The major institutions built to serve the people throughout the West have failed badly.
Just shy of one year from my arrival in Israel in 1992, I experienced my first Israel Independence Day. I didn’t know then that my job was to nurse a barbecue or go to the beach to watch flyovers of the Israel Air Force (IAF) and El-Al. Instead, I went to the lab. A friend also came in, and I am sure we were the only people on the Hebrew University campus. We turned on the noon news broadcast from the Voice of Israel. Ehud Barak spoke. He was the most decorated soldier in Israel’s history and, at the time, the chief of general staff. It was considered a nearly done deal that he would become prime minister one day. Barak talked about the Holocaust and that such terrible things could not happen again because of the strength of the IDF. My friend and I looked at each other, but we said nothing. Just as An A-10 tank killer is a massive Gatling gun with a plane built around it, Israel is the IDF with a society built around it. The main job of Israel and its armed forces has been to make sure that Jews were not slaughtered en masse again.
When the October 7th pogrom took place, the concept that Jews could not be killed in huge numbers went poof. Those in positions of power are the last ones who want a complete and impartial investigation of what went wrong, however necessary such a cathartic action is. At the end of last week it was revealed that it took the IDF forces 6 hours to reach Kibbutz Nir Oz. By the time they arrived, the previous terrorists were already long gone. I once drove from San Diego to Las Vegas in six hours. If you start at the Israel-Lebanon border and drive six hours south, you will not reach the southern port of Eilat, but you’ll be pretty close. How can it take six hours for an army in a small country to reach people who are being butchered wholesale? Where was the Israel Air Force? Why were they bombing deep in Gaza and not in the region between the security fence and Israeli towns and kibbutzim? I try to imagine those people facing death and being certain that the cavalry was coming over the hill, but they never arrived.
The short answer as to what went wrong is institutional rot. The IDF is the diamond of the Israeli establishment. However, it has undergone the same changes every institution in the West has experienced. Whether it be a land-grant university in the Midwest or NATO, every institution is initially set up with a very lofty description of its purpose. And while in the first few years, it may actually strive to reach its goals of training students or protecting Europe, after some time, every institution turns to a new primary goal: self-preservation. Instead of advancing some cause promised to the people who funded and supported the new institution that was to work on its behalf, the institution focuses on raising money and keeping its top people in place. Look at some of the emails from Fauci & Friends. Their only goals during COVID-19 were not to save people but to control the population and keep people from figuring out that the virus came out of the Chinese institute he funded. During the brutal fights over the judiciary in Israel, many reserve pilots—mostly from lefty families—refused to fly. They were making political statements through their IAF status. When they finally decided to fly again, the technicians from humble backgrounds refused to fuel or bring bombs to the planes. So when the pogrom took place in southern Israel, God said to them: “Now, you will work together!”
Wherever we look in the West, we see institutional rot. Elon Musk and his DOGE posse daily show us waste and double-dealing in governmental expenditures. I once saw the founding document of Columbia University. It was, of course, inspirational. Look at Columbia today: Jihad Central. Once institutions lose their way and focus on survival and the well-being of their top echelon, their collapse is either fast or slow. And it’s not just public institutions. Hollywood and sports for generations served the primary task of letting Americans take their minds off their lives for a few hours before having to go back to work, family, or whatever else was on their plates. Then Hollywood had to make movies about 80-pound women throwing 250-pound guys around, and sports teams had to take a knee for the anthem of the country that made them filthy rich.
Ultimately, Pete Hegseth, Bobby Kennedy, Jr., Elon Musk, and others working with Donald Trump are trying to return their charges to their core missions. When one sees a rusty destroyer coming into San Diego Bay or NASA unable to get its astronauts home, you realize that the federal agencies don’t work anymore. FEMA had to blow off Trump supporters in need in North Carolina? How far have we fallen? Institutions can be reformed, but they need dedicated leadership and constant auditing. I once asked on these pages how to keep DOGE going beyond the current Trump administration. Someone wrote that, in the end, it would become corrupt like other Washington institutions. I don’t want to be so pessimistic, but without the proper leadership and constant external monitoring, he is probably right. One Democratic administration, and it would be the end of the game.
Israel will have to eventually get to the painful details of what went wrong in the years leading up to October 7th. The SHABAK, the highly feared internal police/intelligence unit, was supposed to be in charge of managing Gaza. There were warnings, such as hundreds of Israeli SIM cards being activated the night before the attack and unusual activity reported on the border fence. But the warnings were ignored or not sent fully up the chain of command. How could the IDF not have assets close to the border? Where were the IAF planes that were so effective after October 8th? There are lots of questions and names that need to be put forth for who made the catastrophic moves or decisions that led to 1,200 dead and 250 kidnapped. Does Israel have the courage to face its multiple institutional failures that allowed for industrial-scale mass murder? I am not sure.
Institutional rot in the West is among the greatest threats to Democracy and freedom. When European leaders are more concerned with diktats from the World Economic Forum than the livelihoods of their farmers, then the system is out of balance. What of those thousands of British girls abused by Pakistani men: the police, social services, and politicians dropped their supposed care for the public. Did they sacrifice them on the altar of diversity? Institutional rot means that nobody answers when you call a government office in Israel during its stated business hours. It means that veterans in the US receive fewer benefits than illegal aliens. If Donald Trump leaves office and the institutions of the United States once again serve "we the people," he will have done a great public service.