Israeli politicians treat the United States as a civilisational mirror — a fellow frontier society, restlessly entrepreneurial, divinely ordained for greatness. When they tire of that comparison, they reach for Singapore: the plucky city-state that punches above its weight through sheer technocratic will. And when the subject turns to social cohesion, the invocation of choice is the Nordics — those serene kingdoms of universal childcare and bicycle lanes.

All flattering. All wrong.

Line up OECD countries across a range of social, economic, and strategic indicators — GDP per capita, income inequality, military expenditure, fertility rates, R&D spending, conscription policy, housing affordability, religious observance, and the share of the economy accounted for by high technology — and the country that most closely resembles Israel is not America, not Singapore, and certainly not Sweden.

The resemblance, once noticed, is difficult to unsee. Both countries were forged in war within three years of each other — Israel in 1948, the Republic of Korea through the crucible of 1950–53. Both remain technically in a state of conflict with neighbours who deny their legitimacy. Both maintain universal conscription: Israel currently requires 32 months from men and two years from women; South Korea takes 18 to 21 months from every able-bodied male. In both societies, military service functions not merely as a security necessity but as a powerful sorting mechanism for talent. Israel’s Unit 8200 and the Talpiot programme channel elite conscripts into the intelligence and technology sectors; South Korea’s military-industrial pipeline feeds Samsung, Hyundai, and a defence-export industry that now matches Israel’s in scale — each country shipped roughly $13 billion in arms in 2023.

Both achieved prosperity through interventionist states directing finance and investment during their miracle decades, then pivoted toward high-technology economies. Today, Israel spends 6.3% of GDP on R&D, the highest in the OECD. South Korea spends roughly 5% — the second highest. Bloomberg’s innovation index ranks both among the world’s most innovative economies. Both produce a wildly disproportionate number of patents and start-ups relative to their populations.

Yet neither country’s prosperity is evenly shared. Israel’s Gini coefficient hovers around 0.37, among the highest in the OECD. South Korea’s, at roughly 0.32, looks more moderate — until you account for wealth concentration driven by chaebol dominance and Seoul property prices, which tell a harsher story than the income Gini alone. In both countries, a dazzling technology sector coexists with housing costs that have become a defining political grievance. Young Israelis in Tel Aviv and young Koreans in Seoul share remarkably similar complaints: astronomical apartment prices, military service that delays career entry by years, and a sense that the economic ladder has been pulled up by the generation above them.

The demographic picture contains the comparison’s most striking paradox. Israel’s fertility rate of roughly 3.0 is the highest in the OECD. South Korea’s 0.75 is the lowest on earth. Yet the extremes produce the same political condition: demography as existential strategy. Israel worries about maintaining Jewish demographic preponderance; South Korea worries about maintaining a population large enough to staff its military and fund its pension system. The highest and lowest fertility rates in the developed world generate the same sleepless nights in the same defence ministries.

Religious and cultural conservatism exerts an outsized influence on politics in both nations, though in different registers. Israel’s ultra-Orthodox parties wield coalition leverage far beyond their numbers. South Korea’s large and politically mobilised Protestant churches — nearly a third of the population identifies as Christian — shape debates on North Korea policy, family values, and social morality with an intensity that mirrors the Haredi grip on Israeli coalition arithmetic. In both countries, a secular, cosmopolitan elite in the dominant metropolitan centre exists in sharp tension with more traditional communities elsewhere.

Even the geopolitical posture rhymes. Both are American treaty allies surrounded by larger, often hostile neighbours. Both depend on Washington’s security umbrella while cultivating strategic autonomy through indigenous defence industries. Both are democracies whose internal political cultures are fractious, polarised, and prone to dramatic constitutional crises — Israel’s 2023 judicial-overhaul protests and South Korea’s 2024 martial-law debacle, which ended last week with a life sentence for the former president, could have been scripted as companion episodes.

So why do Israeli politicians never mention South Korea? For the same reason British politicians never mentioned Spain: the comparison offers no useful mythology. America flatters Israel’s self-image as a Western liberal democracy and innovation superpower. Singapore flatters its technocratic ambitions. South Korea, by contrast, holds up an uncomfortably accurate mirror — a society of extraordinary achievement shadowed by inequality, demographic anxiety, housing crises, and deep political polarisation.

In the options-pricing framework I have applied elsewhere to alliance behaviour, Israeli policymakers are exercising a call option on idealised comparators — paying a premium for the right to claim kinship with the most flattering possible peers — while leaving the more informative put option, the hedge against self-delusion, unexercised. The data says Seoul. The heart says Palo Alto. Policymakers, as usual, follow the heart.

The Economist’s recent analysis showing that Britain’s true twin is Spain, not Denmark, provoked useful discomfort in Westminster. Israel could use a similar shock. If Israeli housing ministers want to understand runaway property prices in a conscription society, they should study Seoul, not San Francisco. If anyone in Jerusalem wants to understand what happens when judicial crises collide with security emergencies in a polarised democracy, they need only look at what just unfolded on the Korean peninsula.

The country most similar to Israel is not the shining city on a hill. It is the shining city on a peninsula — surrounded by enemies, armed to the teeth, brilliantly innovative, deeply unequal, and increasingly unsure about what comes next.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)