Yehonatan Adiri: Israel Is In "Total Ideational Bankruptcy"

Yehonatan Adiri says Israel has run out of ideas. Not budget. Not talent. Ideas.

In an extended interview with Calcalist, Adiri — founder of Healthy.io and co-founder of the Aleinu movement — diagnosed the country as being in "total ideational bankruptcy." His prescription: a generation of "founding grandchildren" who will rebuild Israel's core institutions and write the civic thesis the country has been running without for twenty years.

Who Yehonatan Adiri Is

Born in Jerusalem, 1980. Philosophy, political science, and economics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Chief technology officer to President Shimon Peres from 2009 to 2013 — the youngest senior advisor in the president's office at the time. Founded Healthy.io in 2013. Built the first company in the world to receive FDA clearance for a smartphone-based clinical urine test. Raised more than $250 million from Aleph, Corner Ventures, Section 32, Samsung Ventures, OurCrowd, and others. Deployed across the UK National Health Service, US Medicare programs, and Israeli health funds. More than 200 employees between Tel Aviv, Boston, and London.

When a founder with that résumé tells Calcalist the country's institutional class is finished, senior operators listen.

The Diagnosis

Adiri's argument: Israel's founding project stopped generating new founding ideas roughly twenty years ago and has been running on inertia since. The state was built by a generation with a coherent civic thesis — Ben-Gurion's mamlakhtiyut, the fusion of Zionism and social democracy, the kibbutz-and-army social contract, the Hebrew revival. Every one of those inputs is either exhausted or contested. Nothing new has replaced them.

Three Points of Failure

Institutions built for a different Israel. Israel's ministries, regulators, and courts were designed for two million people, a socialist economy, and a security posture built around large conventional armies. The country is now ten million, a capitalist high-tech economy, and a security posture defined by irregular warfare and precision strike. Every institution was built for a country that no longer exists.

A founder class that stopped founding. Israel's startup-nation identity became a consumer product rather than a state-building project. Israeli founders build unicorns. They no longer build institutions. The Weizmann Institute, the Technion, the Hebrew University, the Israel Democracy Institute, the Rashi Foundation — the institutional infrastructure of the state was built by an earlier generation. The current one buys yachts. That is the sharpest line in the interview, and it lands because Adiri is himself part of the class he is critiquing.

No shared civic idea. October 7 exposed a country held together by muscle memory rather than a living civic thesis. Twelve months of judicial reform protests had already revealed a country with no shared answer to what Israel is supposed to be. October 7 did not create the gap. It made it impossible to hide.

Aleinu

The movement Adiri co-founded takes its name from the closing prayer of every Jewish service — "it is upon us." Aleinu positions itself not as a political party or protest movement but as a founder-led civic infrastructure project. Its goal: write a new civic thesis for Israel with founders, technologists, scientists, educators, and civic leaders as authors. Registered as a nonprofit. Funded by private Israeli tech figures. No political endorsement, no candidate slate — at least not yet.

The "Founding Grandchildren" Frame

Israel's founding grandparents — Ben-Gurion, Meir, Begin, Rabin — built the state. Their children — the tech generation, the Oslo generation, the settlement generation — built the economy and redrew the political map. Their grandchildren, Adiri says, must now build the next institutional layer: courts, media, education, civic infrastructure, and the shared thesis that binds them. The framing rejects the standard Israeli vocabulary — right versus left, secular versus religious — and replaces it with a generational one: who is willing to build, and who is not.

International Reference Points

Estonia rebuilt its state as a digital-first republic across a single generation. Singapore built the modern city-state around a founder-generation civic thesis that survived Lee Kuan Yew by design. Ireland restructured its institutions under a cohort that treated state-building as a technical project. Every model required a small group of high-conviction operators willing to spend decades on institutional work with no political-office reward.

Why the Framing Travels

English-language business press has not yet picked up the Calcalist interview. It will. Adiri's thesis — that a startup nation cannot substitute for a founding nation — crosses the language barrier. The Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Economist have all run "Israel at an inflection point" stories since October 7. None has yet carried the argument from a founder of Adiri's stature with a concrete institutional program attached.

The Stakes

For Israel's position globally — as an investment destination, an ally, a research partner — the visible question is whether the country still runs on a coherent civic idea. Diplomatic missions, tech investors, philanthropic foundations, and academic partners are reading Israel closely. A founder-led, publicly stated reform program with credible authors gives them something to point to. That matters for capital flows, for hiring, and for every Israeli company selling into a market where national reputation is part of the purchase decision.

What to Watch

Aleinu movement growth over the next six months. Which founders sign on publicly. Whether the group publishes a written civic thesis or stays at the movement-building stage. Whether the political class treats Aleinu as ally, threat, or irrelevance. Whether Adiri himself takes a public political role. Whether Aleinu commits to a specific institutional deliverable — a draft constitutional annex, a court-reform proposal, an education-standards rewrite. Concrete deliverables convert diagnoses into leverage. Manifestos rarely do.

Source: Calcalist, interview with Yehonatan Adiri, June 2026.