During the Knesset’s final two weeks, I watched the news scroll across my phone the way I’ve watched red alerts over these last three years: half dread, half habit. First it was a law shielding yeshiva students from arrest for draft evasion, and a bill curbing the attorney general’s authority to bind the government to her rulings. Then came a law mandating gender segregation in graduate and doctoral programs. Before the session’s end the government also passed a law that hands it much greater control over broadcast media, and for a kicker, allocated $77 million for “identity/heritage programs” via the Settlements Ministry. Four years of legislative sessions ending in a sprint that even veteran commentators struggled to describe as anything but a race to the bottom.

What struck me was not the content of any single bill; it was the machinery. Coalition discipline, procedural fluency, goal oriented no matter the cost and the public consensus be damned. Whatever one thinks of where that machinery was pointed, it worked. Laws, no matter how grotesque, suddenly passed in a week.

So I found myself doing something a little indulgent: imagining what that same........

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