Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during a press conference at the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem on Sept. 15, 2025. Photo: Nathan Howard/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
Eli Clifton is an investigative journalist. He is a cofounder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, where he serves as a senior adviser
Ian S. Lustick is the Bess W. Heyman Chair, Emeritus, in the Political Science Department of the University of Pennsylvania.
In July 2020, Aluf Benn, the editor of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, interviewed a 92-year-old retired Hebrew University professor named Yehezkel Dror. Benn described him as the “doyen of public policy experts in Israel.” For his part, Dror fashioned himself after Herman Kahn, the American defense intellectual who made his name by “thinking the unthinkable” — how to fight a thermonuclear war. In 2005, Dror’s work on policy planning and strategic thinking won him the coveted Israel Prize.
Dror responded to Benn’s questions as a futurologist with knowledge of what is to come, gained by thinking rationally and ruthlessly about a world too complex for all but an elite class of geniuses. Complimenting Israeli leaders for expelling as many Palestinians from the country as they did in 1948, Dror insisted on the correctness of his plan for an Israeli attack on Iran and praised President Donald Trump’s 2020 Israeli-Palestinian peace plan — the so-called Deal of the Century. He also called for a world government run by modern philosopher kings, and in his 2020 book, “Steering Human Evolution,” he advocated settling a thousand fertile couples on Mars to ensure the human race would not become extinct.
