The Israeli prime minister’s latest power grab should prompt his opponents to turn to an unlikely ally
He’s not a usual suspect. He’s known for having won a Nobel prize for economics, and for writing the international bestseller Thinking, Fast and Slow, rather than for manning the barricades or wielding a placard. But this week, I spoke to Daniel Kahneman, who soon turns 89, and was shocked to hear the despair in his voice.
“It’s just a horror,” the Israeli-born professor told me. “This is the worst threat to Israel since 1948,” the year of the state’s founding, he said – worse even than the Yom Kippur war of 1973, when Israel’s survival seemed to hang in the balance – because this time the damage “may be impossible to repair”.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
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