What did not happen in the past will not happen in the future: why do we continue to believe their promises? | Yoash Ben-Eliezer

I once had a colleague whose department results were never anything to be proud of. However, he excelled at one thing: making promises about what he was going to do. "We are about to start a significant reform process," or "We will soon implement a completely different international system." These words were always accompanied by shiny foreign acronyms, which gave the process a semblance of seriousness and professionalism, and if it was possible to include the use of AI in the promise, it was doubly excellent.

But the processes of that manager were never described in the past tense. He never described something he had completed or improved. It was always something future, shiny, and distant like the Promised Land — beautiful, but one that you never reach. And so he continued to promise great things for several years, until the trick was understood and he was released from his position. That is how I learned a life lesson: what did not happen in the past will probably not happen in the future either.

This simple truth is valid not only in the business world, but also, and especially, on the big stages of politics. It is interesting to recall what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu once said, when he explained in a television interview why a prime minister's term should be limited to only two terms:

"What you did not do as prime minister in one or two terms, you will never do."

So if this is true regarding governing power, why do we continue to swallow endless promises?

David Ben-Gurion formulated it well already in his early articles (1915), when he wrote that the conquest of the land and the realization of Zionism is not achieved "by promising political rights and diplomatic guarantees, but by prolonged settlement work, rooting and settling in the land." That is, what determines the result is the work, not the promise.

The problem is that people continue to be impressed by talk and beautiful words about what will happen tomorrow or the day after. When we choose a manager, a politician, or a leader, what should be decisive is not their fantasies about a perfect future, but what they have actually done so far in practice.

Imagine if they signed a basketball player based on his promise to score 30 points in every game, even though to this day he has not exceeded an average of 4 points per game. No sane team would touch him. But as the immortal sentence attributed to Levi Eshkol says:

"I promised, but I did not promise to fulfill."

This economy of false hopes manages to work because future promises create momentary euphoria. It is much easier to connect to an exciting and explosive vision than to deal with the gray and grueling complexity of real work on the ground.

So it is time to stop falling into the trap of empty slogans. To all those politicians who continue to sell us endless visions — whether they promise "huge reforms to lower housing prices" while prices continue to soar; spread "strategic master plans to eradicate crime" while personal security is collapsing; or declare a "revolution in education" that evaporates in the face of overcrowding in classrooms and a shortage of teachers — there is one simple message that must be thrown at them: stop promising. Do.

The author is the great-grandson of David Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister of the State of Israel.