Israel is still waiting for Benjamin Netanyahu to decide on a date for this year’s parliamentary election, the first since the October 7, 2023, attack and the subsequent Gaza—and Lebanese and Iranian—wars. The default date would be Tuesday, October 27, the latest allowed by the law, but there’s reportedly concern in government circles that the number will stir up unwanted associations with October 7th, and hurt the chances of the man who, after all, was in charge when Israel was attacked on that date nearly three years ago.
While his current government remains in power, Netanyahu is frantically pushing to enact as much of his domestic agenda as possible. The Knesset will be adjourning on July 16, and will reconvene only after the election, but in the remaining days it is in session, it’s all hands on deck as the government attempts to rush through the legislative process many of the bills it didn’t succeed in making law during the past four years. The opposition will block them when it is numerically possible.
The bills in question include measures that would prevent the arrest of ultra-Orthodox men who don’t report for military service, and another that would equalize a range of financial benefits received by yeshiva students with those of army veterans. Other bills would reduce the independence and authority of the country’s courts, its legal establishment, and the electronic media, making them all more subordinate to the political powers. The trend to make Israeli society more subject to Jewish religious law also figures prominently in recent legislation before the Knesset.
Some of these new laws, if passed, will be challenged and likely overturned on constitutional grounds by the High Court of Justice. But even such defeat is a form of victory for Netanyahu, as it gives added credence to the right-wing claim that the court is out of control and out of touch, ready to defy the legislature and the public that elected it.
Even if he can’t win, Netanyahu has the will and the wiles to make sure that no one else does either.
The right’s war on the court was ratcheted up on July 5, when Netanyahu’s justice and communications ministers announced that the government does not intend to honor a High Court ruling that ordered the convening of the semi-independent body that must approve the proposed sale of commercial TV Channel 13. Apparently fearing that the new owners will push the channel’s news coverage leftward, the government is throwing up one obstacle after another to block consummation of the deal.
It seems bizarre that Netanyahu’s government would choose its unhappiness over the sale of a relatively minor TV channel as the grounds for initiating a constitutional crisis, but that is precisely what it will be doing if it defies a High Court ruling. Even the nation’s generally timid president, Isaac Herzog, condemned the government’s announcement, calling it “a red line that should not be crossed under any circumstances.”
IT WOULD NOT BE WRONG TO CHARACTERIZE the upcoming election as a referendum on Benjamin Netanyahu. In an earlier era, he would not dare to be running again: He is well into the seventh year of his criminal trial, with its end still over the horizon. Israel remains involved in wars in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran (with its soldiers also occupying a “buffer zone” inside Syria), with the “total victory” promised in each conflict now little more than a joke. Yet the premier has stymied all attempts to convene a state commission of inquiry to examine how the state was caught unprepared in October 2023. Israel’s seemingly ironclad, strategic relationships with the U.S. government and with Diaspora Jewry have both been severely damaged, and with no obvious gain. And the Netanyahu government’s failure to deal honestly and realistically with the issue of military service for Haredi men, roughly 90,000 of whom are now legally considered draft dodgers, is in keeping with its general refusal to address the demographic and political non-sustainability of the unique privileges granted to this rapidly growing community (its annual growth rate is the highest in the developed world), whose leaders have become accustomed to having their demands acceded to in return for their support of the coalition.
Netanyahu, who turns 77 in October, also acknowledged recently that, several months earlier, he had undergone surgery and radiation treatment for prostate cancer. He claims to be cured.
You might wonder why Netanyahu thinks he can win this election. The answer is: Even if he can’t win, Netanyahu has the will and the wiles to make sure that no one else does either. Between 2019 and 2021, Israel had four successive elections, each ending in a virtual stalemate. It was only in 2022 that Netanyahu assembled a collection of pariah parties into a stable coalition, which survived the past four years because none of its members had anywhere else to go. If he is unable to do that this time, there’s no reason to think he will have any compunction about forcing another election, while he remains in power during the interim.
All of the thorny issues mentioned above will be high on politicians’ lists of talking points as the campaign proceeds. What isn’t on the agenda for most of the candidates—and voters—is the Israel-Palestine conflict. A majority of the electorate may be highly critical of the way the Gaza war ended—more correctly, didn’t end—but very few Israelis believe a non-military solution, based on mutual acceptance between themselves and the Palestinians, is possible. They certainly don’t want to hear about the number of Palestinian noncombatants killed in the war, or how many structures in the Gaza Strip were left standing. Hard as it may be to believe, for most Israeli Jews, the criticism by so much of the Western world of Israel’s conduct in the war is just proof that antisemitism is still alive.
Peace, then, is not on the ballot, and the stark division between what once characterized “right” and “left” in the country no longer exists. Even talking about the aspiration for “peace” is viewed as a sign of naïveté. Last month, for example, the popular singers Mosh Ben-Ari and Avraham Tal told the newspaper website Ynet of their deliberations over whether they should include Ben-Ari’s popular song “Salaam,” from 1997, which promises that “Peace will come to us, and to the entire world,” in an upcoming concert tour. They knew that there would be soldiers present at the concert, explained Ben-Ari: “They’re coming from the battlefield, and I’m going to sing to them about peace?” His partner elaborated: “The word doesn’t have any legitimacy right now. It’s sad, but that’s the reality.”
Yair Golan, the chairman of the Democrats party, which was formed after the last election out of the remains of the Labor and Meretz parties, is a former deputy chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces. On October 7th, at age 61, the retired general did not hesitate to collect a rifle from the army and drive to the Negev, where he helped to rescue survivors who were in hiding from the terrorists who attacked the Nova music festival they were attending. He is now viewed by many Israelis as a radical leftist because he still believes in two states, and even worse, as a traitor, because, though he supported the war, he also was critical of Israel when it committed war crimes. He still has not been forgiven for his remark, for example, in a radio interview last summer, that “a sane country … does not kill babies as a hobby.” (An estimated 3,150 Palestinians under the age of three are believed to have died in the war.)
Golan, therefore, is not seen as a candidate for prime minister, and his Democrats party will have exceeded expectations if it gains more than a dozen Knesset seats (out of 120) in the election. But, like all the other opposition party heads, he agrees that the foremost goal is to oust the current government, and he expects the Democrats to be part of any coalition that is formed. He is also the only head of a “Zionist” (a euphemism for “non-Arab”) party who has said openly that he would welcome the participation of an Arab party in the next government.
Among the other opposition party heads, it is still early to point to a single candidate as the undisputed leader of the camp. When Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid announced in late April that they were merging forces into a single party, Beyachad (Together), with Bennett at the helm, they must have figured that Gadi Eisenkot, a former general but near-novice politician, would soon sign on with them as well. But Eisenkot was in no hurry to relinquish the top spot to Bennett, and over the past two months, the stock of his Yashar (“straight,” “honest”) party has risen, while Bennett and Lapid’s Beyachad has been in a slow decline.
Polling released on July 8 showed Eisenkot’s Yashar party scraping past Likud for the first time—23 seats for Yashar against 22 for Likud, with Bennett’s Beyachad in third place with 15. More significantly, the Channel 13 poll also revealed that, were the election held today, the Netanyahu camp would garner 51 seats and the opposition 58, with 11 seats predicted for “the Arabs.” (A majority requires 61 seats in the Knesset.)
Now that he is the front-runner, Eisenkot can expect to face more scrutiny from the press. But with a refreshing anti-charisma enveloping him, Eisenkot is someone it’s hard to dislike. A former IDF chief of staff, he comports himself with quiet dignity, especially evident after the death of his son, Gal Meir Eisenkot, in the early months of the Gaza war. (Two of his nephews were also killed in the war.) At the time, the father was serving as minister without portfolio in the unity government that formed shortly after October 7th. In June 2024, what was at the time his party, led by Benny Gantz, withdrew from Netanyahu’s cabinet, and a year after that, Eisenkot resigned from the Knesset and also from Gantz’s party, saying that it was undemocratic. He formed Yashar last September, and launched its election campaign on June 30.
Lapid is the Knesset’s outgoing opposition leader, but when he recognized that he lacked the popularity to lead the opposition to victory in an election that promises to be fateful for Israel, he yielded the top of the list to Bennett when the two hooked up this past April.
In the 2021 election, Lapid and Bennett, at the last minute possible, cobbled together a coalition with the help of Mansour Abbas, the head of the Islamist United Arab List, the first time an Arab party became a full partner in a government coalition. The three worked in relative harmony, together restoring a modicum of calm to the political scene after a dozen years of Netanyahu’s leadership, even as the latter devoted all of his considerable powers to undermining the “government of change,” so that, by June of 2022, Bennett had lost his majority in the Knesset and resigned. Lapid replaced him during the months leading up to the election, and he too was judicious in governing.
Five years later, Mansour Abbas is again determined to be part of the next government, and he has said and done all the necessary things to demonstrate his loyalty to the Jewish state, short of having a bar mitzvah. (Of course, Netanyahu calls him a terrorist.) But Bennett and Lapid have ruled him out in advance as a coalition partner, even though without the support of at least one or more of the Arab parties, it’s not at all clear how they would be able to cobble together a majority.
The fact that both Lapid and Bennett now say the government they hope to form will include only “Zionist” parties, though neither has a bad word to say about Abbas, suggests that they are not willing to defy the anti-Arab sentiment that has infected Israeli society since October 7th. Much of that sentiment has been whipped up by Netanyahu and his ministers, in particular the extremist, racist Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir. Eisenkot, for his part, has recently come around to hinting that he could work with Abbas.
Recent polling shows that Jewish voters don’t want to see an Arab party in the government, but basic arithmetic suggests that no opposition leader will be able to form a stable government without Arab participation or support. Eisenkot seems to have understood that, belatedly, and he probably could bring the public with him if he prepares the ground properly. That is why Netanyahu is taking every opportunity to warn the public about the grave danger inherent in supporting Eisenkot.
Polling also shows that most Israelis are ready for a change in the political atmosphere and truly do value the democracy that may not survive another round of Bibi as prime minister. What isn’t clear is whether they are capable of seeing that living in a democracy means accepting that all citizens, even those who are part of a minority, are deserving of equal rights and opportunities, and that Israel’s Arabs have long since proved their loyalty to the state and its laws. This isn’t just a question relating to who can form the next government. It is essential to determining whether Israel has a chance to survive as a liberal democracy.
