is, who’s going to make change? Are we going to keep recycling the same people? Is this going to be another election where it’s the same people running in the same issues come up? And if we’re really going to make dramatic change, where is it going to come from? And we have interviewed over the course of time a number of people who are very committed to making change. We’ve interviewed the leaders of Ha’Rivon Ha’Revi’i, the fourth quarter, Yosmat Ha Me’a, the 100 initiative or the initiative of the century. We interviewed, not that long ago, two people from a new political party called El Hadegal. One of them was David Sherez, David Sherez, we interviewed another person. We have interviewed Einat Wilf, who actually just founded a political party called OZ, and we’ll be speaking with her again in another few weeks. We’re here to have a conversation this morning with someone who is part of a young group of people, a group of young people who are taking things in a very dramatic direction and in a very different a way, not founding a political party, but maybe even founding a country, talking about the founding ideas of a country.We’ll explain why in a second. My guest this morning is Reuven Taub. You’ll learn more about him in just a second. We’re going to hear a little bit about his own personal background. He’ll say something about his own experiences on October 7th. Then we’re going to get to the organization of which he is a central part, one of the founders called Alenu, which many people might recognize as the name of a prayer from the liturgy, but it really means it’s on us. And this group calls itself the founding grandchildren. So if their grandparents were the generations of the founders of the country, there’s a group of young people, 18-35, something like that, who have said, now we’re going to, quote, unquote, re-found the country. And we’re in for a fascinating conversation. So, Reuven, first of all, you’re a very busy guy these days. So thank you very much for taking the time to be with us.Thank you, it’s a pleasure, thanks for inviting me.First of all, tell us about you.I grew up not far from here. We’re in Bacca. I grew up to parents who both made Aliyah from London. I actually live not far from here today towards Katamonim, I’m 30 years old. I live there with my wife, Ayelet, who made Aliyah herself from LA and our three little children. Briefly about me, I spent two years after high school in a yeshiva, yeshivat Hesder in Kiryat Shmona, by the Lebanese border where you study Talmud and biblical studies and volunteering in the community. Afterwards, I actually didn’t do the Hesder program where you draft with your group of soldiers to somewhere that this army assigns you. I wanted to try out for the best I could do, and I got into a unit called Sayeret Matkal.Which is basically, the most elite commando unit in the army.Yeah, no, it’s a well-known unit. It has very famous operations. I served there as a combat operator and a sniper. I was in mandatory service, and I stayed on for an extra period. I actually had a tough decision to “Do I stay in the system for a career or do I leave?” Probably the hardest decision I had to make until today to leave what we call the golden cage because it’s an incredible job to be an officer in the unit, and you’re given a lot of responsibility at a young age. After four years there, I left. I went into the social scene. I was a co founder of an organization called “Gidonim”. I joined people from the informal education area. The Mechinot, the Leadership academies, the gap years in Israel, where people go and study and learn how to become leaders, civil leaders. This organization, the goal was to bring together all the heads of these different institutions all around the country and bring them together to learn, empower one another, and to help them build their organizations together. I led this organization for a couple of years while studying in Hebrew U. For me, it was an incredible experience to meet these people who are building the next generation of leaders. The slogan was “leading leaders”. We lead people who lead people, but they are and also the leaders themselves.
After a few years there, which was an incredible experience to found an organization, I’m like, “Okay, this is great. How do we scale?” When you want to scale, you think about technology. I found myself meeting a lot of people in the tech space. When I’m talking about social issues and social problems, which is something that drives me, I met a number of people. One of them was someone who today is my co founder at “Alenu”, who is called Yonatan Nadiri, and I joined him in a company called “Healthy IL”. It’s a tech startup, a medical device startup, which is the first and only company ever to receive an FDA approval for an AI diagnosis test performed on your smartphone. So the goal was to enable people, specifically in the kidney space, to detect early signs of CKD, chronic kidney disease, or to detect signs of need for dialysis, basically, using your smartphone. And we managed to do this. It took a long time. I was there for over five years. I served as the VP.Is your smartphone hooked up to something or just your smartphone?No, you get a kit. You get a cardboard box sent to your house. In it, there’s a cup. There’s an app which directs you how to place a sample in the cup. You then take a dipstick, which is in the kit. You dip it in the sample. You take a picture with your phone, and just that picture is equivalent to a lab test. FDA approved, it was an incredible experience, a very difficult experience. It took a long time because based on our FDA approval, many other companies were able to enter that track. Because being the first, being a pioneer at something. There’s a lot of hurdles along the way, but other people could leverage the fact that we did it. And today, other people are on that track as well. The biggest claim to fame for me is that today, close to 2 million people worldwide have tested using our technology. And close to 100,000 people, we’ve managed to avert dialysis for them. Because these are people, if you detect early signs of chronic kidney disease, then you can intervene and you don’t need to deteriorate. People don’t deteriorate to dialysis.So working in Israel, working in the UK, a lot in England with the NHS and working in the States with the big healthcare providers. For me, that was an incredible experience also to build a global company, supply chain from China to Kiriyat Gat through the UK, Mexico, and the US, obviously. But also the fact that I had this dashboard where every day you could see how many people tested and how many people found positive signs in their urine sample was a very, I’d say, meaningful and fulfilling experience. The fact that you can influence, you have an impact on such a large scale. I was there through the year of the judicial reform, we could talk about that.
But on the seventh of October, things changed, obviously for everyone, myself included. I serve in the unit sniper team till today in the reserve sniper team. I was called up at 7:50 in the morning, 7:52 to be exact. We were actually by my wife’s parents in Modi’in. We were there because in retrospective, I expect that’s a funny story, we had tickets for a Bruno Mars concert that Motzei Chag in Tel Aviv. So we said we’d leave the kids there. We’d leave the kids with my in-laws and we’ll go to the concert. I was with the kids early in the morning. We start hearing explosions, the Iron Dome, and I turned on my phone and I see that eight minutes ago, I was called up. I wake up my wife, I tell her I’m going down south, no idea where I’m going. On the way down, I turn on the radio to hear what is it that I’m going towards. Because of the Tzeva Adom, the sirens on the radio, I have no idea. Very quickly in my unit, I stopped by my unit. Probably took me 120 seconds, I already had my gear, my sniper rifle, and I’m already on the Jeep on the way out. I won’t go into all the stories of that day.
By 10:30 AM, I was already in the field deployed. We were ambushed. The first battle we had, my vehicle, 12 guys, was at Tzomet Ma’on. It’s the junction that basically splits the Otef, the Gaza envelope area from north to south, towards Ofakim. There was a ambush by 12 Nuhba terrorists, shot an RPG at our vehicle in a lot of fire. It was in that battle that my commander on the day, and this is where I think you know him as well, Amir Meir Skouri. He died in my arms while I was treating him. He was a student at Shalem at the time. I could talk about him for a while, but also a very heroic during battle. That was the first battle of the day. It was that battle where, finally, after a while, we managed to kill the terrorists there and continue to other places, to Reim, through the Nova, surrounding Beeri, lots of the different creeks.
For me, that experience beyond being an absolute nightmare, thinking, “When am I waking up from this day?” Probably my biggest takeaway from that day, looking back, is what lack of sovereignty looks like or what it feels like. I remember actually listening on your podcast a few weeks ago, you spoke about the “The Ark of history”, the Ark of history doesn’t necessarily bend towards how Zionism thinks it does. And listening to that, I have a very personal example or feeling towards that. On October 7th, it’s not a terror attack, it’s an invasion. And when you see an invasion like that and you experience it, you can imagine not having a sovereign Jewish state. That’s what it looks like. The fact that me, I was born in Israel, grew up in Israel, never imagined the fact that Jewish sovereignty doesn’t exist. Now it’s a very clear, vivid image. That’s probably the biggest and deepest takeaway from that day. Then spent many, many days, triple digits in Miluim since. The first few months for me, and people, if there’s an American crowd listening, they may connect. I had a very, I call a Forest Gump experience, an Israeli Forrest Gump experience, because Forrest Gump obviously was at every meaningful junction in American history. For me, just being in my unit and being where I was, I happened to be at all the places or the events that caught the national discourse or the media discourse. So whether it’s, I won’t go into too many details, but whether it’s things to do with hostages or the tunnels or Shifa, everything like that, you come out, you turn on your phone and you see that everyone’s talking about the event that you were there with your twelve other guys. It’s a very weird feeling because everyone’s talking about where I was. What do you know about my experience?But you realize that everyone’s so emotionally moved by it and you see that public consciousness may be very, very far from reality. It’s a very sobering experience. I think the biggest takeaway, not from October 7th, but I’d say from the first six months of war, is the name of our organization. It’s “Alenu”, it’s on us because coming out from that experience, I look right and left and up and down. To people who I really look up to, whether it’s in media, politics, tech, and so on, and you see that in Israel, in Hebrew, there’s a phrase “the responsible adult”, you see there isn’t. You see there is an adult, but you don’t see necessarily the responsible one. That feeling of it could push you into two directions, into stress and into, “Okay, let’s hide”, or it could motivate you to do something. And thankfully for me, it was the latter. And this organization called It’s “On Us” was born from, I think, that experience and many others. So I think that just takes us to the birth of “Alenu”, I’ll say one more point. I think in terms of, and you opened with this, which people will change the future of Israel?I believe it’s very much in terms of the people, but it’s not only the people, it’s also the ideas. I’m a true believer of ideas and that ideas can change reality. You obviously need the combination of people and ideas, but very good people without an idea is not enough. When we started “Elenu”, Yonatan and I, we started with the idea, the idea that we are now living through our third founding moment. At founding moments, you don’t lean back and you don’t try and tweak things and fix along the edges. You re-found, like you mentioned, you re-found, you go to the core and you build on the shoulders of your founding fathers and mothers. In Israel, it’s 1947, ‘48. The founding parents, so you have the founding children who are the 1985. We can go into depth and speak about why 1985. We are now living in the era. We are on their shoulders, but we’re living in the era of the founding grandchildren. For me, it’s a very energizing period. People who say it’s 1948. It feels like 1948 again, bring it on. Let’s do it. I’m extremely energized in that sense and very optimistic.I want to hear more about the optimism in a second. I want to hear a lot more about the optimism. But I said, anyone listening who’s been around the block a few times knows that for many years, the classic work on Zionism was Arthur Hertzberg’s “The Zionist idea”. Then, of course, Gil Troy, who also lives in this neighborhood, revised it and did an updated version called “The Zionist Ideas”. But when you say that this is about an idea, that’s a deeply Zionist historical take. In other words, Zionism was, I mean, America’s Revolution also was about an idea also. Jefferson, Hamilton, and so on and so forth. But there are certain revolutions which are fundamentally about ideas, and I think none of them more so than Zionism. So this is about the idea. So you have this experience. You grew up in a world deeply committed to Israel, a deeply Zionist family and community and neighborhood and so on and so forth. You went to very Zionist educational institutions. You did this incredible work in the tech sphere and in the health sphere and so forth. And then, of course, October 7th and what that does.Give us a bit of a diagnosis. You say “there’s no responsible adult here”. And again, we’re going to stay away from the political personalities right now because we really want to talk about ideas here. What’s broken? Before we get to how you’re going to fix it, we know all a lot of things that went wrong. We know a lot of things that went on October 7th, and we know that the political system is this, and there’s been no National Commission of Inquiry, etc. None of those things are unimportant. I don’t mean to be dismissive in my tone, but you have a bigger idea of what’s wrong. So what’s wrong?Societies, in Hebrew “chavarot”, societies and companies, actually- it’s the same word in Hebrew. It happens across the board. So what’s essentially broken at the core is something that happens to everyone. And there’s something a little bit comforting to know that it happens around the world. It’s not only in Israel, it’s a global issue, and it happens to companies as well. At the core stands the idea that political paradigms, political ideas, have an expiration date. So when you found a company, it’s easier to talk about companies, it’s less so when you found a company and you think about who we are and what our vision is and where we want to go, and it fits this strong fitness function with reality. The first few years, the first period usually works and everything fits really nicely and you feel like, “Okay, we’re going in a great direction”. But slowly, slowly, reality shifts and you’re still stuck with the same bureaucracy, with the same idea, the founding idea you set off with. And along the course of time, you realize where reality hits a wall or you hit a wall because reality has changed so much that you understand that the idea that I set out with isn’t fitted to reality anymore and you need to reinvent or re-found the fundamental idea.Now, what happens before you re-found the idea, when reality has shift so far, you start seeing all these different symptoms, and you try to explain to yourselves why things you see in reality, they actually fit your your existing idea of reality. We know this from Daniel Kahneman, we know this from lots of people who say the confirmation bias. So we walk around and say, “Well, actually, Hamas is deterred, but we only need to do so and so”. And then the education, “well, actually, we only need to fund a little bit more in education”. And we could go across the Israeli experience and say, well, things we’re seeing actually suit our older version of the political idea of who we are, where we want to go, what our story, but fundamentally, the core idea has expired. We’ve had this at the founding of the nation. Ben Gurion did this to himself. Between 30th of November, until the War of Independence, Ben Gurion said: “What led us to this success, what led us to here, is no longer what will take us forward. If we think in terms of our geopolitical posture of Great Britain as being the only the sole person or organization that we work against, that is not the future.” The future, he calls it “the game of nations”. We need Moscow and Washington to vote yes for Israel. That is where we’re going. If we want on our socioeconomic contract in Israel, if socialism was our promise to citizens up until now, that’s not what’s going to lead us forward. What’s going to lead us forward is going to provide people this, we call it Israel as an MVP, whatever works. Take money from Germany, let’s do it. It’s a different mindset. Then fast forward another 30 years, we’re in 1985, the idea again needs a refounding. It’s a unity government, interestingly enough. You have Shamir and Peres and say, “Okay, geopolitical posture to try and balance between the West and Russia doesn’t work anymore. We’re going all in on the West. Our socioeconomic contract, that’s it, it’s done. We’re doing mass privatization. We’re going all in on the OECD, we’re adopting the metrics and so on.”
Now, 30, 40 years later, we’re living on the previous paradigm. When When we look at reality and everyone feels that something’s not working, it’s this, we all have our explanation. It’s the Haredim, it’s the judicial reform, it’s the deep state. Everyone has their own, I’m not dismissing them as unimportant issues. Obviously, Bibi is at the core of all of these. Also, Bibi, who in itself is another symptom, is something where beneath the surface, there’s something much deeper, and that’s our ability to say, “Okay, Our political idea has expired.”, Political idea is always composed of three questions. When you read about Thatcher, Reagan, Deng, Modi, it’s all the same questions. First is geopolitical posture. “What is your geopolitical posture in the next era, the next 30 years?”, “What is your socioeconomic contract, the covenant between the citizen and the state?” And the last one is, “what is your big story or a national narrative that pushes you forward?” When you give an updated answer that is suited for reality and suited for you, for who you are, then you can move to your next phase, to what we call Israel’s third Republic.So go over those three and tell us what the prevailing conception about those three is and why it’s broken. In other words, what’s wrong with our conception of the social contract? What’s wrong with our narrative? Just quickly to give us a sense of how you assess where is real as a country now thinks of itself, how it thinks of itself, and why it’s no longer suited to reality.I’ll do it quite briefly, and we can dive into to each one of them. Our geopolitical posture for the past 30 years has been, we are a villa in the jungle. It was coined by Ehud Barak almost 30 years ago, but at its core, it means we don’t belong here. We are a villa in this barbaric jungle, we have to lift up our walls, we don’t belong here. We’re the Europeans who play in the Champions League and the Eurovision, but we don’t belong to this region. The implications or ramifications of that are very deep. October 7th is an example. The agreement that may or may be on the Syrian front now, where we agree a line on the border, is another example. It means that, you know what? We’re not part of this region. We don’t belong. And as long as we dig our heads in the sand and speak to the West and to the US, then everything It would be okay. And that idea, I think it died on October 7th, but it was dead long before.
And what we suggest is replacing that idea with what I call from the Hebrew “from India all the way through to Africa”, from the Book of Esther. And it means at its core that after 2000 years, we’re home and we belong here. We’re indigenous. We have a role to play. We have a positive role to play in the region. Because when you ask MBS or MBZ, and I’ve spoken to people who’ve met them, and you ask them, who are they in the region in 2030, 2040, 2050? They have a positive vision for who they are in the region. When you ask the Israeli cabinet or the Israeli cockpit today, they’ll say, “Well, they don’t have a nuclear weapon. Those people don’t have an arsenal of missiles that can hit us. And we have some flailing peace agreement with them”. That is not a positive vision. That is not our responsibility. I’ll give you one or two short examples.
The fact that two countries on our borders, the governments collapse because of shortage of water. We have a terrible water crisis now in Egypt. And there’s one country in the middle, Israel, who solved that problem. Do we see that as, okay, it’s their issue, they need to deal with it, or do we see it as our responsibility as neighbors to see how we can help?Actually, on a geopolitical front, how do we leverage that for our benefit? That is a big mindset shift.
Another example from a total different aspect, the fact that I finished 12 years of school in Israel without speaking a word of Arabic is the strongest evidence of the fact that we don’t feel like we belong here. When even 20% of our population region speaks Arabic, but all our regions speak, it’s like telling someone in Canada, don’t speak English, just speak French or vice versa in Europe and so on and so forth. I think that’s the first point.
Moving on the socioeconomic contract in Israel. We’re used to the fact that there’s, unfortunately, 36, 37 ministers. The dynamic within Israel is, should we privatize? Should it all be publicly funded? The next era in Israeli socioeconomic contract should revolve around five public goods. Five public goods that government needs to provide to the citizen. It’s personal safety and security, it’s health care, it’s education, it’s transportation and infrastructure. Why these five? It’s the classic five, because when given these five, any citizen can realize their future the way they see fit. I’m agnostic to who that citizen is, of course.The idea is that what is the metric? What am I demanding from my government? What is the utmost goal? Give me these five public goods like you give me health care in Israel. How do you give me health care? I call it the obvious test. Fundamentally, every Israeli citizen, almost zero percent of the Israeli citizens, think about health care. They wake up in the morning and health care is not an issue. They move jobs, I’ve hired people in the US, where the first or second question in the interview is, what’s the health care benefits? In Israel, nobody thinks about it. People move city, move jobs. They think about all their life decisions, and health care isn’t an issue. Also on a price performance perspective, 70% of Israelis basically don’t pay for health care. In terms of the benchmark, it’s 8.5% of GDP. It’s relatively low compared to other countries, obviously compared to the US. You ask yourself, how is that? How did we manage to make health care such an incredible inferior public good?
When you look at it in the history, you say, well, we’re all in debt to one person in specific, a guy called Haim Ramon. He was the healthcare minister from ‘92 to ‘95, and he did what we call today in our organization, he went whale hunting. He saw that there’s an issue in Israeli health care that for a decade, from the 1980s to the 1990s, the whole system was corrupt. It was broken. The system didn’t work. People, and Unfortunately, it’s not nice to say this, but they were not provided health care based on their political party. You’re going back to if you had a red pamphlet, then you were part of one healthcare union, and if you didn’t have it, then you were part of another one.Just to remind people that the individual parties back at the founding of the state all created their own healthcare system. That’s where it came from.Then you have in 1989, you have Netanyahu, Shoshana Netanyahu, who’s a Bibi’s aunt, who’s a Justice on the Supreme Court. She’s the head of a committee to decide what do we do with Israel’s health care. They build this plan. It’s a very great plan. Committees, nothing happens, obviously. A few of these later comes this guy called Haim Ramon. In his campaign, during his election campaign, he tells the public, I am going to dismantle the health care system and put it back together. It’s not going to be easy. I’m going to do it because that’s the only way to build a health care system that will provide for everyone and so on and so forth. And then he actually does it, and he pays political prices. He was fired as the healthcare minister. So he came to the big conference of his party, of the ‘Avoda’.
He stands up and he gives this speech, the Whale speech. He says: “You guys Insist on taking money from people and not providing them health care and so on and so forth. And I try with my meager strength to push you back, but you don’t...” And people in that convention, people are shouting to him “Resign! Resign!”, and he resigns. And Rabin, who’s the Prime Minister at the time, tells him, Why are you doing this? We have Oslo, the peace on our head. Why are you doing this? Let me do the piece. And he says, No, I’m never going to forgive myself if I don’t do this because this is the time to do it.
He then resigns or he gets fired. He becomes the head of the Histadrut, of the Union. And back then, you could be a Knesset member and head of the Union, and he totally dismantles the Union healthcare system from within, and he then puts forward what we call today “The Mandatory Healthcare Law” that provided the system that we’re living through today. So the fact that Israelis wake up this morning and don’t think about health care is thanks to someone who is willing to fight that fight 30 years ago. And what we’re saying is the other four public goods have whales. There’s an education whale, there’s a personal security whale, and so on, that you need leadership with the political capital and the political will to go and hunt those whales in order to provide for all Israeli citizens. But without doing that, you’re never going to get to the same level of the healthcare system in Israel.Those are the five, and that’s what you need to provide for the citizens. There’s an interesting dynamic of how you do that and what it does to the Israeli social fabric. We can go in what that means for the Haredim, what that means for the Arab community and so on, we can go into that. Moving forward to the last issue. What is the national story? That’s the big question. What is your story which is suitable for the time, the period that you’re living in? So this area that I grew up in, there’s another writer who wrote the book “Startup Nation”, and that may have been the story we told ourselves “We are the Startup Nation” and myself included, and lots of others have benefited from that story. We bring the tech, the innovation to the world. But that story as well, that narrative has reached a wall, has reached the end of its purpose.Why?Because I believe that, first of all, other people are the startup as well, and that’s That’s not enough. That’s not enough to take us forward.So it may not be false, it’s just not sufficient.It’s great. We’re still a high tech hub. We’re still having exits here, Whizz and so on. That needs to continue. But that is not the national narrative that takes the nation to its next era. Because it worked really well at its time, but now we need a new story. And the new story, I call it in Hebrew, Ribunut Ivrit Ge’a, so “proud Hebrew sovereignty”. And it’s based on moral issues of of Abraham, the Ivri. We read a few weeks ago of Abraham Ivri, and he was the first person to be called Ivri. Ivri in Hebrew means ‘meever’, from the other side.The whole world’s on one side of the river and he’s on the other side.The whole world is on one side and he is on the other. When we are now thinking of Israel at our 100th anniversary. And that’s soon enough. We’re almost 80 years old. We need to have enough courage to say we’re adults, we have our own flavor, and it’s okay that we’re different. And the internal strifes that we’ve been having over the past few years, a lot of them have been because we’re trying to be like the Nordic system or like the American system or the liberal democracy that there is in other places, that is exactly what we need to mirror in Israel. And if we can’t say “You know what, everybody? It’s okay, we’re slightly different. We have our own set of rules”. And like there is a variant of democracy in Spain, and like there is a variant of democracy in Denmark, all liberal democracies, we will be able to create our own. And if we can’t say that on a public level and agree, it’s okay that our region is different, our history is different, our DNA is different, then moving forward as a nation is going to be very, very difficult. So every discussion we want to enter, whether it’s, do we do what’s called a narrow constitution or what the laws are for the number of members of parliament, those are all important issues.But the way we need to enter that discussion is from this mindset of what I call Hebrew sovereignty is that we are different and it’s okay. And that for me, when you put those three ideas together from who we are on a geopolitical level. So from India, starting with India as the key player in our geopolitical posture, we think about our socioeconomic contract and we think about who we want to be. Those together, for me, are the new idea of Israel in its third founding moment.Talk about India for a minute, because I think a lot of people probably just wrinkled their brow. And India as the central player, from the perspective of the typical listener “Who is this guy, Modi? Anyway, we don’t love when Bibi cozy up to Modi. We don’t love when Trump cozy up to Modi”. We hear all sorts of things about Modi subverting the democratic process in India. But you see India as a key player in a variety of ways. And you see Modi as a model, actually, in certain ways, not in every way, obviously, but in certain ways, is something that we should look at with tremendous admiration, almost. So say something about the role of India and maybe even the biometrics that he’s been doing and so on and so forth.So I’ll start, I think, with the bigger picture, and then we can go into Modi as well. When you look at the next 25, 30 years or even 50 to 100 years of where the world is going, there’s the US-China rivalry, and everything else is a derivative of that. The US foreign policy, everything is derivative of what happens with China. There’s the two camps which are now being built and so on. Then there is one country, the largest country in the world, the largest democracy in the world, who says, I’m not in any camp, I am my own. So in a bipolar world, I am the third Pole, and they mean it. Modi is the single leader in the world who is able to go to Trump and be buddies with Trump and then fly to Xi. Then the next They buy oil at a very cheap price from Putin. So he plays across the entire board.
And when you look at Israel’s geopolitical history and the strategy we’ve had over many, many years, we’ve always had a global superpower as an ally, and then we’ve always had a regional superpower as an ally. So Great Britain and Iran. And then we had actually Turkey as a local superpower, now they’re becoming one of our biggest adversaries. And then we’ve obviously shifted to the US as the global superpower. And looking forward, there is no replacing, obviously, the US as Israel’s closest ally and global superpower. But when you’re looking in the region, you realize that India, again, a billion and a half people growing at an annual rate of roughly over 7% GDP annually, you see that they are people who are willing to play in everyone’s court, and the ability for Israel to leverage that for our geopolitical posture is huge.
I think from a global perspective, that’s the first. The second is when you look at India’s challenges, there’s a lot of similarities to Israeli challenges, again, on different scale. But they have roughly 20% of their population is a minority Muslim population. For them, it’s 200, 300 million people, but it’s similar to ours when it’s a national government, so it’s very similar to Israel. They have a neighboring state, a radical Islam neighboring state with nuclear capabilities. They know what it’s like to live under that threat. Lastly, there’s a famous saying of why is America the biggest superpower? There’s four words, Ocean, Ocean, Mexico, Canada. In their region, everything is relatively calm. India, if something happens in our region, there’s pain for India, pain for Israel, pain for India.
Whether it’s the Straits of Hormuz or Straits of Tehran, all these issues. For one example, when there was the flare up between Pakistan and India, Iran sent forces to the border. So the entire region is moving very differently. We could speak about Turkey as the growing hegemon in the region and the relations between Turkey and Pakistan and what that means to India as well. So there’s a lot of moving pieces on the geopolitical front. I think on a deeper level, we have a connection with India because we know what it’s like to have tradition and technology.And to break away from the British in 1948.Exactly. Yeah, to break away from the British in 1948. I don’t know if I can say this, but we all hate the British. But no, totally. So the sense of taking responsibility for your future.
I was in India. I was invited to go to India, this is six weeks ago, on a delegation together with the finance minister and the chief economist of Israel. There was signing of a very big agreement. The first time India signed an agreement with an OECD country, it’s a Trade Protection Agreement, Investment Protection Agreement. And on the back of that, a whole bunch of business people and organizations were invited to come to be part of the discussions. I was blown away by two things. One, the optimism, the optimism of this is our time, very similar to the sentiment that I’m presenting here. But on a deeper level is everywhere you go, you hear the number 2047. 2047, that’s 100 years to India’s independence. Then you ask, what’s happening in 2047? From the biggest business people to, I’d say, the students across the board, people say 2047 is the year where India is no longer going to be a developing country.We are going to be a developed country. What does that mean? It means 13,000 GDP per capita. Right now, they’re about 2,500 GDP per capita. So they have a long way to go.
I asked them “do you believe it’s possible?” I was speaking to the chief economist, one of the people in Modi’s economic cabinet, he says “Yes” and I say “Why?” He says “Well, we have just under 25 years to get there. And if you look at our growth rate, we need to grow at 7. 6% annually. And in the last 25 years, we’ve been growing at 7. 3% But because of COVID, you take out COVID, it’s actually been 7. 9. So the answer is yes.” So “okay, what do you need to do?” And this is where we look at Modi as an example, because what you need to do is sometimes not so pleasant to hear. What you need to do is you need to be willing to whale hunt. I think we can use Modi as an example as an A-class whale hunter.
So what did Modi do just after he was elected? He said “We have just under a billion and a half people, but roughly, I’d say under 10% of them have identification ID. I cannot build an economy. I cannot build a modern country where no one has ID. There’s no bank accounts, there’s property rights and so on and so forth”. He says “what I’m going to do is I am going to do a very harsh reform to get biometric ID. How am I going to do it? And fight and combat the the the the black money, the money, the unidentified money and so on”. He says “Within six weeks, I am taking out of circulation the 501,000 Rupee notes. Anybody who wants to cash in on those notes needs to come to the bank near them. They cash in, they put their finger, get a biometric ID, and that’s how they will get their money back.” He was slaughtered, Modi, by the Global Bank and the IMF and all the economists that said “You’re going to hurt India’s GDP, the grandmothers in India. This is what they’ve been doing for centuries, and there’s going to be blood on the streets.” And he said “Okay, fine. You know what?” And they were all right. It all happened. It was a big hit, India’s economy dipped, classically, towards the end of his term, just by the time of the elections, you could see the rise.Today, almost a billion and a half people in India have biometric identification, and India is becoming the global finance hub of the world. I was at the Indian Nasdaq, the stock exchange. Incredible, the number of transactions performed every day. It’s quite mind-blowing. So this ability to, I’d say, sell a positive vision to society and say this is where we want to go, but along the way, trust me, it’s not going to be easy. It’s going to be, we call in Hebrew.Going down for the sake of coming up.Going down for the sake of going up. You need to be a transformative leader in order to do that, to tell the public “Trust me, it’s going to be hard, but it’s worthwhile because together we’re going to get to the promised land. Together, we’re going to have a new future where everybody can benefit from it.”So give us the parallel in the Israeli education system. You gave us an example from Haim Ramon in the health system where he said he was going to break the system apart, put it back together, to the point that, we just had this in our family not that long ago, somebody goes to the emergency room and has to get all kinds of tests. You don’t take out a credit card. You don’t even think about the cost. You just go get treated. You don’t think about it.You come home, that’s it. You gave an example of Modi in India doing something that the grandmothers and there’s going to be blood on the streets and it’s going to hurt the economy. And he said, Fine, it’s going to be all of those things. But I’m going to get there. And as according to you, he’s gotten largely there. We know that Israel has invested a tremendous amount of money in its education system. And we know that the Jewish people, which has always prided itself on education, actually has a country which has a failing education system. I don’t think there’s any other way to put it. We’re just dropping further and further back, but it’s not because of a lack of investment. So you have a sense of whale hunting also when it comes to education. So what’s the whale? What’s the hunt? What would a proactive candidate for the Prime Minister have to say to the people here “Here’s what I’m going to do. Here’s what I’m not going to do about education” to take your model?So the vision, start with the positive. The vision to make Israel’s education system one of the top three in the world, like our healthcare system. And we can do that, we can. I truly believe we can, even though when you look at the results, it’s quite unimaginable. And the vision goes through decentralizing and giving a lot more power to empowering headmasters. I can tell this from my mom, who’s been a teacher for 30 years. In the past decade, she’s been a headmaster. So giving a lot more flexibility in how you hire and fire teachers. So the vision is It’s actually relatively simple. More so, there’s actually a broad consensus across the political spectrum. I’m talking about the policy institutes, the think tanks, in terms of what a future education system could look like. The whale in education is as follows. There is a lot of power concentrated in specific areas. In education, it’s the education Ministry and the teachers unions. Every year, as long as I can remember on the first of September, I’ll say the 31st of August, nobody knows is school going to start the following day or not, because there may or may not be a strike where the teachers union hasn’t had an agreement with the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Education, And nobody knows.And the bottom line is that over the past decade, we have quadrupled our education budget. In the past decade, we’ve doubled it. People say teachers don’t get paid a lot. They don’t get paid high tech salaries, but it’s the average teacher’s salary is higher than the average salary in Israel, in general. So money is not the issue. We have tried basically almost every reform under the sun. I can name all the different reforms, the five points, math and adding more this. And now people want to do AI in education. There’s all different solutions. We’ve tried everything. And when you look at the results, nothing, actually, recently, we’ve dipped a little bit. And when you speak to Israeli politicians they say “Well, yeah, we can’t do anything because there’s going to be a strike and there’s going to be... What can we do?” Imagine an Israeli leader who comes to the Israeli public and says the following, and says “I promise you that on first of September, school won’t open. I will be the Prime Minister of the Strike. I’m going to initiate a strike. You need to trust me that during these few weeks or few months when your kids are at home, and it’s going to be difficult, I am going to take apart and then build back the best education system that we can build. Now, during that period, it’s going to be difficult. And like I funded people who are evacuated from the north and the south during the war, I’m going to raise my debt to GDP from 71.5% to 72% during that period and fund you. 2000 shekel for every kid. It’s an investment. It’s worthwhile. But at the end, so that going down to go at the end of that system, I am going to totally transformed the Israeli education space.” Now, that is something that you need political capital and political will. You need people who are willing go through that down and up in order to change. That is a fundamental change in the way we see the future of Israel. It’s not a fix, it’s not a tweak, it’s a going to the core and changing the status quo at the deepest level.I would be happy to listen to you for hours, but I want to ask you two broad questions, and we can wrap up. One of them is this, what’s the theory of change? You are a group of young people, about 10 people, I think, is your cadre of people. You are getting a lot of traction. A lot of young Israelis are going on your website, and they’re making what might sound like small financial contributions, but people are getting on board. There’s something about what you’re doing that is speaking to young people. There are events in Israel now where people are getting together. You’re getting some traction. People are actually moved by this. Say something about the theory of change. In other words, your 10 very, very talented, really thoughtful, able, young people who are getting a lot of traction. What moves us from that to a different kind of Israel? It’s clearly not in the results of the elections in October 26th. That’s clear. So what is the plan?So I’ll say briefly about us, the team, and then the theory of change and where this goes from here. Like you said, the team is a very small, nimble team. Top, top people from whether it’s policy, research, data to production and media. And it’s going to stay small, it’s nimble, it’s fast. The people who are joining, like you mentioned, the people are, how can I help? What can I do? How can I be a part? I think it happens because there’s a dynamic of energy. It’s not, let’s lean back, let’s hug it out. Let’s just agree. No, there’s a positive vision. This is where we want to go. It may be difficult along the way, but okay, like I said before, it’s 1948, bring it on. And It’s primarily young people, but funny enough or interestingly enough, there’s a lot of people from, I’d say, ages 50, 55 and up who have grandchildren. It’s called the founding grandchildren, and they see responsibility for their grandkids. And they don’t want their grandkids to leave Israel. They want them to have as good of a life as they did over the past 20 to 30 years. And they feel a little bit of guilt, but a lot of responsibility to say “How can I make it? If I need to now make tough decisions, I will do that for the sake of my grandkids.” So that’s in terms of the movement and who the people joining are. The theory of change is as follows. It goes back actually to the piece that you mentioned. When you called me, you mentioned the piece I wrote a few weeks ago in the Times of Israel, is that 1973 is similar, in a sense, to what we’re living through now. So obviously, the Yom Kippur War was the biggest trauma up until then. The parallel is obvious. And then we had elections very soon after. And in the election soon after, Golda Meir was voted in in a landslide, 51 mandates, that’s unimaginable today.After the colossal failure.After she was the person responsible for the failure. You could do the parallel, but today, when you look at the polls, Very similar. So the trend is very similar. The trend is very similar. You ask yourself, how can that be? How can the Israeli mentality not have shifted to think, how can we not change our perspective? And there’s lots of different answers. But one of them is that people want to, after a trauma, they want to go back to what they’re familiar with. And we can discuss why that is. But the interesting thing is that the three years that followed that government, the Golda Meir and then Rabin government, mainly, she had to resign because of actually her health. Until 1977, nothing happened. Nothing foundational change. There wasn’t any big change. You would have imagined, we’ll change the way Israel thinks about security and the socioeconomic contract. Nothing happens. It takes three full years for the national mindset, the consciousness to shift. And in 1977, we get probably the biggest event in the history of Israeli politics, the big transition, Begin comes to power.Ending 29 years of Labor rule.Exactly. Ending 29 years of Labor rule. I would argue, actually, that Menachem Begin doesn’t do the refounding things he needs to do. And then we get to ‘85 with our back against the wall. And then we do the big issues.His inheritor, Shamir, does it with Pares.Exactly. But it takes time for national consciousness to shift. So drawing the parallel to today. Ideally, the theory of changes that you and I will hear because of the work that we’re doing that’s gaining a lot of traction, also in the larger public, also within a lot of people who move the needle in terms of the national narrative, so it’s people in media and so on, and also with the decision makers themselves, the people who are right now on the ballot, or the ones who are going to be on the ballot in the near future, and slowly totally moving the overton window to what is possible and what we should be doing. So hopefully, we will start hearing people using this type of mentality of like, You know what? It’s time to do the big changes. Let’s go whale hunting. Now, I don’t want to kid myself that that’s going to happen because right now, the campaigns are telling them the opposite. They’re saying, You know what? You know the famous phrase of, 80% of Israelis agree on 80% of the issues. It could be right. I think even if it is right now, it’s the 20% time. Now is the time to do the 20%.
“Alenu” the founding grandchildren, is a 20% organization. If in the next election cycle, we have like the 1974 to 1977 dynamic, where it’s going to be more of the same, whether it’s the existing coalition, where it’s a different coalition with a slightly be, we could say, broader consensus. If what you’re seeking is broad consensus, and that’s everything you’re going after, then you’re not going to do the 20% changes. What happens during those years, Alenu, the founder grandchildren, becomes the movement that will transform Israel at the next, at the 1977 stage.The last thing I want to ask you about is optimism. You’re animated by optimism. Your whole organization is animated by optimism. There are people that are leaving. You guys are not leaving. You say you want your children to grow up here. You want your grandchildren to grow up here. One could without much difficulty, paint a very not rosy picture of what’s happening here. The political stalemate and the Haredi thing is not going anywhere. We have not destroyed Hamas completely, and Iran may or may not be completely destroyed. We might not have not destroyed all of its nuclear capacity and Hezbollah is coming back. You could go on and on and on. But you have a very, very different take on Israel. And I thank God. I would love for you to explain to our listeners the well-spring of the optimism that you and your colleagues have. You have a tremendous amount of optimism about Israel. Tell us why.Yeah. So I’ll actually start with one of the interesting things when we started, Yonatan and I, we took this idea and we did a very thorough research to see what does the Israeli public, where does it meet the Israeli public? And the poll service, a very famous pall servist came back to us. He said “Listen, I’ve never seen something like this in political polling, that this idea has over 80% what’s called favorability on the coalition or the Bibi side, and over 80% favorability on the other side”. He said “I just don’t get it”. Then he went back, I’ve got a research, I’ve got to look into this. He came back and he says “I’ve got It’s called Sober Optimism”. It says this idea of sober optimism is you’re not saying everything’s great, telling people we are now living the dream, total victory. That’s not the story. On the other hand, you’re not saying, oh, everything’s terrible, we’re the worst. We’re never going to get out of this. So just on that point, this idea of sober optimism leads us. That’s one of our key leading concepts. Why am I optimistic? We can attack single issues. So the Haredim and demographics, why I’m very, very cautious there and thinking we need to do deep, deep changes on that aspect.But I’m optimistic on a larger scale because you look at the Western world and there’s one of two challenges. Either there’s no babies, So more people were buried this year in Italy than were born, and you have it over Europe and the West in general. Or you have a different demographic challenge, like in Israel, where you’re having a lot of babies, and maybe let’s say babies who are not the right, and I’m saying this with quotes, the right type of babies. But when you’re a leader and you have to choose one of those two problems, which would you choose? I would very much prefer my problem, the one where, okay, how can I actually leverage this and change this and use this as a point of actually growth and power. But that’s on that issue. On a larger perspective, I think since King Solomon, has there been a sovereign Jewish leader sitting here in Jerusalem with the economic, military, social power that we have today. From economic perspective, you’re looking at all the big figures and the numbers, whether it’s a quarter ago that the head of the bank didn’t lower the interest rate because the shekel is too strong after two years of a war, where a debt to GDP ratio is still below the 75%.
That’s incredible. When you’re looking at the high tech sector and you’re looking at exits, obviously, like Whizz and others, a growing, booming When you look at energy, we have 25 years of energy at a given price. That’s unparalleled in Europe and so on. When you look at academia and the military, myself included, but others, obviously, many people, the fact what is the Israeli military is able to do and has showcased is second to none. The ability to have this when you’re so superior to anyone in the region, imagine this in 1948, where were we then and Where are we now? I think also on a social perspective, people feel like it’s, and it is, I’m not arguing with the sentiment that things are really tough. I’m not arguing with that sentiment. But which other country in the world would go through 10 months of demonstrations in the streets against changing the fabric of the democracy with 10% of the population in the street. Then October seventh, an full on invasion, two years of a war where during the war you have demonstrations against the government for the hostages, against all that going on. During that period, you have social movements, “Alenu” and people taking responsibility, and young people being involved. Where on Earth you have this type of such a strong democratic, civic movement, society. So all these things together, I am extremely optimistic. I’m not shying away from the challenges ahead because they’re big, and that’s why you need to whale hunt and you need to be willing. But if you don’t come of it from this sober perspective and say, not everything is bad. There’s a There’s amazing things to leverage. There’s big challenges ahead. You put those two together and you say, I don’t know if they use this on an American podcast, but the term, yes, we can, it’s a true battle cry. Founding Grandchildren looks back and says, We’ve had founding fathers, mothers. They did it. We’ve had the founding children, 85. They did it. Now it’s up to us.Yes, we can actually is an iconic way to end this, but I think it’s a perfect way to end it because I think even though, obviously, it’s an American phrase and it’s obviously, they say it’s a controversial because of the person that initiated it and all that. But it is. I mean, yes, we can. It’s a very Israeli notion these days. Frankly, it’s not so much an American notion these days. I think there’s a sense there of tremendous change. The sands are shifting. We’re not quite sure what to do. People are bewildered looking around. You have this sense here that there is, I love this idea that this 80% agree about 80% of the issues. Who cares? Let’s focus on the 20%, let’s go whale hunting, let’s break what needs to be broken so we can rebuild it, let’s rethink the central ideas. This has really been growing on all over again, as you say. This is really the work that he and his colleagues did. To hear a young generation of people who are so talented and so thoughtful and so deeply data-based and so on and so forth doing this work after having had the experiences that you and many others had on the seventh and thereafter, really, I think, is a source of tremendous optimism. Somebody here who’s got grandchildren who are not quite old enough to be part of that movement, but very soon will.When we did some of the swag, we got a nice hat and whatever. We took out a baby girl, a onesie. When it says on the back, it says in the front, it says like Elaina, the founding grandchildren, on the back, it says “Saba ze alai”, so “grandpa, it’s on me”. And you see, it’s sweet to see little kids are walking. So I’ll make sure to give you one.We have God willing, a grandchild on the way doing a couple of months. So that’ll be a perfect onesie for him. In any event, this is really very inspiring. It’s very moving, I think, at a time in which the world seems be shifting so dramatically, and people are not quite sure which way is north. It can become overwhelming. And a lot of people are talking. I was just talking to somebody yesterday who was saying that the central issue in her life is how do you raise children in an era when there’s no hope? That was exactly her question. She wants to write a book about that. But you’re saying that’s not true. It’s not an era with no hope. It’s an era with tremendous resources, tremendous reasons for hope. We just need a group of people to actually begin to ask the questions and to do the things that need to be made happen. So Alenu, a brand new organization, a website which right now is only in Hebrew, but is a very different website because it is filled with content. I mean, a lot of these websites are very thin. Yours is filled with content. I think that also says a tremendous amount. Reuven Taub, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and your work with us. We wish you tremendous success.Thank you very much.
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