The Terrorists' Secret Advantage Was Israel's 'Idiocracy' | Opinion

In the 2006 film "Idiocracy," society in 500 years is dysfunctional because the best and the brightest do not much reproduce. Crops are irrigated with a sports drink. A clogged toilet leaves all the experts stumped. Most people speak at a grade-school level, the president is a former professional wrestler and critical thinking is extinct. In real life, the timeline has sped up—we no longer have 500 years to get our act together, and that can have dire consequences—as we saw in Israel this month.

The contours of idiocracy are coming into view as populist politicians all over the world are elevated by a fashion for disdaining experts, "elites," and education. Possible explanations for this range from the seemingly endless complexity of every issue to mass migrations of jobs and populations. The educated have fewer children, and social media echo-chambers keep everyone in their lane, suppressing the intellectual mobility that society needs to thrive.

Those who see an emergency are treated as hysterics—or worse yet, elitists. The general sense is that we'll muddle through somehow.

And so it comes to pass that a brutish conman like former President Donald Trump could be elevated to the White House, try to steal the 2020 election and now be leading in the polls again. So it is that we got Brexit, in which Brits voted to cut themselves off from their main market because of a campaign built on fake economics; to the economists, Brexiteer Michael Gove declared: "The people have had enough of experts!" He was right, and so were the experts, and the people have paid dearly for their mistake.

In South America, after neighboring Brazil endured several years of nonsense under climate-change denier former President Jair Bolsonaro, Argentina now has its own rising populist: one Javier Milei, who wants to eliminate the ministries of Health, Education, Social Development and Science.

But Israel has set the gold standard.

The country of 10 million boasts stellar achievements. It hoovers in Nobel Prizes and ships out Netflix hits. In 2021 its innovative tech sector attracted venture capital at about half the level of all of Europe – with a population 40 times smaller. In 2022, it boasted a higher per capita GDP than Germany, Britain, or France. And yet that same year it succumbed to total idiocracy: Israelis handed power to a motley crew that lined up behind Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, then and now facing trial for bribery.

In the government that resulted, as in the Mike Judge film, the only qualification appeared to be incompetence.

The finance ministry was handed to a religious fanatic who believes the economy should be run by the laws of the Torah, and for good measure calls himself a "proud homophobe" and wants to segregate Jews and Arabs in maternity wards. Since his main goal is oppression of the Palestinians, he was also put in charge of the West Bank, as if Israel had no interest in keeping that front quiet.

A leading rabble-rouser who boasts of multiple convictions, including for supporting terror groups, was awarded his least suitable station in the world: national security minister. Another extremist who hates the media was made communications minister. And the country's leading enemy of the rule of law was made minister of justice.

The coalition immediately started to wreck the place. Unprecedented sums were funneled to fervently religious schools that refuse to teach students math, science, English, and world history. And more than 200 laws were tabled to wipe out judicial overview of the government, including one that would have allowed the coalition to bar the opposition from running for office.

The Israelis who account for almost the entirety of the GDP have been protesting all year. Many warned that the Putinization effort created such toxic divisions that Israel's sworn enemies would be tempted to attack. These warnings, including by the country's leading past and present security chiefs, were ignored. Critics—from combat pilots to startup CEOs—were invited to leave the country by "Cabinet members" who might struggle to find China on the map. The currency fell by 20 percent, but jubilant disdain for the "elites" drowned out all else, a surefire sign of idiocracy at work.

The piper was paid at 6:30 a.m. on Oct. 7.

On that morning, almost 2,000 Hamas terrorists from Gaza, perhaps indeed finding Israel's projection of weakness too tempting to ignore, busted through Israel's "security fence," which the government seems to have forgotten to defend. For long hours they ran riot in a large area, committing one of the heinous massacres of modern history, in the most murderous day for Jews since the Holocaust. They burned babies to death, raped, and disemboweled, mowed down entire families and dragged more than 200 people—old women, little children, young couples who had been at a music festival—back to Gaza unimpeded.

The horror was an intelligence and security breakdown, and it obliterated the government's notion that having terrorists run Gaza was actually a good idea, because it weakened the more moderate Palestinians, limiting their rule to islands of autonomy in the West Bank. Indeed, the military was overextended in the West Bank on Oct. 7, dealing with the mess the radical settlers had whipped up, leaving the Gaza border wide open.

Idiocracy didn't work out too well. Polls suggest remorse for prior votes, with three-quarters of respondents wanting Netanyahu to resign. But the awakening comes too late for the 1,400 who lost their lives—and for the even greater number of Gazans who have since been killed as human shields in Israel's effort to finally destroy Hamas.

A disaster this big focuses the mind, and invites us to reflect. Could there be a better way?

Fear that democracy might lead to idiocracy goes back to the beginning. Plato, in The Republic, so feared the naked will of the masses that he argued education and philosophical training must be required for those in power. John Stuart Mill, the 19th-century philosopher, emphasized the need for an educated and enlightened society to ensure liberty does not descend into chaos or tyranny. And George Orwell, in 1984 and Animal Farm, illustrated the dangers of a suppressing intellectualism.

Sure, there could be an argument for preferring the simple things. A minimalistic life, with fewer regulations and complications, might yield a more straightforward existence. If no one is striving to achieve higher education, advanced careers, or social status, there's less anxiety. When everyone is equally clueless (the kind of society Israel's coalition was furthering) there might be less inequality too—a sinking tide that keeps all ships equally mired in the sand. No jealousies, and perhaps better mental health.

Even if that sounds appealing, events in Israel offer stark illustration of a flip side that should be accepted as axiomatic: if you elevate fools and incompetents, you will get foolishness and incompetence and that can lead to tragedy.

In this way, Israel perhaps has finally shined a light unto the nations, as it long claimed it would. This is a massive service to humanity, perhaps to Israel's greatest ally most of all. As Americans prepare to make tough choices in 2024, they should consider themselves forewarned.

Dan Perry is managing partner of the New York-based communications firm Thunder11. He is the former Cairo-based Middle East editor and London-based Europe/Africa editor of the Associated Press. Follow him at danperry.substack.com.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.