Israel’s ballot box or Pandora’s box? - opinion

In 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.

As Israelis approach the ballot box, I wonder whether we are about to open our own Pandora’s box. Or whether it has already been opened.

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.

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.

What happens when a democracy must make decisions essential to its survival while the cognitive faculties required to make them are under sustained assault?

In my Jerusalem Post column, “When journalism fails, democracy fails,” 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.

The patient is Israel.

Millions of Israelis are being asked to make consequential decisions while immersed in accusations, selective reporting, propaganda, outrage, and increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence.

We consume information constantly. But are we better informed?

In “The biggest threat to Israel is mass cognitive warfare,” I explored how dopamine-driven digital platforms exploit our appetite for stimulation, rewarding emotional reactions over understanding.

Outrage attracts engagement. Certainty is rewarded. Nuance struggles to survive.

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.

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.

When citizens cannot agree on what happened yesterday, how can they intelligently decide what should happen tomorrow?

Israel possesses formidable military capabilities. Yet tanks, fighter jets, and missile defenses cannot protect a society against every form of cognitive manipulation.

Iran, Russia, 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.

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.

This is the eighth front.

Unlike a conventional battlefield, it has no clear border. It reaches our homes, smartphones, schools, newsrooms and political conversations.

A nation can prevail militarily while undermining the cohesion needed to sustain that victory.

Our disagreements are real. Israelis differ over leadership, accountability, judicial authority, religion and state, military service, national security and relations with the world.

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.

The people voting differently from us are not foreign armies.

They are our brothers and sisters, even though this is not always an easy pill to swallow.

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.

Whatever government emerges, Israelis will still need one another.

We cannot defend our country against external enemies while treating half our population as an internal enemy.

That does not mean excusing wrongdoing or abandoning convictions. It means recognizing that democratic legitimacy cannot depend on our preferred candidate winning.

Another illusion poisons our political discourse: that replacing or retaining a government can immediately transform the country’s strategic circumstances.

Israel is not a speedboat capable of turning sharply with one movement of the wheel.

It is an enormous ship carrying millions of people through dangerous waters, subject to powerful currents, accumulated momentum and forces beyond its captain’s control.

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.

A new government cannot instantly eliminate Iran’s capabilities or ambitions. A different foreign minister cannot reverse decades of international narratives. Exceptional access to one American president cannot guarantee bipartisan support for the next generation.

Some turns may take months, others years or decades. Some may prove impossible without changes beyond our shores.

This is not an argument for paralysis or the status quo. It is an argument for strategic realism.

Ask candidates not merely where they would steer the ship, but how they would execute the turn, what resistance they expect, what sacrifices it requires, and how long it will take.

A captain promising an impossible turn may be more dangerous than one acknowledging the difficult navigation ahead.

Viktor Frankl, the Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist, repeatedly invoked Nietzsche’s observation that a person with a compelling why can endure almost any how.

Frankl understood that resilience depends not simply on surviving hardship but on preserving meaning and purpose.

Israel needs to rediscover its collective why.

Not the why of Netanyahu or his opponents. Not of religious versus secular, Right versus Left, coalition vs opposition.

The why that allows a diverse people to remain a nation despite profound disagreements. The why that recognizes Israel as a shared home whose citizens must determine its direction peacefully.

Without that common purpose, every election risks becoming an existential confrontation. With it, even bitter political defeats remain survivable, because the nation is larger than any government.

Perhaps Israelis should approach this election as soldiers preparing for a consequential mission.

Not a battle against one another, but a struggle against fear, anger, exhaustion, manipulation, and overconfidence.

Do not enter the voting booth drunk on hatred.

Do not enter intoxicated by propaganda, selective journalism, viral outrage, or the false certainty that your side possesses every answer.

Question what you believe. Examine competing evidence. Distinguish promises from executable plans. Consider consequences beyond the next electoral cycle.

Ask not merely whom you want to win, but what kind of country your children will inherit.

And remember: even the most decisive electoral victory cannot eliminate the need to live together afterward.

Pandora’s tragedy was that once the evil forces escaped, they could not simply be returned to their box.

Israel’s tragedy would be to allow political divisions and cognitive vulnerabilities to become more dangerous than the election itself.

But unlike Pandora, we still possess the capacity to choose our response.

The ballot box cannot defeat Iran, repair journalism, reverse polarization, or instantly redirect the enormous ship called Israel.

It can, however, affirm our commitment to resolve differences through democratic institutions rather than hatred, intimidation, or violence.

Israel’s democracy is not simply another front to defend. Our ability to manage disagreement peacefully is part of the national strength on which every other front depends.

The question is no longer simply who emerges victorious when Israel opens its ballot box.

The question is whether, after all the hate and fears, we have allowed to escape that ballot box before election day, we will still find hope inside, that our collective why is still strong and our democracy is stable.

The writer is a global strategist and a strategic adviser at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs. Follow him on X: @jeffkahn2020