An LLM's take on Israeli politics

Israeli elections are upon us, and the year is now behind us. With this I thought I should make use of the excellent Knesset corpus in some way, which holds decades of floor and committee speeches. I extended it to this year (2026), when the Knesset dissolved itself ahead of the October election, using the Knesset's published protocols.

When the model Jev came out I saw this as an opportunity. This model can process billions of tokens for relatively very little in a small fraction of a second. With some time I pieced together the story of the Knesset, and more widely Israeli politics, over the last thirty years or so.

The first obvious step was to map the politicians on dimensions established by the Chapel Hill survey, to ensure the model was better than a random number generator. I was pleasantly surprised when the results on most dimensions were highly correlated, with an r value between 0.93 and 0.99 (though weaker on the economy, where Israeli politics has much greater consensus). It holds among the Jewish parties alone, so the model is not just telling the Arab parties apart from the rest.

Next I mapped all the members of the Knesset (MKs) for every Knesset since 1992, around 16 million sentences from the plenary and its committees. I found that the trend we see across the world holds true in Israel too: increased polarisation and political sorting. The two camps drew together in the Kadima years and are now as far apart as ever.

Israeli politics dealigns and realigns all at once. It realigns because the courts now divide the chamber more than anything: four in five members sit at one end or the other of the courts scale, against one in seven in the early 1990s, while the conflict has divided members about as much throughout.

It dealigns in the sense Michal Shamir and her colleagues described: voters' ties to their parties have loosened while the camps hold. At each election about a fifth of the vote moves between parties, often to new ones, but little moves between the two camps. Nine centre parties have come and gone in thirty years, and only three lasted more than two Knessets.

The courts, a symbol of liberal democratic institutions, now divide Israeli society. The Right and Left once sounded alike on them; now they stand at opposite ends. The religious right gained a foothold in Likud (though Likud's secular members moved too), and religious members of the Right have since gone further than even the Charedi members, who wanted the courts curbed first. Power matters as well: when power changed hands in 2021, the parties' talk of the courts changed with it, and changed back when Netanyahu returned.

What is also interesting is that you can identify the trends of individual politicians as their political rhetoric shifts with their attitudes. A few leaders moved far, Sharon, Olmert and Livni among them, but most members ended close to where they began, so the chamber moved mostly because of who was elected: composition matters more than conversion. Voters moved too. The share of Jewish Israelis who call themselves left fell from three in ten in 1992 to about one in eight in 2022. But the Left's seats fell much further, from about half of those won by Jewish parties to 4%, as many left-wing voters backed the centre parties instead.

The stories of whole parties and their coalitions are also evident. You can see how Likud turned its back on a proud democratic institution, the Supreme Court. And how Ariel Sharon's efforts to moderate to win over the Jewish middle classes proved only temporary. The collapse of Labour Zionism, and the rise of the secular centre in its place. The change of sides by Yisrael Beiteinu, which swung to defending the courts after it broke with Netanyahu but stayed hawkish on the conflict. The increased focus on issues such as corruption, which each side raises most when the other governs. And Netanyahu himself: his opponents attack him far more than they defend him, and his allies the other way round.

Knesset members have also become angrier, more divided and more hostile to one another since 2021, after hostility and delegitimisation had been flat for 30 years, and the tone was still hardening in 2026. It is not just new faces: the 98 members who spoke both before and after 2021 grew harsher too. And since 2023 the government side has attacked the courts, and the opposition the Charedim, at record rates.

You can look at what is discussed most, and how the security agenda continues to dominate Israeli politics, especially since October the 7th: security took three plenary speeches in five in 2024, twice its usual share. In the months before this election, as the fight over drafting Charedim came to a head, religion and state took a record share too. Every Jewish bloc talks most about security and the law; Arab members talk most about Arab citizens and their rights.

You can also split by other variables: religion, gender, ethnicity and institution among them. The televised debates in the Knesset plenary are more polarised and less cordial than the committees behind the legislation. Women are now nearly a quarter of the members who speak, and say a third of what is said. And a heckle at a woman is four times as likely as one at a man to be about her looks or sex.

And for both Arab-Israelis and Jewish-Israelis, ethnicity and religion play a pivotal role in their politics. Labour now sits close to the Arab parties on almost every scale, while Ra'am parts from both on religion and social values. Druze and Arab members of Zionist parties part from their Jewish colleagues on the Jewish character of the state. And attacks on Arab citizens as a group, almost all from the Right and the Orthodox, come in waves after violence, and were highest when an Arab party, Ra'am, sat in the government.

What this tells us is that the future of machine learning and text analysis (soon to be multimodal) looks very bright for academics and researchers of all kinds! The code is available here, for those curious.

Shana Tova! And if you are Israeli, please vote on the 27th of October! If you know any Israelis, do your duty to nag them until they plan to go to the polling booth. The stakes couldn't be higher for democracy, for the hope of peace, and for the freedom and security of all people, Israeli and Palestinian.