“You are the president of two hundred million Americans. I am the prime minister of three million prime ministers.” — Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir to U.S. President Richard Nixon
Lists of difficult jobs are usually lists of large responsibilities. In politics, that frame is incomplete. Difficulty is not merely scale. It is the ratio between what an officeholder is accountable for and what he is permitted to do, levered by how securely the office is anchored because in a parliamentary system, any decision may be his last. Measured that way, the hardest job in the world is not held by the commander of the world’s largest army or the steward of its largest economy. It is the Office of the Prime Minister of Israel.
The usual candidates do not survive it. The president of the United States commands more of everything, but his errors are amortized over a continent, a Congress and two election cycles, and his four years are effectively guaranteed; no president has ever been removed by the process built to remove him. A Westminster prime minister faces two levers, the electoral cycle and the confidence of parliament. Autocrats face neither. European premiers govern real states with real problems; none wakes to a live question about whether their state should exist. Elsewhere the scale arrives with room to move or the tenure with a floor beneath it. In Jerusalem, there is neither.
Begin with what you know and then set it aside. A country the width of a commuter drive, encircled by states and movements that treat its elimination as a program rather than a grievance, with no strategic depth and no margin for a bad week, where errors are corrected not in the next budget cycle but at funerals. All of that is legible, and a nation can organize itself around a visible enemy. This one does so remarkably well. None of it is the hard part.
The hard part is the condition the job is conducted inside. Since 1973, Israel’s military capacity has been underwritten by the United States, and the airlift that saved the state also priced its terms: survival in exchange for a dependency that converts every operational decision into a diplomatic one.
The prime minister commands an army whose resupply clock runs through another capital. He fights wars he is not permitted to conclude. Sometimes, he is not permitted to answer at all, as when, in 1991, ballistic missiles fell on Israeli cities for weeks, and the state was pressed to absorb them without reply—and did.
The leverage does not stop at ordnance, and historically has not needed to. What the sponsor holds is the state’s juridical standing—the veto that prevents hostility from becoming law, the recognition that keeps the ports open and the currency financeable, the cover that keeps an embargo in proposal form rather than becoming a regime.
At Suez, these were taken for granted, and the aftermath revealed them for what they are: collateral, held and called, when Israel was forced to surrender its hold on Sinai under direct threat from the president of the United States while Washington was arming it with nothing. The aircraft and armor were French. So he negotiates not over an arms shipment, but with a partner whose displeasure can be expressed as an open question about whether his country is entitled to exist in its present form. The chip on the table is legitimacy, and behind legitimacy, viability.
Whoever holds this office submits to judgment by a generation he or she will not live to meet.
Dependency is not unique. Most states subordinate some portion of their sovereignty, and do so comfortably for generations. What is unique is the file he carries into every such calculation: 38 centuries of experience of what follows when a nation’s existence becomes conditional on someone else’s permission. Where others weigh dependency as a risk, his weighs it as a precedent. Even so, it is not paralysis. A sponsor who handcuffs his client destroys the asset he is paying to maintain. What is serially withheld is the finality of the act.
Oct. 7, 2023 made the dynamic visible. By Oct. 8, before the dead had been counted and before a single soldier had crossed into Gaza, Israel’s enemies were invoking the constraint against a response that did not yet exist.
Warnings about proportionality preceded the operation they were meant to govern. A state attacked in its homes stood accused before its defenders fired their first shot. Whatever latitude had been assumed to survive the extreme case did not survive it, and this was the extreme case: the largest single-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, suffered by the one state founded so that it could never happen again. If constraint holds there, it is not proportional, conditional or even provoked. It is structural to the office.
It also shaped the policy that produced the war.
A system that forbids resolution produces management: containment rather than defeat, a hostile statelet tolerated on the border and financed through channels everyone understood. None of which explains or excuses the failures that allowed the massacre to happen. No foreign capital prevented Israel from guarding its border, stopping the attackers or moving its forces in time. Those failures belong entirely at home. But they occurred inside a doctrine of permanent management, and management remains the only posture on offer.
Around that sit the burdens that would individually end any other premiership.
Territory whose final shape rests in someone else’s in-tray, where a building permit in one postal code is zoning and in another an international incident. A cabinet assembled from factions, any one of which can bring him down, each rival holding a credible theory of his own eventual premiership. A Diaspora that holds no citizenship and pays no tax, but is answered on its own streets for policies it had no part in setting.
Two billion people told, within the hour, that a security measure on a 35-acre platform concerns them. International Institutions that assert standing without actually holding any, whose findings nevertheless become the basis on which another country’s courts suspend an export license. And beneath all of it: budgets, housing, transportation, hospitals, schools, an aging grid, food prices.
But inventorying challenges is not the answer. Any competent government handles hard problems. What distinguishes this office is that they arrive simultaneously and compound on themselves, so that none can be touched in isolation. It is not administration; it is orchestration.
A decision moves the coalition. The coalition moves the budget. The budget moves the street. The street moves the sponsor’s domestic politics. That moves the resupply clock, and the clock moves the next decision. He must hold every one of those registers in his head in the same hour, with no possibility of deferral and no colleague who is not also a rival.
Then there are the decisions that do not only save his own people. What his state judges existential is frequently a danger the world has examined and declined to remove because the political cost of acting was more than anyone cared to pay.
In 1981, Israel destroyed the Iraqi reactor at Osirak and was condemned by all of them, its sponsor included, in a U.N. Security Council resolution the United States voted for.
Ten years later, with Iraqi armor in Kuwait, the same governments were privately grateful. The benefit had been the world’s. The decision and the price of it his alone—and the interval before the verdict turns may run a decade or perhaps longer than a life.
He must conduct all of it while pursuing the only project that actually matters: a route through dependency to some other relationship. Not rupture, which is suicide. Not permanence, which is subordination dressed as alliance. Graduation: the industrial base, the alliances, the deterrent and the standing that will one day let the state act on its own account. It has to be built with instruments the dependency itself controls on a timeline no electoral cycle will accommodate, and without ever saying out loud what is being attempted since to say it is to invite its prevention. It is the only part of the job that is not defensive.
And it is an office in which thanks seems to arrive only at the funeral. The pattern is older than the state; the man who brought them out of Egypt was not permitted to enter.
The premier who held the line in 1973 was destroyed by the reckoning over a war she did not start. The man who made peace with Egypt withdrew after Lebanon into a silence he kept until he died. The verdict is revised at the graveside, and the decision praised in the oration is frequently the one that was called treason when it was taken. Whoever holds this office submits to judgment by a generation he or she will not live to meet.
That is why being prime minister of Israel is the hardest job in the world.
The sovereignty he stewards was not born from independence but has, since 1948, remained in a form of gestation, and he is its midwife rather than its guarantor. His only job is to advance its emergence—to refuse to let its delivery be stopped, despite the succession of empires that have conditioned his nation’s existence from Assyria and Babylon through Persia, the Greek successor kingdoms, Rome, Britain, and now, America, each insisting for their own imperial reasons that sovereignty be postponed to a more convenient hour.
And no one thanks the midwife. The delivery, when it comes, may be noted. What it took will not, except by those who were in the room and only for as long as they live.
