Amit Segal is having a moment. A longtime TV reporter for Israel’s Channel 12 and print journalist for Yediot Ahronot, the country’s most widely circulated newspaper, Segal burst into the English-speaking spotlight courtesy of multiple post–October 7 appearances on Dan Senor’s Call Me Back podcast, numerous op-eds in the Free Press, the Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere, and a popular Substack aimed at a foreign audience. He presents a cogent, witty, and likeable center-right perspective, often in friendly contrast to center-left sparring partners like Yediot’s Nadav Eyal, and he comes across as a happy warrior, a smiling avatar of mainstream, security-minded Israelis.
His latest book follows this blueprint, cheerfully but critically examining the history of leadership (and, at times, lack thereof) in the Israeli prime ministerial class. A Call at 4 AM is about some of the consequential choices of Israel’s premiers during the country’s eight-decade-long existence. “My aim,” Segal writes, “is to describe the political decisions that they made,” like the ones that helped create Israel’s byzantine electoral system under the guidance of its first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion. In seating the 120 members of their Knesset, Israelis elect by party, not geography, a method used by Slovakia and the Netherlands and no other land on earth. And so, in Israel, Segal contends, “the movement is more important than the man; the party more important than the individual.”
Segal calculates that Israel, in its first 72 years, wasted more than 11 years on elections and coalition negotiations. The opportunity costs are no less steep. Had the 1969 elections been held on a regional basis, Ben-Gurion’s party would have won an astounding 103 seats. In 2020, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party would have secured 92 mandates. Equally striking is “the massive gulf between public opinion on matters of religion and state,” the result of the perpetual horse-trading created by Ben-Gurion.
Still, security questions dominate Israeli politics and have for half a century. The question that means the most to voters is this: “When the red telephone rings at 4:00 a.m., who should answer?” That notion, which provided Segal with his title, arguably originated with an actual 4:00 a.m. call on October 6, 1973, when Prime Minister Golda Meir belatedly came to realize a war was brewing. Her failure to act resulted in military and political disaster.
The prime beneficiary of Golda’s disaster was Menachem Begin, the long-suffering leader of Israel’s national camp, who overcame decades of electoral failure and finally secured the premiership in 1977. He cobbled together disparate center-right parties and appealed to the neglected Sephardi community, skillfully navigating what Segal calls
the “multiple identities” possessed by all Israelis. Begin recognized that “internal contradictions do not always impede the creation of victorious political alliances; sometimes they are even a hallmark of them.”
Some leaders had the misfortune of succeeding legends but nonetheless achieved success. Levi Eshkol, who followed Ben-Gurion, was, according to Segal, a “one-man reconciliation commission.” He repatriated the body of Ze’ev Jabotinsky from the nationalist intellectual’s resting place in a Long Island cemetery—an act of grace that Ben-Gurion, who had been Jabotinsky’s fierce rival, had adamantly resisted. Eshkol also ended 18 years of military rule in Arab towns and excised the word “socialism” from the name of the country’s largest party. Most important, he made the fateful decision to invite Begin, Jabotinsky’s successor, into a national unity government for the first time ever, four days before launching the Six-Day War. It was Eshkol who once famously said, “I compromise and I compromise—until I get what I want.”
Similarly, Yitzhak Shamir, who succeeded the iconic Begin, rose above his opposition’s political insults and even invited his own rival, Shimon Peres, into a national unity government. The diminutive Shamir, like Eshkol, lacked charisma but managed to steer the country through difficult economic times, stamped out inflation, and engineered the beginning of Israel’s emergence from stultifying statism. Both men left office with a whimper, but history has remembered them more kindly.
Segal also praises Labor’s Shimon Peres, the Jewish state’s eighth prime minister, for conceiving of and honoring the rotation agreement he inked with Shamir in 1984 when neither Likud nor Labor could command a majority. After two and a half years in power, and following excruciating deliberations, Peres ceded power. It was a decision Segal calls “totally extraordinary,” not least because Peres would never again win election to high office.
Equally fascinating was the behind-the-scenes maneuvering in 1992 by the secular Yitzhak Rabin to bring Shas, the religious Sephardi party, into his coalition through negotiations with Rabbi Ovadia Yosef some 16 years after a different religious party had spiked Rabin’s first premiership. A year later, that relationship secured the Knesset vote in favor of the Oslo Accords. Time and again, the left has (bafflingly, to Segal) made common cause with the Haredim despite the fact that “a large majority of Israelis, including right-wing voters, supports civil marriage, equal rights for same-sex couples, and public transportation on Shabbat”—all anathema to the religious parties.
Segal’s account of the very brief tenure of Ehud Barak, Rabin’s spiritual successor, in the late 1990s and early 2000s chronicles just how damaging to the entire Israeli left was Barak’s accurate assessment and frank (perhaps too frank) admission in the wake of the failed Camp David talks in 2000 that there was “no partner” for peace on the Palestinian side. With those two words, Segal contends, Barak “liquidated the political camp that had governed Israel for most of its history, leaving it naked with only a torn flag around its midriff.”
Similarly, over the course of his long political and military career, Ariel Sharon (per Segal, “a walking paradox”) migrated from center-left to right and then back to the center when he championed Israel’s 2005 disengagement from Gaza—and then abandoned the Likud to form Kadima, a new, largely non-ideological party. “Sharon,” Segal quips, “spearheaded two grandiose demolition projects in his second and final term as prime minister: the Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip and the Likud.” Sharon suffered a stroke that ultimately proved fatal—Segal reveals his final words: “Who’d you just call lucid?”—which empowered Likud leader Ehud Olmert and dealt a death blow to Kadima.
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Segal’s more recent vignettes are modestly less interesting. That’s partly because Olmert was a bland and fairly inconsequential figure; partly because Benjamin Netanyahu has already had his many terms as prime minister covered in great detail; and partly because the yearlong interregnum featuring split-second PMs Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid was practically over before it began. We nevertheless learn how King Bibi has triumphed for so long: He never lets anyone get to his right, he’s mastered social media, and he polarizes the electorate like no other Israeli leader.
At times, the “decisions” reached by Segal’s subjects resemble general governing styles more than specific decisions, which means his catchy “4 AM” framework doesn’t really fit the book. And while he examines the domestic controversies that convulsed Israel in early 2023, he neglects to discuss the ultimate 4 a.m. call: the one that Netanyahu did not receive on October 7—and the critical decisions that preceded and followed it. For that, we will need a sequel.
Nevertheless, Segal vividly and elegantly explains throughout this illuminating book how “the combination of [the prime ministers’] will to survive and the power of the most important office in the land generates an incredible energy, which has unleashed dramatic changes in Israel.” Long may this energy persist.
Photo: Nati Harnik/GPO via Getty Images
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