Western observers often approach Israeli politics with a sense of bewilderment, even disdain. Parties split and recombine. Leaders refuse to exit the stage. Elections come and go with exhausting frequency. Coalitions collapse, resurrect, and collapse again. To the outsider, the system looks broken—almost farcical.
Yet as Elliot Kaufman’s review of Amit Segal’s A Call at 4 a.m. makes clear, what appears to be dysfunction is also a mirror of Israel’s history, anxieties, and moral seriousness. Israel’s politics are not chaotic because Israelis are unserious. They are chaotic because Israelis are deadly serious—about security, identity, and survival.
Segal’s great contribution is not merely to recount the personalities of modern Israeli politics, but to expose the tragic pattern beneath them: leaders who cannot let go, parties that fracture under the weight of existential decisions, and a public that punishes failure in security more harshly than any other sin. In Israel, corruption can be survived. Economic mismanagement can be forgiven. Strategic blindness cannot.
That reality explains why Israel never produced a George Washington. David Ben-Gurion, the country’s founding giant, did not quietly step aside after stabilizing the state. He returned, schemed, split parties, and destabilized his own successors. But Ben-Gurion’s inability to leave the stage was not merely ego. It reflected a deeper truth: Israel was never allowed the luxury of political finality. Every decision felt provisional because history itself remained unresolved.
The 1973 Yom Kippur War exposed this merciless standard. Golda Meir’s Labor movement did not fall because it was corrupt or ideologically spent, but because it failed in its most sacred duty. As Segal observes, Israelis awoke to discover that the guardians had been asleep. That breach of trust ended Labor’s hegemony and opened the door to Menachem Begin and the Likud—not as an ideological accident, but as a moral reckoning.
Begin’s revolution was not only political but sociological. By forging an alliance with Jews from Middle Eastern and North African backgrounds long marginalized by the Labor elite, he reshaped Israeli democracy. The famous lament that “the Jews defeated the Israelis” revealed more about Labor’s condescension than about Likud’s success. Israeli politics, Segal shows, is inseparable from Israel’s internal struggle over whose story counts.
The book is equally unsparing toward the right. The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin did not produce the right-wing victory his killer imagined. Instead, it silenced protest and cleared the path for the Oslo process. Only the subsequent wave of Palestinian suicide bombings revived the Israeli right—again underscoring Segal’s central thesis: ideology matters less in Israel than results. Israelis do not reward intentions. They reward outcomes.
Perhaps the most devastating portrait Segal paints is of Israel’s center. One-man parties, hollow movements, and leaders whose primary ideology is opposition to Benjamin Netanyahu have failed to offer a coherent alternative vision. The center’s refusal to choose—peace or security, secularism or tradition—has left it perpetually fragile. Netanyahu’s longevity is less a testament to his brilliance than to his opponents’ emptiness.
And yet Segal, and Kaufman after him, resist caricature. Netanyahu survives not because Israelis “believe” him, but because they do not fully believe anyone else either. In a nation shaped by broken promises—from enemies and allies alike—skepticism becomes a civic virtue.
Western critics often ask why Israeli politics feels so unstable. Segal’s answer, implicit but unmistakable, is that Israel lives in permanent moral emergency. Every election is haunted by war, terror, and memory. Every coalition carries the weight of life-and-death consequence. Stability, in such a context, may be the greater illusion.
A Call at 4 a.m. is not merely a history of Israeli politics. It is a reminder that democracy under existential threat will never look tidy. Israel’s political system may frustrate outsiders—but it reflects a society that refuses to stop arguing about its future, precisely because that future is never guaranteed.
In that sense, Israel’s politics are not a failure of democracy. They are democracy under fire—and still standing.