Every political system is, fundamentally, a contract between governors and governed. The terms of that contract are not fixed by ideology or culture. They are set by an underlying structure of power, and shifting a single variable can flip the entire equilibrium from coercion to consent, or back again.

Political systems settle where the marginal cost of coercion equals the marginal cost of cooperation. Four variables set that ratio: the diffusion of military capability, the availability of exit options, the transparency of information, and the mobility of capital. When all four favour the governed, consent emerges. When all four favour the governors, extraction dominates. Most systems sit somewhere in between — and it is the movement of these variables, not the labels attached to constitutions, that determines which direction they travel.

Israel is one of the most analytically instructive cases in the world, because the four variables pull in sharply different directions, often simultaneously, and have shifted dramatically since 2023. What follows is an application of the framework to three distinct phases: pre-2023, the judicial reform crisis, and the post-October 7 landscape.

Military Dependence: Conditional Coercive Capacity

Israel is one of the few democracies where military capability is genuinely dispersed across the civilian population. Near-universal conscription — covering Jewish, Druze, and Circassian citizens, with a bitterly contested exemption for ultra-Orthodox men — and a massive reservist system mean that the governed are, in large part, the military. The state retains overwhelming coercive capacity through its air force command, intelligence hierarchy, and strategic deterrent capability — but that capacity is conditional on the voluntary participation of the reservist population that staffs it.

This became operationally decisive during the 2023 judicial reform crisis, when over a thousand Air Force reservists — including more than four hundred pilots — along with intelligence and cyber specialists announced they would refuse to serve if the government overrode judicial independence. The governors discovered that they could not simultaneously dismantle institutional checks and maintain the security apparatus. Functional dependence on the governed checked executive overreach more effectively than any court ruling.

Post-October 7, this conditional dependence deepened. Armed civilian security squads expanded from 70 to over 800, and the state’s survival depended on voluntary mass mobilisation. A war that might have centralised power in........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)