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(Illustrative) A man casts his ballot at a voting station on the morning of the municipal elections, in Ashdod, February 27, 2024 (credit: Liron Moldovan\/Flash90)The intoxicated electorate<\/p>\nIn Greek mythology, Pandora opened a mysterious box, unleashing suffering and misfortune upon humanity. Horrified, she slammed it shut. But the forces had escaped. Only hope remained inside.<\/p>\n
As Israelis approach the ballot box, I wonder whether we are about to open our own Pandora\u2019s box. Or whether it has already been opened.<\/p>\n
Israel is not entering an ordinary election. We are a nation confronting eight interconnected fronts of conflict: military, diplomatic, political, and cognitive. We face Iran and its proxies, international delegitimization, uncertain alliances, and profound internal divisions.<\/p>\n
Yet the greatest danger may lie in our diminishing ability to distinguish truth from lies, disagreement from hatred, and political competition from a struggle against our own brothers and sisters.<\/p>\n
What happens when a democracy must make decisions essential to its survival while the cognitive faculties required to make them are under sustained assault?<\/p>\n
(Illustrative) A man casts his ballot at a voting station on the morning of the municipal elections, in Ashdod, February 27, 2024 (credit: Liron Moldovan\/Flash90)The intoxicated electorate<\/p>\n
In my Jerusalem Post column, \u201cWhen journalism fails, democracy fails,\u201d I described a family awaiting news of a loved one undergoing lifesaving surgery. The surgeon emerges needing an urgent decision. But the family, overwhelmed by anxiety, has become intoxicated. Nobody is capable of sound judgment.<\/p>\n
The patient is Israel.<\/p>\n
Millions of Israelis are being asked to make consequential decisions while immersed in accusations, selective reporting, propaganda, outrage, and increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n
We consume information constantly. But are we better informed?<\/p>\n
In \u201cThe biggest threat to Israel is mass cognitive warfare,\u201d I explored how dopamine-driven digital platforms exploit our appetite for stimulation, rewarding emotional reactions over understanding.<\/p>\n
Outrage attracts engagement. Certainty is rewarded. Nuance struggles to survive.<\/p>\n
Not every social media user is addicted, nor is every voter incapable of independent thought. But the architecture of our information environment can reinforce vulnerabilities that make careful political judgment harder.<\/p>\n
AI adds fabricated voices, synthetic images, and manipulated videos, enabling deception at extraordinary speed. Traditional journalism, once expected to distinguish fact from opinion, increasingly competes in the same attention economy<\/a>.<\/p>\n When citizens cannot agree on what happened yesterday, how can they intelligently decide what should happen tomorrow?<\/p>\n The eighth front comes home<\/p>\n Israel possesses formidable military capabilities. Yet tanks, fighter jets, and missile defenses cannot protect a society against every form of cognitive manipulation.<\/p>\n Iran, Russia<\/a>, China, Qatar, and other actors have differing interests and methods. Their influence activities must be assessed individually, not assumed to be a single coordinated conspiracy, but rather a global ecosystem focused against Israel. Nevertheless, hostile information operations are exploiting these same internal divisions.<\/p>\n An adversary need not persuade Israelis to embrace its ideology. It may be enough to deepen mistrust, weaken institutional credibility and encourage Israelis to regard one another as enemies.<\/p>\n This is the eighth front.<\/p>\n Unlike a conventional battlefield, it has no clear border. It reaches our homes, smartphones, schools, newsrooms and political conversations.<\/p>\n A nation can prevail militarily while undermining the cohesion needed to sustain that victory.<\/p>\n Brothers and sisters, not enemies<\/p>\n Our disagreements are real. Israelis differ over leadership, accountability, judicial authority, religion and state, military service, national security and relations with the world.<\/p>\n These questions deserve serious debate. But something dangerous happens when disagreement becomes delegitimization: every opponent becomes a traitor and electoral defeat is portrayed as national extinction.<\/p>\n The people voting differently from us are not foreign armies.<\/p>\n They are our brothers and sisters, even though this is not always an easy pill to swallow.<\/p>\n Our children go to the same hospitals and confront the same emergencies, may serve in the same military, may attend the same universities, may work in the same companies, but for sure all of our children are dependent on a strong, united Israel.<\/p>\n Whatever government emerges, Israelis will still need one another.<\/p>\n We cannot defend our country against external enemies while treating half our population as an internal enemy.<\/p>\n That does not mean excusing wrongdoing or abandoning convictions. It means recognizing that democratic legitimacy cannot depend on our preferred candidate winning.<\/p>\n The enormous ship called Israel<\/p>\n Another illusion poisons our political discourse: that replacing or retaining a government can immediately transform the country\u2019s strategic circumstances.<\/p>\n Israel is not a speedboat capable of turning sharply with one movement of the wheel.<\/p>\n It is an enormous ship carrying millions of people through dangerous waters, subject to powerful currents, accumulated momentum and forces beyond its captain\u2019s control.<\/p>\n Consider ultra-Orthodox conscription. No campaign promise can instantly resolve generations of religious, educational and institutional realities. Meaningful change demands military capacity, enforceable policies, accommodations and time.<\/p>\n