Einat Wilf has been an intelligence officer, a consultant, a lawmaker and an author. Every stop, she says, was preparation for a single job: telling Israel's story to a world that does not know it.
On the first day of first grade, in the Beit Hakerem neighborhood of Jerusalem, a teacher held up a poster of "Dana Kama." One girl in the room could already read it. Her father had taught her. She raised her hand and answered.
"From that moment, I didn't stop raising my hand," Einat Wilf says. "I was the student the teacher had to say, 'Anyone besides Einat want to answer?'"
Her hand has stayed up ever since. Wilf served as an officer in Unit 8200, studied art history and political science at Harvard, earned an MBA at INSEAD and a PhD in political science at Cambridge, sat in the Knesset and wrote books. When Eli Gotthelf, host of the Kikar FM podcast from Kikar HaShabbat, sat down with her, he confessed he did not know where to begin. "How many lives have you lived?" he asked.
"Long ones," she said, smiling.
The girl from Beit Hakerem grew up in the Jerusalem of the 1970s and '80s, in a secular Labor Party family surrounded by teachers and academics. It was a place where the children all went down to the courtyard at exactly four o'clock, and where commerce was so remote that when a girl from Tel Aviv said her father was a "businessman," Wilf stared at her blankly. "I knew what a doctor or professor was," she recalls. "That's what I knew."
What she wanted, though, was not a life of research. "I was a groupie of Abba Eban," she admits. She watched Benjamin Netanyahu as ambassador to the U.N. in those years, and she set her goal: to represent Israel in the world. The degrees were a means. "I understood that in order to tell Israel's story in the world, I needed to have degrees from a university that no person in the world could challenge," she says. Her English, spoken and written, had to be "at the top of the top."
First came the army. Wilf describes a half-year course in 8200 that ran morning to night, among the sharpest people in the country. It set a bar that Harvard, to her surprise, did not clear. She had braced for sleepless nights and mediocre grades. "And then I came and went back to getting A's. It was a bit disappointing," she says. "The human quality I had in the army I didn't experience afterwards at Harvard."
Harvard gave her two things all the same. One was the liberal arts, the freedom to study for the soul, which is how she came to complete a degree in art history out of love for the subject. The other she calls "writing boot camp." She had arrived writing like an intelligence officer: one, two, three, four. "They really had to uproot that writing from me," she says. Her supervisor would ask what she had been trying to say. Wilf would explain it aloud. "So write that," came the reply. The lesson she took away was that clarity is always the writer's responsibility. If the reader did not understand, it is not the reader's fault.
Then came what she calls the Red Carpet Syndrome. Outstanding students expect the world to roll one out, with offers from the U.N. and the embassies. The only recruiters who actually show up are consulting firms and investment banks. So Wilf found herself at McKinsey, analyzing financial reports. Business was not her place, she concluded, and her MBA year in France is remembered mainly for the parties and the good life. But McKinsey taught her to take a problem apart from first principles, and it taught her something else. "I understood there's no red carpet," she tells Gotthelf. "If you want something, you have to go there, knock on the door and be in that arena."
In 2010 she entered the Knesset for the Labor Party. It was there, inside the Israeli left, that her thinking turned. The more she met with Palestinian leaders, she says, the more she came to believe that Palestinian identity rests not on the wish for a state of their own but on the wish that Jews not have one. That conviction led her to UNRWA, long before October 7 put the agency in the headlines. She saw the issues of refugee status and a "right of return" as a landmine under any chance of peace, and she was stunned that Western countries preaching two states were funding an organization she believes exists to perpetuate that status. She pressed the Knesset, the Defense Ministry and the Foreign Ministry, where, she says, officials were angry at her for being "too effective." Gotthelf calls the legislation and transparency demands she pushed through a rare case of one determined lawmaker changing political reality.
All of it fed the ten minutes at Oxford. Wilf usually speaks without a script. Not this time. "I knew I was on the clock," she says. "I have ten minutes where every word will be analyzed." She worked on the speech for months. It drew millions of views and has since been translated, with the help of artificial intelligence, into 19 languages, from Azeri to Japanese to French. Its value, she says, lies in stating facts that Israelis take for granted and the rest of the world has never heard.
She almost did not go. Six years earlier, in 2019, she had taken part in a London debate on whether anti-Zionism is the new antisemitism. The audience was hostile, her side lost, and the mood, she says, had "a bit of a pre-pogrom feel to it. If people had walked out of the hall and started smashing shop windows, I wouldn't have been surprised." She accepted Oxford only after making sure she would be given the time to speak.
Gotthelf asks how hatred of Israel can thrive at once among TikTok teenagers and in elite universities. Wilf's answer is that the two do different work. The message itself is simple: "The collective Jew, currently called Israel or Zionism, stands between you and the thing you want most in the world." Academia supplies the respectability. "Someone did a PhD on 'Israel as an apartheid state,'" she says, adding that for years Israel underestimated the campus as an arena. TikTok supplies the repetition. The brain, she argues, looks for patterns rather than truth, and a handful of words repeated often enough begins to feel true.
For all that, the conversation ends somewhere warmer. Wilf, who today is part of the Oz party and the Economic Party, wants a strong welfare state conditioned on military or national service, with children in state schools exempt whatever their parents do. "A small country that sends people to be killed in the name of the collective must be a welfare and solidarity state," she says. "Whoever wants to be a libertarian, let him find a desert island."
She lives in Israel by choice, and she cites the book The Genius of Israel to explain why the country keeps ranking among the world's happiest. Happiness comes from family, community and meaning, she says. Some countries now have a minister for loneliness. "That's not something you'll need in Israel." Thanksgiving, as she puts it, happens here every Friday. Gotthelf adds that the Haredi community scores especially high for the same reason: people meet not once a week but three times a day in synagogue.
Even the shouting, to her, is affection. "My unity with you is that I invest in arguing with you," she says. "I'm not going to argue with some Frenchman." Though letting people out of the elevator before stepping in, she allows, would not hurt.
Does a mother of twin girls and an older son pay a price for a career that spans the globe? "Not at all," she says. She built a working life flexible enough to bring her children along, and her message to women is that you can do everything, if not everything at once.
Gotthelf ends by admitting he could have kept going for hours. Wilf, one suspects, still had her hand up.
