The Nadir, the Slope and the Pit - the Fate of Zioism on the Knife's Edge, June 2026

Israel has reached its nadir – unless it’s only halfway down a slippery slope. That’s the question.

It’s been a year since I last wrote, and my relationship to my country is worse than ever, but I’ve yet to give up in spite of the estrangement. So here’s an attempt to explain to myself what’s going on. I’ll write three sections: War under Iranian missiles; Israel’s decay; and the political context which will determine if our decline is, or isn’t, reversible.

 

We recently spent six weeks under Iranian missiles, while the air forces of Israel and the United States pummeled Iran, we launched yet another ill-thought-out attack on Lebanon and garnered missile attacks also from Hezbollah. At home in Jerusalem, life was weird but actually fun. Millions of Gazans have lost everything except their lives. A million Lebanese fled their homes in face of the IDF. Thousands of Palestinians on the West Bank have fled before settler hoodlums. Many thousands of Iranians feared for their lives from Israeli and American bombs. Thousands of Israelis saw their homes smashed by Iranian and Hezbollah missiles. Hundreds were wounded, and dozens killed. Israelis were protected by snazzy Israeli and American anti-missile systems, but some missiles always get through. A third of Israelis have no protection from them. Another third has bomb-shelters outside their homes, which they have to run to each time the sirens go off, at any time of day or night. We’re of the third that have strong-rooms in our own apartment – one of the bedrooms. Were a heavy Iranian missile to hit it directly we’d be killed, but may of the missiles had cluster heads, which can hit 10-20 buildings simultaneously but don’t have enough payload to smash a strong-room. The chance of a direct hit is miniscule, and the Iranians seemed mostly not to be shooting at Jerusalem, anyway.

For six weeks we had eight people in our apartment instead of two. Our son Achikam and his three small kids, Itamar Sophie and Alon; his wife Idit when she wasn’t on shift at the hospital; and our daughter Nechama. (Meir and Sophia live far away in Spain, and for once I was fine with that). Sylvia and I set aside 100% of our normal life, activities, pastimes, and privacy, and reverted to being caretakers to three small children and supporters of three harried adults, who were trying to carry on at their jobs. For me, this was a first. I have never put the needs of our kids or grandkids entirely above my own activities. I’m trying to write a book – for six weeks I had access to my laptop no more than ten minutes a day. Since leaving my last full-time managerial job almost eight years ago, I’ve re-taught myself to read books – dozens every year. In those six weeks I read half of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. In six weeks. On the other hand, eight-year-old Itamar and I read the first four volumes of Harry Potter, and then, when time came to go home and we were in the middle of book 5, he realized that he can read real books on his own – so I lent it to him. (He’s now in book 6). Sylvia and Sophie started making Mandala designs.

We spent a lot of time at home. The kids, each according to their age, knew bad things were happening out there, but not to them, so it wasn’t personal. (The caffe a block from their home was destroyed, but no-one told them). They figured out, even two-year-old Alon, that the screeching smartphones meant missiles were coming our way but they could carry on their activities until the siren itself, normally 6-7 minutes later, and then it was time to go into the strong-room and seal it up. Often there were loud bangs. Sometimes it was impossible not to notice the shriek of outgoing interceptors.

If the shrieking smart-phone went off when we were outside the building the protocol was a bit more intense because we had to reach a public shelter – so they went outside less than normally. They preferred staying at home. When we were outside, with the kids or on errands, we kept a mental map, and measured our distance to the nearest public shelter, moving from the range of one to the next, sort of like airliners handed off from one air-control tower to the next. When outside, the slightest hint of a siren would make me jump. There were times our quadrant wasn’t being targeted but nearby ones were, and then we’d hear rolling rumbles of far-off explosions. Once this happened while we were at a playground, and all the parents (or grandparents) looked at each other uneasily, while the kids carried on.

It was a very strange time. I know lots of people in the region had it a lot worse. I also know no civilians in any normal western country have ever had similar experiences. Israelis, as a nation, have lost their way in recent years, and we’re deep in troubled waters. But it must be said: we’re the world’s only nation with armed enemies committed to destroying us. Well – maybe the Palestinians can make a similar claim. They, too, have an enemy which wishes them gone, and which has committed widespread war crimes against them, and some crimes against humanity. That’s us, the Israelis. Target of genocidaires, and war criminals ourselves.

I’m a Zionist, and an Israeli patriot. Even now. There’s much about Israel to be proud of. In spite of everything going on around us, the resilience and determination and perhaps sheer cussednes of ten million Israelis has our economy flourishing. There’s next to no unemployment. Inflation is historically low. The stock market is at its highest ever. Our currency is one of the strongest in the world. We’ve got good universal health coverage, and excellent medical care. Employers and employees must pay into robust pension schemes. There’s next to no homelessness. There’s no Fentanyl crises, and substance abuses are uncommon. October 7^th and its very long aftermath demonstrated that hundreds of thousands of our young adults recognize and accept the burden of duty and responsibility at any price. Family is one of our strongest institutions, the birthrate is higher than anywhere in the developed world, life expectancy is high and for women, very high. Cultural creativity? Flourishing. Technological innovation? World-class.

Those things can be measured. Then there’s the part that can’t. Israelis have become polarized to an unprecedented level. Yet even today, we share a common language and perspective on life that express strong commonalities. I’ve sometimes tried to describe this to non-Israelis as the capacity to banter. Throw two Israeli strangers into a situation that invites response, and they’ll chat, or comment, or kvetch, or gripe, or raise their eyebrows at the foolishness or whatever. Irrespective of class, politics, gender, education, vocation, whatever.

Perhaps the strangest demonstration of the success of Israel’s society comes from the 21% of Israelis who are ethnically Palestinians, but who live within Israel’s borders of 1967 and are full citizens. In spite of systematic discrimination and enmity from the Jewish majority, they are integrating ever deeper into the majority, and most of them regard themselves as Israelis and identify with Israel. If even they identify as Israelis, Israel must be doing something right, even as it treats them wrong.

Even now, in spite of all my rejection of broad swathes of the Israeli consensus, I’m still a Zionist: Someone who believes the Jewish nation needs a nation-state in its ancestral home. And I’m still a patriot, both in striving for Israeli’s improvement, and more basically, seeing it as home. Were I someday to live elsewhere, it would never be home; the Israelis, exasperating and vexing as they are, are my people.

My disillusion with them has never been harsher.

The present government came to power at the end of December 2022, and launched what it euphemistically called the judicial reform on January 4^th 2023. It was never merely judicial, and it was never a reform, a term which indicates improving the existing order. It was a frontal attack on liberal democracy. The judiciary was to be neutered and limited. The attorney general was to be fired and the position divided in three. The successful commercial TV stations were to be weakened, and the public broadcaster was to be banned from broadcasting news; TV channels close to the government were to receive generous public funds. The police were to be subordinated to politicians. There was talk of ending the independence of the central bank. And much much more. Perhaps this shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but it turned out that significant sections of Israeli society cared far more about their sectoral interests than about democracy. Moreover, now that the ruling politicians, from Prime Minister Netanyahu down, along with their party-line media, were urging their constituents to recognize the county’s institutions as the foes of the national interest, large chunks of the populace eagerly agreed.

In February 2024 I wrote at length about the furious counter-movement, in which millions of Israelis took to the streets and never left them until they’d battled the government to a standstill. The nine months of January till October 2023 were the heyday of Israeli democracy at its best. We were anguished to recognize how strong the anti-democratic forces in our society were, but heartened by the extent and determination of our opposition to them. Public opinion polls suggested we were backed by a modest majority.

Then came October 7^th. The worst blow to Israel’s psyche, ever. I say this as a member of the generation scarred forever by the Yom Kippur War that began when we were almost brought to our knees on October 6^th, 1973, and in many ways, never recovered. October 7^th was much worse, and its scars will remain into the 22^nd century.

Let’s try to tease apart some of the strands of the trauma, because the initial horror has split into varying forms.

There was humiliation, later expressed by Netanyahu in an odd but revealing comment, that we’d been attacked by a horde in flip-flops. The sentiment was clear: how could those inferior Hamas thugs manage to do this to us, the regional technological and military hegemon.

There was vengeance. A perfectly natural reaction, but one that shouldn’t have guided the actions of a nation and its military. Nation states are expected at least to pretend to be rational actors, and governments are supposed to decide on military action through a process of multi-layered deliberation. Widespread bombing of civilians, even if thousands of blood-soaked Hamas fighters were hiding amongst them, isn’t a justifiable action of a law-abiding state. By the evening of October 7^th, most Israelis had conflated Hamas and the Palestinians, and we were willing to kill them in masses. Later, we were unruffled by the thought of starving them into submission.

Within a few weeks yet another phenomenon became clear: messianic glee. About a month in, a military rabbi was filmed proclaiming before troops that “If we overlook the thousands of casualties, this has been the best month of our lives. Finally, the entire nation has recognized its enemies and is determined to utterly destroy them”. A rabbi, no less. A few months later Orit Struck, Minister of Settlements and a member of the Security Cabinet, was filmed saying “We’re in a period of miracles. I don’t know how long it will last, but we’ve got to utilize it to its full potential”. One evening thousands of settlers and supporters converged in Jerusalem’s largest concert hall to listen to speeches about emptying Gaza of Palestinians and replacing them with Jews. After the speeches eight or ten prominent politicians, Cabinet members included, formed a ring and danced their exuberance.

Israelis who think like this are a minority, but not a tiny minority, and Netanyahu has no government without them. What made everything worse was that their agenda mostly dovetailed with a much broader craving for complete military solutions to intractable political problems. It took Netanyahu a few weeks to figure out how to save his career in spite of October 7^th, but then he found his slogan: Total Victory. A victory that would include the rearranging of the entire Middle East so that Israel’s vanquished enemies would never again dream of threating her, and instead, quacking in their boots, would resign themselves to living under her military hegemony on her own terms. A goal to be reached by attacking our enemies again and again, until they cry uncle, and if they don’t, attack more. Never stop using force, and never turn to diplomacy, because diplomatic solutions require give and take. They don’t give total results.

Back in 2024 when Netanyahu started using the Total Victory slogan, public opinion was split between the camp that demanded a deal to free the hostages even at the cost of ending the war in Gaza, and the camp that demanded victory first and freeing hostages second. The camp demanding a deal was probably the larger of the two: significant crowds of us demonstrated every week-end, and occasionally we managed to launch gigantic rallies similar to those of Summer 2023. The longer it took, the more explicit we were: Yes, we demand the hostages be freed even as we fully understand that will end the war. Actually, it’s long past time to end the war.

Then in September 2025, after almost two years of war which had already spread from Gaza to Lebanon to Yemen to Iran, Donald Trump forced Netanyahu to agree to a deal that freed all the hostages. Einav Zangauker, a 40-something single mother whose son Matan had been kidnapped on October 7^th and whose unwavering tenacity to free him had propelled her to the top of the movement, danced on the hospital helipad to which he was flown singing deliriously “The war is over! The war is over!”

Except of course, it wasn’t. Netanyahu can’t have the war end, because then he’ll have to face the nation with no strategic achievements. And large swathes of the Israelis have become enamored with war, including many who easily recognized the idiocy of the Total Victory slogan back in 2024, but now, since the hostages are back (dead or alive), they’re willing to keep on trying. After all, Hezbollah really are as bad as Hamas, aren’t they? (They probably are). And the Iranians really do intend to destroy Israel someday, don’t they? (Actually, they probably don’t, but there isn’t one Israeli in 50 who believes that). So when we attack them, and attack them again, and then again, never achieving any strategic goals but always demonstrating our military prowess and superiority, we’re waging justified wars of self-defense, aren’t we? And at some point, our tactical successes will bring strategic benefits, just wait and see.

It’s the middle of 2026, and none of Netanyahu’s strategic goals have been achieved. Battered Hamas is still armed and rules almost the whole populace of Gaza. Battered Hezbollah is still standing, and has begun effectively deploying Ukrainian-style drones against us. Battered Iran, as you will have noticed, is winning. Faced with strategic failures on all fronts, most Israelis still refuse to consider the possibility of a better alternative. For a while in 2024-5 there seemed to be an emerging peace movement, but this proved wrong. Elections are approaching and the opposition seems likely to win, yet even the leaders of the opposition talk incessantly of the need to destroy our enemies, and not of the need to seek ways to reduce the hatred.

On the pages of Haaretz, Israel’s high-brow liberal daily newspaper, there’s daily rejection of our eagerness to wage war and the brutality of our methods. Readers can even find voices which connect our militarism to its own failure: so convinced have we become of our justice that we’re incapable of wondering if we’re becoming like our enemies, and perpetuating our wars by fanning hatred. But Haaretz isn’t representative of Israel, and its viewpoints are increasingly distant from the mainstream.

Nir Hasson gave a bleak description of this recently. Hasson, Haartez’ long-time reporter on Jerusalem, wrote a book about a decade ago describing the accelerating integration of the city’s Palestinian neighborhoods into the Jewish mainstream. In 2024, looking around and seeing near-total silence, he took upon himself to become the county’s main reporter on the devastation in Gaza. I’m paraphrasing and shortening his lecture:

I’m often asked to explain Israeli media’s silence about the devastation of Gaza. I normally start by defending our press: we were the only national institution which functioned well in the darkest days of October. Then, we rallied around the flag just as the media in any democracy would do. And that explains our silence as the first 2,000 children were killed in Gaza. But as time went on, and it was 5,000 dead children, what then? 10,000? What if the number was even higher?

Palestinian Journalists in Gaza have become military targets. On the West Bank and even inside Israel, they are harassed by the police. Jews such as myself are subjected to a constant barrage of invective and hate, but the police won’t arrest us for what we write. Most of us censor ourselves, for fear of public backlash and the ire of the hatemongers. We’ve largely failed our professional duty. And the number of dead Gazan children, meanwhile, is 21,461. 17 were killed on their day of birth. 1,080 during their first year. 5, 263 of them before their 5^th birthday.

Personally, I’m less generous than Hasson. To me it seems that most Israeli journalists aren’t apprehensive of social retribution. They’re part of the national consensus, decades in preparation but forged in steel on October 7^th, that sees us as the embattled victims of Islamic genocidism and world antisemitism who have no choice but to fight and fight and fight.

Someday Israeli society will come to its senses. Someday, later, Israelis may, perhaps, start questioning our brutality, our blood-thirst and our aggression of these years. Some nations, the healthy ones, eventually achieve national honesty and soul-searching. Others never do, and I don’t know which camp future Israelis will choose. I can hope.

 That future choice may eventually be formed by our elections this year. Not because our peace camp is challenging our war camp: there is no peace camp. But what will be chosen is which military-minded camp wields power: the corrupt, anti-democratic chauvinist and messianic one, or the flawed but still liberal, sometimes-Western-orientated one.

So let’s see if I can make some sense out of our fiendishly complex political system. First thing to know: we’ve got a radical proportional system, which is built to give some political representation to any group that can garner a minimal number of votes. This is the opposite of 1^st-past-the-post systems, where some voters will never see their representative elected, ever. In our system, any group that reaches 3.25% of the votes will have 4 representatives in the 120-seat Knesset.

Second, since we’re a parliamentary democracy, the vote is for the Knesset, a majority of whose members then elect the government. Citizens vote only once.

Third, the vote is for a party list, not individuals. Members of Knesset (MKs) have no constituents among the public: their allegiance is to the party that put them on its list. Voters be damned.

Four: irrespective of everything, most voters vote for a leader, not a party. No-one ever voted for candidate number 23 on Netanyahu’s Likud list. No-one even knows who candidate 23 is.

Five: for the past decade or two, most parties align themselves in advance with a forgettable leader from the Left, or with Netanyahu from the Right. This enables their voters to split their single vote. A committed settler, for example, can vote for Netanyahu and also for the settler wing of his coalition, secure in the knowledge that the settler party will always support Netanyahu, but Netanyahu will have to pay for the support with goodies for the settlers. A member of the vanishingly-small Left-peacenik camp can support, say, Yair Lapid against Netanyahu, but also the Peace-camp against centrist Yair Lapid, secure in the knowledge that were Lapid able to beat Netanyahu, the peaceniks might pull his coalition a bit further Left.

For various reasons the tendency to forms blocks of parties on either side has hardened in recent years, almost solidified. Netanyahu’s camp is built of three groups of parties; the Opposition currently has six parties but only two (or two-and-a-half) camps. Netanyahu, master-machinator that he is, is apparently toying with the idea of running a fake party an inch to his Left to confuse some of the voters who detest him but aren’t willing to vote for the other side, but I expect too few voters will be confused for this to matter.

There are 120 MKs, and you need a majority to elect the government the first time after elections. 61 and you’re home – or, theoretically, if one side has, say, 58 but there’s a block of 10 that abstains, the opposition of 52 won’t be able to prevent the creation of a minority government. This is actually not merely theoretical – see below.

The elections must take place by October 27^th.

The stakes of the elections couldn’t be higher. We’ve never had an election where one side has already proven its commitment to ending democracy. The elections will tell us if our fellow citizens want a country we can live in, or if they prefer a country we can only regard with horror.

The polls all agree Netanyahu will lose, but polls are fallible, and Netanyahu is by far the most intelligent, canny, devious and experienced politician we’ve ever had. Back in the previous decade he was my boss for seven years (in a somewhat oblique way), and I used to encounter him two or three times a year. He’s almost always the most intelligent person in the room, and often he’s the best informed. He’s usually the most widely-read. He can sit for hours, fully focused the whole time. He sincerely believes he’s the only person who can lead Israel, and has lost any distinction between he and us. His interests are Israel’s interests.

He’s also the only politician in the country who will go to jail within a year or two of losing power, as he knows, so he can’t lose power. For Netanyahu, losing will be like death: so he can’t lose.

Here are the forces arrayed before us, from the far right onwards:

At the farthest Right-wing pole stands Itamar Ben-Gvir. He and his party are racists, and their agenda is that the Palestinians need to disappear from our land. They have no intention of creating Sobibor-like death-camps, though at the peak of the war they were in favor of mass bombing and a policy of starvation to force the Gazans to go anywhere else. He and some of his colleagues are settlers, but settlement policy isn’t their main thing. Expulsion is. They garnered six MKs in the previous elections, and will get anywhere from 8-10 in the next ones. They’re the only party on the Right that’s rising in the polls, cannibalizing voters from the rest of their block. Their main achievements in this government have been to tie the police to their agenda (Ben Gvir is the Minister of Police, and he’s broken all the rules to assure only his people are in charge). Their second achievement was to legislate the death penalty, for Palestinians only. Ben Gvir’s long-term goal is to succeed Netanyahu when he dies of old age. His voters are mostly young and with little or no Western education – like Ben Gvir himself, a canny lawyer who used to represent Jewish terrorists and can’t put together a single sentence in English. Many of them are religious.

Bezalel Smotrich is as far-right as Ben Gvir, and together they’ve held Netanyahu to their agendas, but they hardly overlap. Smotrich represents the messianic settlers. He’s also a lawyer, whose single attempt to make a speech in English made him a national laughingstock. Where Ben Gvir’s intelligence is of a streetfighter, Smotrich is eloquent and extremely arrogant. Unlike Ben Gvir, Smotrich knows how to get things done with supreme efficiency. In 2017 he joined the rarified ranks of Israeli politicians with a clear plan, when he published a long essay describing his goals: a combination of Apartheid and ethnic cleansing. While notionally his main day-job is minister of finance, his interest and achievement has been to expand settlements. He had seven MKs last time, but now he’s hovering around the death-zone of 4. Ultimately, most Israelis don’t really care about settlements.

 The Haredi autonomy.

Lots of nations have or have had racists, chauvinists, and war criminals. The Haredi are a special Israeli oddity and social perversion. The often-used term “ultraorthodox” is an unhelpful descriptor, not least because the rest of the orthodox Jews don’t see themselves as being less religious. The great divide is rather about one’s relationship to modernity. The other orthodox Jews embrace it, hence their title in the English-speaking world as “Modern Orthodox”. The Haredi reject modernity, or at least pretend to, and have constructed elaborate mechanisms and communities to live in a pre-modern, pre-secular society.

About 100% of what they claim about themselves isn’t historically true, but that’s irrelevant. What’s important is the reality they and we have created, not its theological validity.

In a single paragraph: The Haredi refuse to teach their children anything but the pre-modern library of Jewish legal and theological thought, and the ideal is that men will dedicate their entire lives to this study, while the (religiously inferior) women bear their many children, raise them, and earn the family bread. The women fervently go along with this. Tremendous effort goes into staving off any penetration of any non-Jewish ideas, mores, and vocations based upon them. They embrace the comforts of technology, as long as it doesn’t import secularism. So: electricity yes, modern medicine, yes, mobile phones, yes, but computers and smartphones which connect to anything, NO!

All of this would be merely curious – folks in a free society are welcome to their weirdness as long as it isn’t harmful – if it weren’t for the fact that the bill for the wackiness is paid for by the rest of us. Thanks to their stratospheric birthrate, the Haredi are currently about 15% of the population and growing. The rate of their participation in elections is as close as possible to 100%, and their raison d’etre is to force the government to subsidize their livelihoods. Also, they don’t serve in the military, and in an era of 100+ annual days of reserve duty and a steady drum-beat of military casualties, thousands of their healthy young men block highways shouting “We’ll Die but Never Enlist!”

The entire insanity is propped up by Netanyahu’s political needs. He didn’t invent it, of course. It’s been festering and growing for decades. But the current level of brazenness is unprecedented. The Supreme Court has ruled that the whole deal is illegal. Military service is mandatory, and the government can’t subsidize criminal behavior – but this merely serves as grist for Netanyahu’s anti-judicial campaign: “Look! We’re the elected government, and the courts are telling us what to do! Proof that the court is anti-democratic!”

There are two or four Haredi political parties, depending how you count. Their political agenda is simple, and aimed at Netanyahu: you pay us billions of NIS, and we’ll give you the political power to pays us more billions. Together they have about 16 MKs, a number that hasn’t moved in the turmoil of recent years. Some young Haredi voters support Ben Gvir, and some – not many – have migrated towards Likud. There’s a slowly growing number abandoning their communities and integrating elsewhere, and all of these movements slow the growth of the political base. But their political clout and stranglehold on Netanyahu is rock-solid.

Netanyahu’s Likud party also has a rock-solid base of about 20% of the electorate. Anyone who supports Netanyahu after the past few years of corruption, poor governance, internal turmoil and external bloodshed, will not be swayed by anything reality might throw at them. I know some of them personally, and so long as we stay away from politics of any sort, some are even friends. The foundation of their support – nay: adulation! – for Netanyahu is emotional, not rational. It’s rooted in identity. To them Bibi is the Defender of Israel. Defender against Israel’s real enemies. Defender against the antisemitic nations of the world who don’t support us in our just wars. Defender against the Israelis who have allowed themselves to be lulled against their nation with false theories of international mores, laws and values, which actually are ruses to dissolve Israel’s strengths and resilience. Defender against foreign-inspired institutions which betray real Jews and authentic Judaism.

Netanyahu heads into the coming election at the head of a coalition of these camps: the racists, the chauvinists, the messianists, the anti-modernists, the anti-democrats, and the corrupt. Together, they’re more than 40% of the electorate, and patriots of my ilk need to own this. If Zionism was invented 130 years ago to create a world in which Jews would be able to create their own national destiny – well, a significant number of them have chosen an identity and destiny which are hard to stomach, and impossible to accept.

The question of our lives is whether there’s a larger number of Israelis who reject this identity and destiny.

The polls think so, but it’s not going to be smooth, and it certainly won’t be simple. The camp facing Netanyahu is splintered, diverse, and full of contradictions. Let’s continue on the path of right to left.

Avigdor Lieberman stands on the right wing of the camp. Born in the Soviet Union, he moved to Israel as a young man in the 1970s. In the 1990s, after a stint as the right-hand-man of young Netanyahu, he built his own party for the voters of the gigantic wave of Soviet immigrants then arriving. Nowadays it’s hard to grow your party by appealing to elderly ex-Soviet citizens, so Lieberman has re-invented himself as proudly Right-wing, militaristic, but also fiercely anti-Haredi and pro-liberal-democracy. He passionately detests Netanyahu, an animosity nurtured by their decades of past collaboration. This political flavor seems worth about 8-9 MKs in the upcoming elections. 10 on a good day. Besides the old Russians, many of his supporters are veteran Likud voters who remain committed to liberal democracy and dislike casting Israelis to their Left as traitors – as Netanyahu always does.

Naftali Bennet and Yair Lapid were the two prime ministers of the short-lived “Government of Change” – Bennet for a year, Lapid for six months, between June 2021 and December 2022. Bennet is a high-tech entrepreneur who grew up in the religious settler movement but has moved towards the political center. Lapid is the scion of a political family from the ideological center: secular, educated, and cagey of extremists of all flavors. These days they’re running together – indeed, their current party name is “Together” – and they hoped Bennet would be the next PM. For a short while their party was neck-and-neck with Likud. The problem is that since Lieberman has mostly cornered the market for liberal right-wingers, and Lapid has never managed to escape his light-weight image, many of their supporters could go elsewhere in the anti-Netanyahu camp. They’ve been slipping in the polls for weeks now. It might even be alarming (for them), if there were a plausible alternative. Gadi Eisenkott, say.

Eisenkot (66) is the rising star of Israeli politics, and as of June 2026 I’d put (a little bit of) my money on him. Non-Israelis have never heard of him.

He was Chief of Staff, the IDF’s top general, between 2015-19. He’s uncharismatic, and pudgy. His name is German-sounding, but his family came from Morrocco. He grew up in Eilat, and finished high-school by correspondence. When Netanyahu’s attack-dogs blame their opponents for being privileged Ashkenazis from Tel Aviv, Eisenkott could be the poster-boy for what they call exploited Second Israel – a terminology he refuses to use. He entered politics in the party of his predecessor as chief of staff, Benny Gantz, though even at the time people wondered if it shouldn’t have been the other way around. On October 10^th 2023 they both entered Netanyahu’s War Cabinet in a national unity gesture, a perch that allowed him to watch Netanyahu’s war leadership from as close as possible. He has told how Netanyahu occasionally asked him, as they were making military decisions of life and death, if Eisenkott’s reservist sons were on the battlefield (Netanyahu’s sons famously weren’t). In December 2023 his son Gal fell in battle one day, and his nephew Maor on the next. Another nephew was killed a few months later. In June 2024 he resigned from the government in protest of Netanyahu’s war leadership. Later he resigned from the Knesset and gave his spot back to Gantz. He said he wanted time to think.

In November 2025 he formed his own party, with the pointed name “Integrity”. Early polls were underwhelming, but he went to work the old-fashioned way. He holds 5-8 town-hall meetings every week, at which he hones his messaging and his mediocre rhetoric skills. He’s been producing pointed videos, most about Netanyahu and October 7^th. He sits for long and thoughtful interviews. Every week he rises a bit higher in the polls; at the very least we’re now in a three-way race between Netanyahu Bennet and him. He seems the only one who has room to grow. Likud’s attack adds are unsuccessfully probing for his weaknesses.

And his positions? He emphasizes his military experience, and criticizes Netanyahu’s failure to deliver victories. Yet he also touches some of the current third rails of our politics, such as the need to reduce our control of the Palestinians, and his willingness to work with our Arab parties – themes Liberman, Bennet and Lapid all stay away from so as not to frighten off right-wing anti-Netanyahu voters. Some pundits claim that his true positions, which he doesn’t flaunt, are further to the Left than anyone else’s. When we look at him, are we looking at Israel’s coming prime minister? It would be nice.

Onward leftwards, we’ve got the Democrats, led by Yair Golan. Golan is another ex-general, who was likely to succeed Eisenkott as chief of staff in 2019, until he made a famous speech about anti-democratic tendencies in Israeli society. Had he talked about the centrality of settlements for Israel’s security his being in uniform wouldn’t have been a problem, but the speech he gave effectively ended his military career. He had a stint in Meretz, the closest thing Israel had to a peace party, but he didn’t fit in. Then, on October 7^th he put on his military fatigues, found a gun, and went off to kill Hamas fighters while saving Israelis. The official generals were flailing and failing, but Golan was being a true hero. It re-cast his public image in a single day.

Golan got himself elected as the head of the Labor party – once the party of Israel’s founders, now a splinter party near the edge of oblivion. He merged it with Meretz, another 50-year-old party, that didn’t even make it into the current Knesset. Even as the head of the renamed Democratic party, which by definition is to the Left of everyone else, Golan is very careful not to talk explicitly about Palestinian statehood, preferring – somewhat like Eisenkott – to burnish his epaulets and not frighten voters with talk about peace. But at least he says clearly that the Arab parties need to be part of the next coalition. The polls project 10-11 seats for the Democrats – 12 on a good day. 10% of the electorate.

Finally, we come to the greatest irony in contemporary Israeli politics: the fact the only bloc of voters that can offer a sure shot at full rejuvenation of the Zionist project and Israel’s return to the family of peaceful liberal democracies, are… the 21% of Israelis who are ethnically Palestinians. The more than 2,000,000 Israelis who aren’t Jews at all. The Palestinians who live within Israel’s 1967 borders, and have been Israeli citizens all along.

Constitutionally they are equal citizens. You’d be hard-pressed to find any laws on the books which are unequivocally discriminatory. But there’s the letter of the law, and there’s reality. In reality, Israel’s Palestinian citizens are marginalized and often discriminated against. In the long view, over decades, their conditions have been steadily improving, but the base line for that long view was very low. Then, about four or five years ago, there was a specific turn for the worse, when the level of violence amongst the Israeli Palestinians started rising. Specifically, the murder rate, which by 2021 had passed 200 annual cases. The Bennet-Lapid government invested major resources in confronting this, and the numbers improved. Then Netanyahu appointed Ben Gvir to be minister of police, and Ben Gvir doesn’t give a hoot about Arabs killing Arabs, and the numbers skyrocketed. So far this year there’s a murder almost every day.

The Arab vote has traditionally been low. Marginalized communities worldwide often vote less then their fellow citizens. Yet if there’s been one factor which changes the Arab vote, it has been the number of Arab parties. At the moment there are four of them, running on three lists: The Islamists, the Communists, and the Palestinian Nationalists. When they run in three lists, they garner about 10 MKs. In the few cases when they united, the level of Arab participation in the vote climbed, and they got 15. (Some Arabs vote for the other parties).

The demand among the Arab voters for a united lists is shrill (and obvious). Some observers expect that a unified Arab list, after four years of Netanyahu and Ben Gvir, could garner 17-18 MKs. This would be a strategic, even philosophical game-changer of Israeli politics.  Full Arab participation in the elections means the end of the rule of the political right for at least a generation. You’d think liberal Israelis would be begging their Palestinian fellow citizens to get out and vote. You’d be wrong. You’d also expect the decision to run on a united list would be a no-brainer for the Arab politicians. Again, you’d be wrong. The current crop of Arab politicians prefer their pet hatreds of one another over winning elections.

Lieberman, Bennet and Lapid are all on record for saying they will not base their coalition on Arab MKs, unless they manage to get 61 votes from their own parties, in which case they’re fine with adding at least the Islamists, as they already did in 2021. And why? Because they’re petrified that Netanyahu will castigate them as illegitimate, since he’s already made clear that for him, Arab votes don’t count. What if all the parties of the current opposition end up with 58-59 MKs, Netanyahu’s block with 52, and the Arabs who ran apart have 10? If you believe pre-election statements of politicians, this will be yet another hung parliament, and we’ll go to a second round of elections, then a third, then a fourth…. Until Netanyahu eventually wins again. Just as already happened between 2019-2022.

Yair Golan is the only leader of a party who states the obvious, that we need the Arab citizens in the government of Israel. Eisenkott may well agree, but he’s mostly evading the question, so as not to be pinned down.

I’ll be voting for Golan, if you had any doubts.

 

The writing of this screed has brought me no pleasure. But now that it’s written, I’ll send it off. Stick it on the front of your refrigerator, if you wish, and wait until November to see if Israel has a future we can be proud of – or if the Zionist experiment has failed.

Yaacov

PS This was written over the first weeks of June 2026. I posted it on this website only on July 1st, 2026