The real threat to Israel is not in the missiles. The invisible destruction is coming from within.
While Israel’s enemies, Iran and Turkey, invest in education, Israel is funding the deepening of ignorance and poverty.
And where is the opposition? Does it understand the abyss into which the country is sinking?
For years now, Professor Dan Ben-David has been showing everyone his presentations.
Opening his laptop, he explains: here is the growth rate of the ultra-Orthodox population, here are the reading and math test results, and here is the share of scientists, doctors, and engineers who form the foundation of Israel’s prosperity.
The presentation is constantly updated with new data, and its findings pass from mouth to mouth.
“Listen, just don’t fall into despair the next time you sit through one of Dan Ben-David’s lectures. I saw the presentation recently and it crushed my spirits,” one senior politician told me.
Professor Ben-David heads the Shoresh Institution for Socioeconomic Research and is a researcher at Tel Aviv University.
His core arguments have not changed in two decades.
One of them is this:
“A third-world state will not be able to maintain and finance a first-world army.”
Unfortunately, his warnings are now coming true one after another.
He explained how all of Israel depends on 0.3% of its population, and how educated people are capable of emigrating.
And now the data from Professor Itai Ater and others illustrates a mass departure from Israel over the past two years, above all among highly educated Israelis and young families.
Ben-David warned about the unchecked growth of the ultra-Orthodox sector, where basic school subjects are not taught and military service is avoided, but he was told that falling birthrates would soon affect that sector too.
It did not happen.
I met with Ben-David during the first week of the war with Iran, and he showed me new data.
Some of it is presented here.
The growth rate of the ultra-Orthodox population is not just failing to slow down, it is actually rising compared with the pre-COVID period, while the rest of Israel’s population is having fewer children.
Cities that have become ultra-Orthodox, whether Jerusalem or Arad, are seeing a drop in living standards and a decline in their place on the socioeconomic scale.
And it is happening very quickly.
The reasons are clear:
ultra-Orthodox society does not receive the academic education that is considered the route to higher incomes;
men often do not work, at least not officially;
and large numbers of children lead to higher rates of poverty and deprivation.
In the 50-54 age group, ultra-Orthodox Jews make up about 6% of Israel’s population.
Among those born in 2019-2023, they make up more than 25%.
In 2000, one in five students in Arad was ultra-Orthodox.
In 2024, it was already three out of every five. In fact, three and a half.
This week the government decided to transfer 5 billion shekels, and in practice 6 billion, to sectoral coalition needs, above all to ultra-Orthodox educational institutions and settlements.
The decision was entirely predictable, and sources in Likud had been talking about it for about two months.
The draft law, they predicted, would never pass.
There would be no draft law, but there would be a budget, one in which the ultra-Orthodox would receive “compensation” for the “injustice” done to them by sanctions on draft dodgers.
This is how Netanyahu and Smotrich announced the death of the draft law, immediately after sending billions to the ultra-Orthodox, while imposing broad budget cuts across government ministries.
Education, healthcare, and infrastructure budgets were cut for everyone in order to finance the security addition, funds for the ultra-Orthodox, and the ministries of Orit Strock and Amichai Eliyahu.
At the next stage, ultra-Orthodox politicians will probably return to the government.
That matters very much to them.
They want to be there when it becomes a transitional government, and especially if no one is able to form a coalition after elections.
In essence, Israel is in the middle of a social experiment unprecedented in the history of nations.
For years, it has encouraged within a community suffering from glaring poverty and low levels of education a rejection of military service and employment, while also encouraging childbirth.
The victims of that experiment are, first of all, the ultra-Orthodox themselves, whose leaders lock them into a legal trap of poverty and ignorance.
Children, boys and girls, who could have succeeded and prospered while remaining fully ultra-Orthodox in their religious worldview, could also have gone on to work in well-paid and in-demand professions in the modern world.
Israel is at war with Iran. It identifies Turkey as a future threat.
The first is a dark theocracy, while the second is moving in that direction.
And yet in both countries there is a strong emphasis on scientific education, particularly in Turkey, where this is in many ways a core idea of Islamist schooling.
There are no religious streams there that receive exemptions from studying mathematics or chemistry, for example.
Unlike Israel, these are large countries with huge populations.
How many words does it take to say that Israel is shooting itself in both knees, paving its own path to self-destruction, marching into folly on a scale that may have no parallel?
A country that sees enormous success from its technological capabilities and receives major profits from them is subsidizing ignorance and hatred for state institutions, along with the destructive project of the Religious Zionism party to forcibly Balkanize Judea and Samaria.
About twenty years ago, in a café in Caesarea, Benjamin Netanyahu boasted to me about declining birthrates thanks to the cuts to benefits that he had carried out.
Today, that clearly no longer matters to him.
But the truly serious part is that the opposition does not grasp the critical moment either.
Smart political aides and strategic advisers are thinking about the next coalition.
For them, Ben-David and his data are a tool for poaching votes from religious Zionists, not an alarm bell about Israel’s fate.
There are signs of change:
Naftali Bennett, Avigdor Lieberman, Yair Lapid, and Gadi Eisenkot, whose program is more coherent than the others, all promise to end any funding for schools that do not teach the core curriculum.
Some of them speak only about state schools, including ultra-Orthodox ones.
That is only one component, and it is nowhere near enough to break the deep mechanism of political bosses and rabbinic dynasties.
It is doubtful that the leaders of the opposition understand the enormous force of the exponential demographic trend.
They still have not decided to burn the bridge to coalition deals with the ultra-Orthodox parties, and they keep trying to bargain with reality while time is running out, or may already have run out.