On Friday, 23 October, four days before Israelis were due to vote, Benjamin Netanyahu went on Channel 10 and talked about money that does not have to pass through a bank. “We need to prepare ways to evade banking sanctions through an alternative economic system,” he said, as Al Jazeera reported. “You know what that means – the currencies that can bypass them.” He meant cryptocurrency on the blockchain. When the presenter, Roi Katz, asked whether blockchain was the workaround he had in mind, Netanyahu called it “one of them, certainly” and said he had already ordered a plan, according to The Media Line.

Look at the tense. The sanctions he was planning to get around had not arrived. Israel’s banking system has not been targeted. The prime minister was digging an escape tunnel under a wall that nobody has built yet, and in doing so he told the country the wall was coming.

The wall, brick by brick

The bricks are real, though. The European Union has sanctioned individuals and groups tied to the settlements. Spain and Ireland have restricted settlement goods, and in September the Netherlands banned their import, purchase and sale. Accounts differ on when the latest brick was laid. Al Jazeera says at least 12 major economies, the United Kingdom among them, pledged coordinated measures against West Bank settlements last month. The Media Line says Britain and eleven other Western countries announced sanctions on settlement goods the day before the interview, after a wave of settler attacks on Palestinians.

Behind all this sits the war. Al Jazeera, which calls it genocidal, puts the number of Palestinians Israel has killed in three years of war on Gaza at more than 74,500. The International Criminal Court has issued a warrant for Netanyahu’s arrest on war crimes charges. At the International Court of Justice, judges are hearing South Africa’s genocide case against Israel. A ruling against Israel could add to the pressure for restrictions on arms, trade and finance.

Then there is Washington. “America has changed,” Netanyahu said, and the money for Israel’s wars will stop: “It will end. It is only a matter of time.” He told Israelis to expect a less friendly White House once Donald Trump leaves office in two years. That is a striking admission from a man whom Trump endorsed for this very vote.

The bank speaks

Central banks seldom answer prime ministers in public. On Saturday the Bank of Israel did. Cryptocurrencies, it said, “cannot be used as a route for bypassing sanctions”. Middle East Monitor rendered the same line as saying they cannot circumvent sanctions. The bank went on:

The right thing for Israel’s economy is preserving the economic relationships with our principal trade partners and focusing on preventing sanctions and their negative influence on the economy. This issue is within the responsibilities of the political echelon, and it should act to advance it.

Read the last sentence again. Behind the polite bureaucratic language, the institution that guards the shekel was telling the government to do its own work: stop the sanctions instead of inventing ways to live with them. Netanyahu said he was grateful for the advice, “But I do what I think [is best].” On Channel 14 he later said he would “take into account” the criticism, mentioned other routes to the same goal, and conceded that cryptocurrency might never be used.

The signatures

On Sunday, 109 economists, business leaders and former officials put their names to a letter. Ynet reported that the signers include Joel Mokyr, winner of the 2025 Nobel Prize in economics, the chemistry laureate Aaron Ciechanover, the former Bank of Israel governor Jacob Frenkel and several former directors-general of the Finance Ministry. They wrote of “grave concern and anxiety”. They said Netanyahu does not grasp how serious the threat is and that his remedy is the kind more usually associated with criminal organisations. Sanctions, they warned, would do “enormous and irreversible damage” to the economy. They pointed to South Africa, Iran and Russia, and said Israeli living standards would “plummet dramatically”.

Their warnings came down to the size of an ordinary household. According to The Media Line, the signers noted that foreign workers in Israel could struggle to send their wages home if the banks lost access to international transfers. People like these never appear in a minister’s speech. They would still be first in line when the transfers stopped.

What a coin can do

A blockchain does move value from one digital wallet to another without a bank approving each payment. People under sanctions have used it to settle oil deals and buy goods, and Russia has reportedly made some payments this way since its invasion of Ukraine. But the experts agree that crypto can run alongside the banking system and cannot replace it at the scale of a modern economy. Sanctions also punish third parties who deal with designated entities, so a payment that is illegal stays illegal whatever it is made in. Yair Avidan, a former Bank of Israel supervisor, said blockchain only moves the choke point, because the banks on the other end still have to clear the money. Israel’s defence and technology industries depend on foreign parts and specialist equipment. A wallet address won’t get them across a border.

The rival’s question

Gadi Eisenkot, who leads the Yashar party and is Netanyahu’s main challenger, called the idea “a threat to national security”. “After he finished dismantling Israeli society and weakening the [Israeli military], Netanyahu has marked the next target: the dismantling of the Israeli economy for generations ahead,” he said. He said the prime minister had “lost touch with reality”, and AFP reported that he warned a “BibiCoin policy” would drive companies abroad. Then he asked the question every Israeli start-up founder had probably already asked: “How will Google buy an Israeli company on the condition that it bypass an international bank and pay in crypto?” Yair Lapid also attacked the remarks. Another opposition figure, Horowitz, predicted: “We will see entities withdrawing their money from here.”

A ruler who expects to be cut off may start sounding like the people who already have been. That is an observation, not a fact. The facts are these: Netanyahu has run on security, and two days before the vote he described a country that might one day pay its suppliers the way sanctioned states and smugglers do. Israel votes on Tuesday, 27 October. By the eve of the election the government had published no crypto plan, and the people who manage the country’s money had already turned it down.