Ido Norden begins with food. “Picture the prime minister walking into IDF headquarters and ordering a juicy sirloin,” he tells me. “The generals nod respectfully – then bring three ‘choices’: chicken steak, schnitzel, or a burger. Beef was scratched from the menu long before he sat down.”
The anecdote sounds flippant, yet in Norden’s semi-new book, The Invisible Rulers: The Story of Israel’s Deep State (Lion Press, August 2024), it is a parable for a bureaucracy that pre-screens what can, and cannot, reach Israel’s elected leadership. October 7, he argues, was the ultimate sirloin-that-never-arrived: a Shayetet 13 rescue raid on Hamas headquarters under Gaza’s Shifa Hospital that, according to Norden and confirmed by the book’s prologue, stopped on the chief-of-staff’s desk and was never shown to the cabinet.
I challenged him: Surely a democratic cabinet can demand the steak? “When the same officials own the intelligence, the purse strings, and the legal gate, they decide which plates are ‘safe’ to serve,” Norden answered. “By the time ministers walk in, the real entrée is already in the trash.”
Norden is an Israeli public-policy professional and former IDF combat officer. Raised in Moshav Nehalim and today living in Moshav Gitit in the Jordan Valley, he studied at Merkaz HaRav and the Bnei David pre-military academy in Eli, completed Hebrew University’s civil-service cadet program, and worked as an economist in the Bank of Israel’s Banking Supervision Department. He later served as a senior professional adviser to the Prime Minister’s Office director-general (2012–2013), became chief of staff at the Israel Innovation Authority, and founded a strategy and project-management firm.
Since October 7, he has focused on advising government and public bodies.
Norden devotes a whole chapter to 2024-25’s failed judicial overhaul. He knows both architects personally: Justice Minister Yariv Levin and Knesset Constitution Committee chair Simcha Rothman, and he insists their goal was “balance, not coup.” But the rollout, he says, proved everything Invisible Rulers warns about.
“Ministers went on TV boasting ‘nareh lachem,’ now we’ll show you,’” he recalls. “If you live in Tel Aviv, that sounds like a promise to evict you from your own country.”
Fear, once triggered, gave every legal adviser and mid-level clerk license to stall. Norden writes that a segment of Israeli society “genuinely fears the reform as it has been presented,” and that fear “poses significant obstacles to the legislative process... and inflicts considerable damage on the country.”
He faults design as much as tone. “Levin copied the US model, where power flips every few years,” Norden told me. “But here, the same camp has won for two decades. The Left looked at the committee math and saw zero future seats on the Supreme Court. That’s existential.” His book floats an alternative: a 10-member professional committee, four chosen by the coalition, four by the opposition, plus the justice minister and opposition leader as public representatives, confirmation hearings broadcast live, a fixed presidential term for the court, and an end to the elastic “reasonableness” doctrine.
When I asked whether scrapping that tool would hobble judicial oversight, he leaned again on cuisine: “Today the Court can cancel your recipe because it tastes unhealthy. Let it intervene only if the ingredients are toxic. Define the poison; don’t ban dinner on a whim.”
The veto class and the Channel 14 effect
At the Finance Ministry’s Budget Department, Norden saw “billion-shekel programs die on the altar of legal exposure.” In the Prime Minister’s Office, he watched a gas-field deal stall because a deputy attorney-general warned the High Court might strike it down. Netanyahu forced it through, a victory Norden calls “exceedingly rare” because most ministers “avoid direct clashes with the judiciary.”
That caution, he believes, becomes lethal when it migrates to security. Invisible Rulers details how the planned Shifa raid “stopped” on the army chief’s table and was never shown to Netanyahu.
“Filter, yes,” Norden concedes. “Veto without briefing? That crosses the line. An unelected official erased the sirloin – an operation that might have saved captives – before the diners even opened the menu.”
One of the book’s more surprising villains is Israel’s mainstream media. Norden devotes chapter six (“Agents for Creating Consciousness”) to what he portrays as a uniform editorial class that amplifies bureaucratic vetoes. The result, he writes, is “a market that almost entirely lacks a balance of perspectives.”
Asked whether anything has changed, he lights up: “Channel 14 is insane, in the best sense,” he says, referring to the right-wing pro-Netanyahu cable news channel that now challenges legacy broadcasters 12 and 13. “Just the fact that it exists, that there’s finally another voice, is dramatic. People keep quoting the rating panel, but half my neighbors stream or watch Channel 14 online. In practice, 14 is neck and neck with 12. Its presence alone shakes the system.”
That shake, Norden argues, dovetails with the “Forum of Senior Professionals” he founded after the war, dozens of ex-directors-general, ex-CEOs, and reserve generals prepared to speak publicly against what they view as deep-state inertia. “When a former Finance Ministry DG or the ex-head of the Innovation Authority says the emperor has no clothes, it’s harder to dismiss him as fringe,” Norden maintains.
The next sirloin test
For Norden, the war’s aftermath offers two litmus tests. “First, David Zini as Shin Bet director; second, who[ever] eventually replaces Attorney-General Gali Baharav-Miara,” he says. “If every finalist looks like his predecessor, the steak’s still off the menu.”
The first test is alive: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nominated Maj.-Gen. Zini in May, but the appointment still awaits cabinet and High Court clearance.
“Zini’s candidacy matters less for ideology and more for process,” Norden argues. “If the same gatekeepers who bottled the Shifa plan now bottle Zini because he’s seen as an outsider, we’ll know nothing has changed.”
I press him on substance: Would replacing Ronen Bar with Zini really tilt the Shin Bet? “Maybe not overnight,” Norden concedes. “But for once, the political echelon, not the security bureaucracy, would pick its own security boss. That reset alone forces the service to remember who it answers to.”
So what does reform look like? Norden’s prescription mirrors American practice: When governments change, top civil-service layers should stand down unless reappointed. Legal advisers should behave like corporate compliance officers, map risk, propose mitigations, and then let ministers decide. Diversity, he stresses, is practical, not ideological: “When only one worldview staffs the Budget Department or the State Attorney’s Office, huge blind spots form,” he says. “October 7 showed what happens when the blind spot is Gaza.”
Skeptical, I ask who will fight that war. Norden shrugs. “A crisis resets the odds. October 7 stripped the comfort blanket. Politicians now know they’ll be blamed for failures they never heard about.” His forum already delivered two position papers to the Prime Minister’s Office: one urging a shift from today’s “veto culture” to an explicit risk-management model; the other advocating US-style political appointments for senior civil-service roles.
Norden makes no claim to prophetic perfection. He admits years inside the machine may color his lens, and he concedes that fuller menus do not guarantee wise choices. But his core question lingers: If those we elect never see every option, if the sirloin is gone before the waiter approaches, who is really governing?
War keeps that question painfully current. Rocket alerts still punctuate evenings; hostages remain underground; ministers still look to unelected briefers for “options.” Norden’s book and the interview behind these notes insist that democracy is not just ballots but the guarantee that the people chosen to rule are the ones who actually do.
That guarantee, he argues, will be measured not in think-tank panels but in the next shortlists: David Zini at Shin Bet, the next attorney-general, the next IDF chief. “Watch the funnels,” he tells me. “If you still can’t order beef, nothing else will taste right.”