It seems that we are heading toward an Israeli election battle that will be different from all previous elections. There are deep internal crises afflicting Israel as a result of loss of public trust in the government, cracks within the Likud and a rebellion against Netanyahu’s leadership, as well as the possibility that Netanyahu and his alliance will not accept the results of the elections if they are not to their satisfaction. There are signs of efforts to outlaw the Arab parties and prevent them from participating in the elections. If that fails, the elections may be accompanied by fabricated clashes and confrontations designed to disrupt their conduct, especially in Arab-populated areas, in order to create a pretext to disqualify the Arab votes.

The Elections Are a Referendum on the War

The upcoming Israeli elections are not merely a competition between Benjamin Netanyahu and his opponents for the premiership, nor are they a traditional power struggle between right-wing and centrist parties. Rather, for the first time since the establishment of Israel, the elections appear to be a referendum on the results of a war whose repercussions have not yet ended, on the limits of Israeli power, and on the future of the relationship with the United States as the partner without whom Israel cannot fight a major regional war.
Netanyahu senses the threat to his leadership and the significant potential of not only being removed from the political scene but also of ending up in prison if convicted of the criminal charges pending against him. He is also afraid that a state commission of inquiry formed after the elections will hold him accountable for the security and intelligence failures on October 7, 2023, and the major mistakes in the ongoing wars on other fronts. The opposition, political and media elites and former military and security leaders believe Netanyahu fought them as an extended war to serve his political and personal interests, leading Israel to disaster and politically degraded giving up on its independent decision and becoming under American custody.

Netanyahu and Trump

Netanyahu’s latest hasty visit to Washington to meet his war partner Trump was intended to seek a lifeline. The aim was not only to deepen the traditional alliance between the two parties but to establish the rules for the next phase. Netanyahu wants to drag Trump back into war against Iran, considering that the war did not achieve its major goals and the U.S.-Iran Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) did not take Israeli security and political interests into account. Netanyahu was trying that though he realizes that Trump wants to solidify the agreement with Iran to serve American economic and strategic priorities and enhance his political standing and his party’s chances of winning the upcoming November midterm elections.
Netanyahu also planned the visit in the hope of showing an achievement to enhance his chances of winning the upcoming Israeli elections and remaining prime minister. Therefore, if he fails to drag Trump into war with Iran again, he will try to market himself as the great defender of Israel’s security through attempts to secure amendments to the MOU on the issues of Lebanon and Iran’s nuclear program, missile production, relations with its Arab allies and with the Palestinian liberation movements.
Opinion polls in Israel reveal that Netanyahu no longer monopolizes the leadership of the political scene. They show the rapid rise of former Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot, who has reshuffled the cards within the opposition camp, leading in a number of polls over Naftali Bennett. Meanwhile, the Likud is losing its lead but has not collapsed.
It should be noted that the polls do not give either camp a stable majority, making the most likely scenario the reproduction of the same division that Israel has suffered from in recent years, with a Knesset divided between intersecting blocs and a renewed inability to produce a strong government capable of making major strategic decisions.

Two Different Approaches

Reading the election discourse is more important than reading the numbers. Netanyahu is fighting his battle on the premise that he is the indispensable war leader, and that replacing him means admitting failure and abandoning the war’s goals. As for the opposition, led by Eisenkot and Bennett, it does not present itself as a leadership for a new war, but as a leadership that rebuilds the state exhausted by war, but on the basis of extremist, and war rhetoric. Therefore, its programs feature headlines that would not have topped any Israeli election campaign years ago: an official state commission of inquiry into the failures of October 7, reorganization of the army, addressing the conscription crisis, expanding reserve forces, reforming the military establishment, and restoring public trust in the state. These are the priorities of a government preparing to restore the ability to wage war, not a government that learns from the lessons of war to make policies that seek an alternative to war, a government that declares it is not going to war but to a political track. The opposition attacks Netanyahu because he did not achieve victory, but it does not promise Israelis to achieve this victory tomorrow. Instead, it first promises to rebuild the tools that make winning the next war possible. This is an implicit admission that the last war did not exhaust the army alone, but exhausted the state, society, and trust in leadership.

Washington Will Remain the Final Arbiter

In contrast, the opposition is confused regarding the United States, which has become a protector and supporter of Israel in any war. On the one hand, the opposition’s discourse attacks Netanyahu because, according to the opposition, he gave in on Israel’s independence and sovereignty and became a captive of American will, who accepted Washington’s restrictions on the war and is no longer able to impose his priorities. On the other hand, none of the opposition leaders call for disengagement from Washington or for fighting wars without it. Instead, they make restoring the relationship with it under new conditions one of their most important goals. The question that the opposition avoids is more important than its slogans: If the problem is Netanyahu, would the United States have chosen war if the prime minister were someone else? And if Washington has redefined its interests and now believes that expanding regional wars no longer serves its economic and political priorities, do Eisenkot or Bennett have the ability to change the American decision or is best either of them can do is improve the management of the relationship with Washington, which will remain the final arbiter when it comes to going to war and how to exit it?
The battle is not between proponents of war and proponents of peace, but between those who believe that Israel needs a comprehensive review before any new war and those who will try to convince the voter that the problem is not Netanyahu but the transformations that have affected Israel’s surrounding strategic environment.

The Ability to Go to War Is No Longer an Israeli Decision Alone

Perhaps the most important thing revealed by the election campaign is that Israel itself no longer speaks with confidence about its ability to wage a long regional war alone. The talk about rebuilding the army, expanding mobilization, reforming command systems, and reorganizing the relationship with the United States is not the discourse of someone preparing for an imminent military decision but the discourse of an entity recalculating after discovering that the power it possessed is no longer sufficient to achieve the goals it set for itself. Most likely, according to the polls as of the time of this article, the elections will not produce a governing majority but will reproduce the crisis of the political system itself. Then Israel will face an unprecedented paradox: a new leadership may emerge from the ruins of Netanyahu but lacks a governing majority, or Netanyahu remains without a majority that enables him to continue his project. In both cases, the crisis is not about individuals but about a state searching for a new strategy after the limits of power clashed with the limits of politics and the limits of Israeli will came up against the limits of American will. The most important outcome of the elections may not be knowing who sits in the Prime Minister’s Office but discovering that Israel, for the first time in decades, is entering a phase where its decision-making ability is not independent but rather a part of American decision-making. Whoever governs in Jerusalem will not be able to ignore the fact that the decision to go to war is no longer purely an Israeli one and that rebuilding the army may not be easier than rebuilding the ability to influence American decisions or may not even be possible without the United States.
The issue of resolving the Palestinian Israeli conflict or making peace is absent from the Israeli elections’ campaigns.