Having no solution has become a national consensus. Netanyahu built his legacy on it, shaping a generation for whom war is as inevitable as the weather. Israel seems to live in a vacuum, forever searching for its next enemy
Israel seems to live in a vacuum, forever searching for its next enemy
Israeli strike on Gaza hospital kills at least six, including doctor and child
Avraham Burg
Days before the election, Israel is a pressure cooker, with every candidate turning up the flame.
Haredi men riot to prevent military police from arresting draft refusers. Extremist settlers attack Palestinian communities in the West Bank with murderous brutality. Violent crime rages in Arab towns while the state stands idle. The families of 7 October still demand accountability. The figures on depression, trauma and suicide are alarming. Emigration and the collapse of trust in public institutions are without precedent.
Across these crises the pattern is the same: state authority has eroded, civic solidarity has crumbled and brutality replaces political responsibility. Three years after its greatest failure, Israel is militarily strong, psychologically frightened and so divided that it stands on the brink of a cold civil war. How did this happen?
On 7 October, Hamas committed horrific atrocities and crimes against humanity. It bears full responsibility for the massacre, abductions and abuse of human beings. But Israel bears responsibility for the mass killing of innocents and the destruction and suffering it has inflicted on Gaza since. These are two monstrous systems of crime; neither excuses nor offsets the other.
Having no solution has become a national consensus. Netanyahu built his legacy on it, shaping a generation for whom war is as inevitable as the weather
Beyond the moral reckoning lies a political one. For years Israel was addicted to the belief that it could expand settlements, keep millions of Palestinians under military rule, isolate Gaza, weaken the Palestinian Authority and purchase security through fences, technology, intelligence and military force. On 7 October that illusion collapsed.
Israel has since made substantial military gains. Enemy leaders have been killed, capabilities damaged and Israeli intelligence has shown remarkable reach. Yet every one of its wars remains undecided and unfinished. Hamas still rules Gaza. The occupation of the West Bank deepens. Lebanon waits for the next assault. Each round generates the next, more brutal war. Israel wins tactical battles while losing the strategy on which its very existence depends.
Iran is the clearest example. For three decades, Benjamin Netanyahu urged US presidents to bomb Iran; finally, one did. Yet the regime in Tehran survives, its scientists retain their nuclear knowledge, and Israeli cities have learned what it means to live under Iranian missile fire. Abroad, not least in Washington, the campaign is increasingly judged a strategic disaster.
But in Israel, barely anyone asks whether Netanyahu, or the political and military establishment that backed him, got it catastrophically wrong. His election rivals endorsed the war too. With almost everyone implicated, almost no one is held accountable.
On 27 October Israelis will choose a government. A Netanyahu defeat could begin the repair of battered state institutions. The bloc for change promises much that matters: removing a corrupt prime minister, establishing a state commission of inquiry, restoring the rule of law and civil service, healing society and repairing Israel’s standing abroad.
These would be real achievements. But the security doctrine exposed as bankrupt on 7 October is scarcely debated. Every serious contender still believes security requires permanent military control over the Palestinians and the endless deferral of a political solution.
Israel has moved steadily right in the 25 years since the collapse of the Camp David talks and the second intifada. Since 7 October, that drift has become a stampede. The left has almost disappeared. Netanyahu’s opponents – Naftali Bennett, Avigdor Lieberman and Gadi Eisenkot – dispute the prime minister’s integrity, competence and assault on the rule of law, but not his position on the Palestinians.
Having no solution has itself become a national consensus. Netanyahu built his legacy on it, shaping a generation for whom war is as inevitable as the weather and occupation a necessity. This explains why half the country sees no reason to replace him.
The occupation has shaped the Israel we see today. Decades of brutal rule over Palestinians without political rights have erased the boundary between the force exercised beyond the Green Line and the politics within it. To many Israelis, Arab citizens and the left are enemies too.
Consider Sami Abu Shehadeh, one of Israel’s most impressive Arab public figures, who withdrew from the election earlier this month after Israel’s elections committee and supreme court justices effectively forced him out. The country’s political and legal systems thereby admitted they cannot accommodate a Palestinian voice that challenges the majority narrative. This campaign has set a new low for Israeli democracy.
The crisis reaches far beyond the divide between Jews and Palestinians. The very idea of shared citizenship is fraying within Jewish society. Israel’s internal breakdown, unfinished wars, international isolation and partial loss of political independence barely register in the voter’s mind. Tribal allegiance and anger dominate, along with the simplest of questions: which candidate do I hate least, and which trauma hurts me least?
The memory of persecution and extermination made the myth of Jewish power central to Israeli identity, and the external threat a source of internal cohesion.
But from outside, Israel seems to live in a vacuum, forever searching for its next enemy.
The moment the guns fell silent with Iran, ministers and commentators recast Turkey and Erdoğan as a menace greater even than Tehran. The enemy changes; the need for one does not. Israel can scarcely imagine a future defined by anything else.
Will the Jewish state remain the eternal fortress of a persecuted people, or become a secure national home living in peace and equality with its neighbours? Can Israel survive without an external enemy? Both questions are absent from the ballot, and both will shape Israel’s future far more than the identity of the next prime minister.
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