Wanted: leaders for a country of 10 million. Requirements include leading by example, taking responsibility, representing everyone, including those who voted against you, and describing what you are building, not who you are fighting. Must inspire trust. Must make a path for new leadership. Willingness to make difficult decisions is a plus. Humility and empathy preferred. Courage required.
Sound reasonable? It should. Twenty of us wrote this list at the start of the Argov honors program in leadership and diplomacy at Reichman University. Our program head asked one question: What do we expect from our country’s leaders? She hoped the exercise might become an op-ed. It took a year. You are reading it.
We started the exercise a few weeks after the last living hostages came home. The Israel-Hamas War was not over, and some of us were still serving or waiting to hear about reserve duty. But the weight had lifted just enough to ask what comes next. And if we are being honest, the assignment seemed a little ambitious. Twenty students, 20 opinions, one op-ed? Good luck.
Somehow, the foundations practically settled themselves. Most Israelis, we suspect, are like this, too. From any camp, who would actually cross out “take responsibility”? Or “put your country before your personal interests”? We agree on the job description. Our politics rarely rewards it.
“Take responsibility” means exactly what it says. Blame is everywhere in our public life. Ownership is almost nowhere. A leader who cannot say “I failed, and here is what I will do about it” should not ask a 19-year-old to cross a border fence.
“Serve everyone” means the campaign ends when the counting does. Once elected, you represent the people who voted against you and the ones who protest outside your window. A government that treats half the country as an internal enemy is at war with its own reserves.
“A positive vision” means telling us what you are for. Every party in Israel can recite what it is against. Few can describe the Israel of 2026 that they want to build – one where war is no longer the organizing principle of its politics. Fear may mobilize voters, but it does not lower the cost of living or fix a broken education system.
“Compromise” means courage, of a specific kind. The test of leadership is the willingness to make decisions your own supporters might not all like, and to stand in front of them and explain why.
“Make room for the next leaders” means treating succession as a duty. A generation that refuses to prepare its successors, then wonders why talented young people build start-ups instead of parties, has answered its own question.
Roles of leadership
WHY DOES a job this reasonable attract so few good applicants? Everything around it warns them away. The loudest voices drown out a quiet majority, and the media business model rewards the split. And people are tired – five national elections in four years, then years of war and reserve duty. A tired public stops demanding, and a politics that benefits from exhaustion has every reason to keep the public exhausted.
We know how a job posting written by students reads. Easy to write, brutal to live. We are not claiming to speak for everyone our age, but this generation has a particular experience of war, service, and political instability, and with it a particular stake in what leadership demands.
Over the past year we took courses on diplomacy and public speaking, great power competition, entrepreneurship, and the future of technology. We met politicians, officers, founders, educators, and diplomats. The lessons accumulated on their own: leadership comes in many shapes and sizes, and Israel can be served from almost any of them.
But the list from that first exercise never changed. It held in every room we entered, in Israel, the US, or Taiwan, which convinced us of its claim on the one room it was written for.
It also convinced us of its claim on us. We cannot demand a political culture we refuse to practice. If we want leaders who listen to people who disagree with them, we must keep doing it ourselves. If we want leaders who put the country before their personal interests, then some of us might eventually have to make that trade too.
On October 27, thousands of young Israelis who saw battle before they ever saw a ballot will choose the leaders who send them. Our generation proudly gave what the moment asked of us. But we do not need gratitude. We are owed a standard. Demanding it is a right we have earned and an obligation we intend to keep on election day and beyond.
Our program head spent the year believing in us more than we believed in ourselves. She has a dream we all know about: that one day there will be an Argov party in the Knesset. And no, this is not an announcement of one. Although, in fairness, she does tend to be right.
We will all be building the country from different rooms. But the posting is public now, and the requirements are too. The country is hiring. And whoever applies should know that a generation with every reason to be tired has decided to keep demanding anyway.
The writers are the 2026 class of the Argov honors program in leadership and diplomacy at Reichman University.