Israel and the Limits of Global Attention
James Quillian, Economist, Political Analyst, Natural Law
The world is full of suffering, and the international system has only so much capacity. That’s why triage — the secular principle of limited resources — is becoming unavoidable. When nations face multiple crises at once, they prioritize the largest, most urgent, and most consequential problems. A country of fewer than eight million people cannot expect to command unlimited global attention forever.
Israel’s leaders have long operated as if the world would always treat their cause as exceptional. But history shows that no nation, large or small, escapes the consequences of its own political choices. Power concentrated in the hands of a small leadership class tends to drift toward corruption. That is not unique to Israel. It is a universal pattern. Power corrupts because human beings are human, not because of who they are or where they live.
The tech industry has been riding high for a long time, mostly on the back of advertising dollars. For years, the public needed tech more than tech needed the public. That balance has flipped. These days, the tech giants need the population a whole lot more than the population needs them, and they’re not handling the shift with much grace.
Most people judge politicians by the labels pinned on them — conservative, liberal, moderate, centrist, reformer, outsider, insider. These labels are cheap. They are marketing tools, not measurements. If you want to understand a person or an institution, you ignore the label and look at how they actually function.