Israel Can’t Postpone Its Reckoning Forever

On October 13 of last year, Hamas released its last living Israeli hostages—20 Jews in various states of disrepair. And Israel, along with a remarkably small fraction of the rest of the world, allowed itself a brief moment to celebrate. Among the Israelis paid to contain his relief was Zohar Palti, who served as Mossad’s head of intelligence from 2011 to 2016. He joined me for dinner in a northern suburb of Tel Aviv two days later. Looking on the bright side, he told me, was “a waste of time” for someone whose job was to think about all that could go catastrophically wrong. Palti said he was happy to see the hostages freed, but Israel’s future would probably look like its past. And that meant more war. “My dad is 92 years old,” he said. “He fought in Gaza in ’56, in ’67, and in ’73. I myself was there in the ’90s, in 2000, and in 2010. My son is there right now.” Then he smiled. “Trust me: My grandson will be there as well.”

“I know what you are thinking: typical cynical Israeli,” he said, but added that he was not a pessimist; he was reasonably sure that Israel would be able to manage, if not solve, its conflict with the Palestinians. He was also confident about his country’s preparation to handle Iran, whose government has committed itself to Israel’s physical elimination. “If you speak with the generals, the security people who invest their lives in this issue: What is the essential threat to Israel? No one will say, Something from the outside.”

They do not fret about Iran or Gaza or Syria, he said. The real problems lie within—negotiating the divide between the secular and the religious; incorporating into the state the one-fifth of the Israeli population that is non-Jewish and Arab; and figuring out how Israel will govern itself. Dismantling Hamas, Palti said, is a leisurely errand by comparison.

[Franklin Foer: The existential heroism of the Israeli hostages]

“We know how to control all the bad guys,” Palti said. “Forget about terror. Forget about ballistic missiles.” The real issues are domestic. “Think whether we will know how to live with each other.”

The dominant view outside Israel is that the country’s problems are just the opposite: The issues that matter include the hard rain of Iranian missiles, and the tattered umbrella of interceptors that provides shelter; the failure to destroy Hamas; and, finally, Israel’s pariah status. Israeli officials have estimated roughly 70,000 deaths in the Gaza war that followed the October 7, 2023, attack. (That figure includes Hamas fighters as well as civilians.) The magnitude of the carnage has shredded Israel’s reputation. In the United States, progressives aiming to take over the Democratic Party have made Israel’s alleged genocide their singular foreign-policy issue. The Gaza war has roiled British and European politics as well.  

Historically, Israel has depended on the good graces of larger and richer powers. Without the help of the Soviet bloc, it might have failed to achieve independence. Without weapons from France and money from Germany in the 1950s, it would have faced military defeat and insolvency. And since 1967, it has relied on the United States as a patron, friend, and armorer. A friendless Israel would be a dead Israel.

When I first visited the country, nearly a quarter century ago, during the Second Intifada, these sensitivities were heightened, and world opinion was a source of concern and even dread. That is less true today. Although Israelis discuss the effects of international arrest warrants and bans on arms sales, these issues do not dominate public debate. In some circles, the cost of cottage cheese is more pressing. The reason for this blitheness toward international public opinion is simple: Israel has become its own armorer, indeed an exporter of arms, and is far richer than it was just 20 years ago. Moral disapproval of its conduct during the war in Gaza is easy to ignore, when so many of those disapproving had excused the October 7 attack. Meanwhile, the price of cottage cheese (and most everything else) is going up, though the economy is growing quickly.

It is just like Israel to have worked out survival in a region where almost every other country has, at some point, tried to annihilate it—but neglected something as predictably bedeviling as how to manage demographic shifts and the challenges of coexisting in a diverse society. That society includes Tel Aviv tech bros, half a million settlers living in the West Bank (which is to say, outside the territory that Israel claims as its own sovereign land), 1.7 million Arab citizens, and hundreds of thousands of ultra-Orthodox men whose main activity is medieval study.  

Polite disagreement about the role of religion in particular ceased to be polite after Benjamin Netanyahu’s election as prime minister in 2022. Netanyahu invited religious, right-wing politicians into his coalition, and many Israelis came to the conclusion that he had sold out to fanatics who would replace democracy with theocratic rule. Netanyahu’s supporters took the opposite view, that the prime minister was finally empowering a religious base hitherto ignored by disdainful secular elites. Forcing those elites to watch their enemies govern was not the end of democracy. It was democracy.

By the summer of 2023, the fight had become so acrimonious that many doubted that Israel was one coherent country capable of resolving its differences through voting. “The wheels were coming off,” Eylon Levy, who served as a foreign-media adviser for the government that year, told me. “We were in a death spiral of political argument.” Only a swift kick in the face from Hamas or Iran managed to distract Israelis from their own internal hatreds.

Today, Israel is no closer to working out any of the big questions about its identity and destiny. On October 27, Israelis will vote again, in an election likely to postpone the reckoning further.

One indication that this election will fail to deliver a new, uniting vision for Israel is that it has failed to deliver even one new individual to the political scene. The major candidates are all products of the 1990s, a period that most Israelis are too young to remember. Netanyahu’s first term as prime minister started 30 years ago, when he was 46; his leading challenger this year, the 66-year-old Gadi Eisenkot, was a military adviser to Prime Minister Ehud Barak from 1999 to 2001. Naftali Bennett, a relative spring chicken at 54, is also associated with this older generation: He was Netanyahu’s chief of staff from 2006 to 2008. Yair Lapid is a former prime minister who also belongs to the older generation.

An Israeli political observer with strong connections to establishment figures in both pro- and anti-Netanyahu camps said he regretted how few fresh ideas and new candidates have arisen in this election cycle. “They have all been in the game for a very, very long time,” he told me. (He requested anonymity, to preserve comity with those connections.) “What we hear is the same pre–October 7 conversation,” in which every major politician defines himself by whether he is anti-Netanyahu, pro-Netanyahu, or, well, Netanyahu. The result, he said, is a conspicuous lack of a “positive alternative vision for the country.” The election that is likely to determine Israel’s future is therefore not this one but the next one, which Netanyahu would have to be a gerontological marvel to contest.

Netanyahu (whose father, Benzion, lived to be 102) might still survive politically to lead another right-wing government. He is extremely good at not losing elections, sometimes by duct-taping together factions that are not his natural allies but are happy to use his political skills to their advantage. Right now, those factions are all to his right, and he is the left-most figure in his own government. Even if he loses this election, he will have defined its terms, as he has every election since his second turn in office, in 2009. The political observer described him to me as “the pole in the political tent”—the figure whose presence keeps the whole Israeli political circus going in its current form.

His domination of politics has coincided with a general shift toward the right. In this election, Netanyahu’s plausible rivals differ from him less in policy than in cynicism and governing style. All of them are center or center-right and agree with a version of Netanyahu’s peace-through-strength doctrine—a focus on making Israel strong and independent enough that reconciliation with its enemies is optional. “One might have thought October 7 would have caused a substantive debate about Israel’s broadest strategy,” Dov Waxman, an expert on Israeli politics at UCLA, told me. But the election won’t be about the future of Israel, let alone its relations with its external enemies. “It’s about which parties are willing to work with which.”

Bennett, the former prime minister, has an outside chance of returning to office with an anti-Netanyahu coalition. But the most likely successor is Eisenkot, a former chief of the Israel Defense Forces and the latest in a long line of generals who have entered politics, usually with underwhelming results. Eisenkot served in a post–October 7 unity government headed by Netanyahu but has opposed the prime minister on a range of issues, such as Israel’s lack of postwar plans and the relative urgency of rescuing hostages versus defeating Hamas. These are differences of means rather than ends. Eisenkot’s biography provides some political leeway that others do not have. His son Gal was killed while serving in Gaza in December 2023. As a general after the 2006 Lebanon War, Eisenkot formulated what has become known as the “Dahiya doctrine”: When the enemy thoroughly embeds itself in villages or neighborhoods, Israel classifies those places as military targets, and attacks them with disproportionate force. Being associated with the plan, or promise, to obliterate what would otherwise be regarded as civilian areas does much to inoculate Eisenkot against the usual accusation from the right that its opponents are soft on national security.

The result is an election where remarkably little is at stake. Netanyahu, Bennett, and Eisenkot are all running on “security” platforms and view Hamas and Iran as their top priority. The first two candidates wish to thwart Palestinian statehood in general, but even Eisenkot has said that, after October 7, restarting the peace process and providing a path to statehood is “delusional.” In the West Bank, Jewish settlers have harassed and attacked Palestinians to pressure them to give up land where they live and graze animals. Netanyahu’s government has overseen the expansion of this reprehensible activity. The contrast with Bennett is again mild: He supports settlements and wishes to restrain only the most aggressive settlers. Eisenkot, the furthest left among the candidates who have a real shot at becoming prime minister, considers many of the settlers a diplomatic embarrassment or impediment to peace, but he has only a vague plan to stop them.

Of the major issues in the election—recriminations over the government’s failures on October 7, how best to continue the Gaza war, the rising cost of living, and whether ultra-Orthodox Jewish citizens must serve in the military—only the last touches on the deepest rifts in Israeli society. The debate seems to be mostly about which hawk will fly point. Palestinians, including Arab citizens of Israel, are understandably dismayed by this short menu of politicians who differ only on how quickly and by what means they will be alienated from land they consider their own. The Israeli left is by now so far outside the country’s mainstream that its chief party, the Democrats, can hope to win no more than 10 or 11 seats, and its leader, Yair Golan, is more likely to win the Israeli lottery than serve as prime minister.

So Israel, plagued by factionalism, in some sense consists of only one faction when it comes to the issues that the outside world identifies as the most difficult and urgent. What splits the country instead are the questions Zohar Palti listed: religiosity, ethnicity, and political philosophy. Most have been around for a long time.

The State of Israel was born 78 years ago. The Book of Psalms allots men 70 years, 80 for those hungry for an extra helping of labor and sorrow. Even secular Israelis often invoke the turmoil and self-destruction of the Jews during the days of the First and Second Temples, when decades of internal strife corroded the state and made their ancestors ripe targets for the Babylonians and Romans. The sense of an impending round of internecine squabbling, with potentially disastrous results, is universal.

Doomsaying about outside threats is a chronic national neurosis, natural to a state that was nearly strangled at birth and that has survived regular attempts on its life. In Israel’s early days, however, certain internal arrangements seemed settled. The first big waves of Jewish immigrants to Palestine came from Europe, and they brought with them ideas and political knowledge that were current in the countries they were fleeing. After the First World War, Jews began arriving in Palestine in large numbers, especially after America and other sites of refuge from anti-Semitism closed their doors to them. The Holocaust provided a final surge of Jewish immigration. A pragmatic spirit animated the Jewish state from its declaration in 1948, and in its victory over the combined Arab armies of Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria. The war and subsequent expulsions displaced about 750,000 Palestinians, few of whom returned to the homes they left behind.

Survival is not an ideology, and few of these immigrants arrived with ideology in mind. But in the early years, the elites who led Israel infused the new project with their hopes and ideas about how to govern. Some followed a model heavily influenced by the nationalisms of 19th-century Europe. Others, who came to dominate the next generations of Israeli politics, brought European-style labor leftism, and saw Israel as a state for Jews just as Sweden was a state for Swedes and Poland was for Poles.

David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister, expounded on the concept of the “new Jew,” a muscular and independent pioneer, whose identity was not defined by religion. The founding generation tended to be secular, educated, and leftist. This was no accident: If you were visibly Jewish and spoke only Yiddish, you were less likely to have survived when the Nazis showed up. The Holocaust was a great filter. When Israel was founded, these secular elites recognized that their more religious and insular brethren had been nearly annihilated, and they were happy to create a new habitat where the religious could survive as a pitied minority in a state ruled by secular Jews. Soon Arab countries expelled their Jewish populations, and a new wave of Jews arrived, this time without the deadly filter of 1940s Mitteleuropa. Baghdad, a city that was roughly one-third Jewish in the early 20th century, expelled virtually all of its Jews by the early ’50s. Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia forced the departure of theirs at a more relaxed pace. Collectively, these Jews are known as Mizrahim—literally, “eastern” Jews, as opposed to the European-descended Ashkenazim—and they, too, were welcomed, with the expectation that their numbers would not swamp the demography of the nascent state, or pry power from the country’s founding leaders.

That was Israel in its early decades: a big, rowdy Jewish bus, which any Jew could board, but whose route and rules of carriage were dictated by secular, leftist Ashkenazim. Israel would be as Jewish as Belgium was Christian, and in many ways it would follow the path of postwar Europe—toward benevolent democratic socialism. The naivete of this expectation is startling in historical hindsight. Neither the Mizrahim nor many of the religious Ashkenazim felt attached to European traditions of modernity, liberalism, and nationalism. They were poorer than their secular Ashkenazi counterparts, and less educated. And they had more kids.

The initial social pact lasted into the ’70s. Menachem Begin, the prime minister from 1977 to 1983, was the first prime minister to break with the elite consensus and present Israel as a country that was neither European nor Middle Eastern but a blend of both. He led a political realignment, spoke for the poorer and darker classes, and was bellicose. Europe had given up on wars, except of the cold variety, but Begin defied the liberal democratic consensus against firing guns except in self-defense. He oversaw the entry of Israel into the Lebanese civil war, and Israel’s long occupation of southern Lebanon, beginning in 1982.

Israel’s religious shift has been subtle but unmistakable. In 1948, the ultra-Orthodox (the Haredim, or “those who tremble” before God), comprised a tiny fraction of the Israeli population. The Haredim followed what one modern Haredi rabbi and activist, Yehoshua Pfeffer, called a “Noah’s Ark model,” with the surviving members “riding the storm” so they could maintain a way of life and proliferate after the storm passed. They were fruitful beyond expectation. Within three decades, about one in 20 Jewish Israelis were Haredi. By 2024, they were  one in eight, and by mid-century, they could be one in three. The proliferation of this population would be inconsequential if it meant only that more Israelis observed Shabbat. The Haredim, however, insist that their contribution to Judaism is prayer and observance, and that civic demands placed on other Israelis are, at best, distractions. Some even consider the modern Israeli state a secular abomination. Their population is poor and lives largely off public assistance, and the men (instantly identifiable by their black suits, prodigious beards, and forelocks grown long) almost all take exceptions from military service. What the early secular elites assumed would remain a niche interest—lifelong religious study—has become the full-time occupation of an unsustainable number of Israeli citizens. Taxpaying, war-fighting Israelis express irritation at a community that reproduces at an astonishing rate, takes public money, and lives behind a shield that others die to uphold. But it is also awkward for anyone, even a fellow Jew, to describe a group of Jews as parasitic, especially a group of Jews that recently faced extermination by an enemy that spoke in those same terms.

To the secular Israelis who have watched this shift, their religious fellow citizens who refuse to work and serve are only slightly more alarming than the religious Israelis who do work and serve. For much of Israel’s history, religious Zionists were content to live under the protection of the state, without insisting that they control the state. The shift away from that passivity is the most significant political change of the past 20 years. In 2005, the government of Ariel Sharon forced thousands of Israeli settlers, many of them religious Zionists, to leave Gaza. These uprooted settlers vowed not to trust the state again until they had senior positions in the military, the government, and other institutions of power. They have since stormed such former bastions of pragmatic atheism, while retaining their sense of fury over 2005. “There’s something in it that’s almost vengeful,” the Hebrew University political scientist Avishay Ben Sasson-Gordis told me. “It says to the left: You took what was most important to us. We will take what is most important to you.”

Often, the observers of this trend invoke a useful demographic shorthand: the hat. Much can be inferred about Israeli culture just by looking at the prevalence of kippahs, the Jewish headgear whose style indicates the wearer’s sect: black felt for Haredim; knit for religious Zionists; none at all for secular. “When I was young, there were maybe five people in my battalion who were religious,” one retired military officer, himself a religious Jew, told me. “Now probably half the command staff wears the kippah.”

The result is a country whose people are more religious, illiberal, and warlike than its founders had intended. The social shifts are clear. But Israel still needed an individual to translate that long-term shift into political reality. The mathematical historian Peter Turchin has noted that such shifts away from elite-led consensus rarely take place because the non-elites seize power directly. Instead, they find a defector from the old elite, who then uses popular discontent to rise to power and create a counter-elite. Begin was the first version of this, a European Jew who embodied the changes in the 1970s. The current version is the most consequential leader in Israel’s history, Benjamin Netanyahu.

When I visited Israel in the summer of 2023, it seemed like all of Tel Aviv was decorated with anti-Bibi propaganda. Posters featured high-contrast imagery of Netanyahu, combined with denunciatory slogans and promises to throw the bastard out. Blue-state “resistance” rhetoric against Donald Trump reads like a dignified, sternly worded letter to the editor compared with the bilious invective of the anti-Netanyahu protest movement.

Protests in Tel Aviv that summer attracted as many as 200,000 people at a time. The protesters, sincere and urgent in their anger, believed that Netanyahu was turning Israel into an illiberal state for his personal benefit and to advance a fascistic and theocratic agenda. Their loathing for Netanyahu multiplied because, they said, he knew what he was doing. Netanyahu is not religious. He is worldly, educated, and familiar with the blessings of liberalism—and despite these characteristics, the protesters said, he was transmogrifying Israel into a fanatical country. He was overseeing this change, they argued, because he wanted to stay in power, and he preferred to pilot the country into the ground rather than surrender the controls to someone else.

The immediate cause of the protests was not religious in nature at all. Netanyahu’s government had finally taken up a cause that right-wing Israelis had championed for years: curtailing the extraordinary power of the Israeli judiciary. Starting in the 1990s, Israel’s supreme court assumed for itself the power to review, and sometimes stop, government policy and even political appointments. Israel has no constitution to authorize this power, but the supreme court, under the court’s president, Aharon Barak, effectively said that there wasn’t any point in having a supreme court in a liberal democracy if it didn’t have this final say over how the country is run. (If this judicial arrangement sounds peculiar, that is because no other country is run this way.) The court has tended to rule in a liberal direction since then. Many of the uprooted Gaza settlers of 2005 thought that it would save them from removal. It did not, and many of those same settlers have hated the court ever since, because they say it always finds rights for Arabs but never for settlers.

In 2023, Netanyahu proposed limiting the court’s power of review and changing how its judges are appointed. The net effect of these changes would free future Israeli governments from judicial restrictions. The protesters said that their ancestors did not survive fascism in Europe only to live in a state that would flush away its own liberal democracy. They would not pay taxes to such a state, and would not fight in its military.

They also made much of the corruption charges against Netanyahu. Starting in 2019, the prime minister was charged with abusing his office for personal gain—pushing through laws in exchange for expensive gifts and positive press coverage. These charges have been stalled while he has remained in office. But the protesters were, I found, frustratingly silent on the dynamics that had brought Netanyahu to the controls in the first place. Not all were attributable to demographics. The Israeli right, of which he is the most prominent figure, had provided security to the country and support for settlement expansion—even in defiance of Israel’s own laws—into the West Bank. The attack on October 7 had not yet happened, so in the summer of 2023, Netanyahu could credibly say that the policies he championed had brought about a happy and uneventful decade for most Israelis.

[Michael A. Cohen: How Netanyahu hurt America’s Jews]

For a country that had recently endured suicide bombings, that achievement was hard for voters not to reward. The Israeli left had contended that the country’s security depended on making a deal with the Palestinians, a handshake that would lead first to more handshakes and finally to a multitude of embraces between Arabs and Jews across an agreed-on national border. Such confidence in the power of diplomacy was a throwback to the early ’90s, when the Oslo Accords promised peace through Israeli land concessions, mutual recognition, and ongoing dialogue between the most reasonable Israelis and the most reasonable members of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. The result of those efforts: In 1995, the most reasonable Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, was shot dead by one of the least reasonable Israelis; settlement activity in the West Bank and Gaza accelerated; and the Second Intifada, launched with the blessing of the supposedly reasonable PLO president, Yasir Arafat, killed thousands of Israeli and Palestinian civilians. The Israeli right has flourished simply by observing that conceding land for peace left Israel less secure than before the concessions started.

Their preferred approach was to harden Israel’s borders, prepare advanced defense systems to pluck missiles out of the sky, and relentlessly kill Israel’s enemies. The Israeli right won this debate. Ignoring handshakes produced a pleasing result: For two decades, no foreign power dared attack Israel, and terrorist attacks declined until they were rare rather than constant. It is difficult to appreciate, if you are under the age of about 40, how aberrant this period in Israeli history was—and how hapless the Israeli left was, when trying to explain to voters that they should prefer the left’s moral superiority to the security that the right had delivered by ignoring the left. Israel is one of the few places where even the young have moved consistently rightward. Some of this drift is demographic (right-leaning segments of society, such as the religiously observant, tend to have more children than left-leaning segments), but some is attributable to the view that by pursuing peace naively, the left nearly got everyone killed.

Even at the protests in the summer of 2023, I detected a tacit acceptance of the right’s victory, both over the Palestinians and over the Israeli left. In fact, the protesters treated the issue of Palestine with an almost Freudian avoidance: Precisely because the issue silently dominated the protests, it could not be mentioned. Jacob Abolafia, an American Israeli political philosopher who has criticized Israeli policy in the West Bank, urged me to see that Netanyahu’s whole reason for attempting to neuter the supreme court was because it represented the last hope for Palestinians who objected to their abuse by Israeli settlers. But few protesters saw it that way. They considered themselves—the liberal democrats—to be the victims of the proposed reforms. “I would say, generously, that maybe a thousand protesters out of 200,000 would mention Palestinians at all,” Abolafia said. “If you tried to bring up Palestinians, you would get shouted down.”

The protesters had another problem. The crowds in Tel Aviv were huge, and if one knew nothing about Israel except the sight of a sea of T-shirt-clad, sign-waving liberals on Kaplan Street, one would assume that Netanyahu would soon fall and his country would be restored. To leave Tel Aviv was to learn that Israel was not united in this view, and that the remaining outposts of liberalism were being overrun.

In the summer of 2023, I went to a rally in Jerusalem outside Netanyahu’s official residence. I accompanied my friends Peter Cole, an American-born poet, and his partner, the writer Adina Hoffman. We walked together from their home near the Old City, past neighborhoods filled with very religious families—many of them recent arrivals from America or North Africa—who had taken over former slums, and to Rehavia, a neighborhood whose residents include intellectuals and professionals, and the prime minister himself.

The atmosphere was at times euphoric, in the way of effective political rallies: reminders that like-minded people exist and care about the same things you do. But the crowd was older than me, and I am no longer young. Jerusalem is an old city with a young population. The rally against Netanyahu felt at times like a Class of ’74 high-school reunion, and after my friends recognized their third or fourth gray-haired or bald friend in the crowd, sometimes shaking hands or hugging after years apart, it became impossible to ignore how these old-school liberals were also just plain old, and had failed in some way to reproduce their politics in future generations. Back in Cole and Hoffman’s neighborhood, the families had so many children that I could sit on the writers’ balcony, watch the alley’s comings and goings for hours, and still not know the total head count in neighboring houses. Religious youngsters in black suits or snoods passed by, but few people dressed like me or my hosts did. Many at the rally had children and grandchildren, but they were not present. Those other Jerusalemites, the young and the native-born, skewed either indifferent to the protests or possibly in opposition to them.

I had come to Israel hoping to speak with Israelis on the left and on the right. I was chastened by a joke I heard, more than once, upon describing my mission to Israelis in those terms. “What left?” they asked. There was none remaining. I would need a time machine. It was like coming to Rome and trying to meet Italians and also Etruscans. Too late! In the ’90s, secret meetings in Oslo and in the Rose Garden had given peaceniks a good name, or at least led Israelis to give them a chance. The Second Intifada, which killed thousands of Israeli and Palestinian civilians, ended that indulgence for a generation. Some of those peaceniks moved to kibbutzes on the Gaza border, which were established with the intention of fostering peace. On October 7, when these kibbutzes were raided and their populations massacred, many of the surviving peaceniks turned in their beads and decided that there was a time for peace and a time for war, and the time for war was now.

No figure is more illustrative of this flitting-away of Israeli doves than Yair Golan, the leader of Israel’s Democratic Party. He exists to answer this question: What is the probability that the perfect Israeli politician will become prime minister, if he is also a leftist and a peacenik? I believe that Israeli nanoscale engineers are using precision equipment to quantify the exact number, and distinguish it from zero.

Golan is a genuine Israeli hero. I met him twice, once last year in a bare room in his party’s Tel Aviv office, and once several months ago in the Knesset. Now 64 years old, he grew up in what he remembers as “the most glorious period” in Israel’s history, when the country had “a very cohesive, egalitarian, optimistic society” run by “practical” people interested in doing what worked, rather than fulfilling a rigid ideology. He spent 38 years in the IDF, was nearly appointed its chief of staff by Netanyahu, and retired from active service as a major general in 2018. In bearing, he is stoic and serious, with the credibility that comes from having devoted his life to war and having determined that peace is better.

On the morning of October 7, 2023, Golan was at home, near Tel Aviv, and first learned about the attacks because his phone began having little seizures, alerting him to missile attacks. He retrieved his boots from his garage and drove to the military headquarters in Ramle.

“When I saw the security assessment, I was shocked,” he told me. About 40 incursions along the Gaza border had already been detected. The commanding officer had been a cadet when Golan commanded the IDF officer course. “We had known each other for many years,” Golan said. “I asked to be his personal envoy to the front.” With the general’s blessing, Golan took a rifle and drove south in his white Toyota Yaris.

At the IDF’s base in the southern district, he found a barracks in disarray, attacked by Hamas and littered with wounded. The colonel in charge had been shot in the shoulder, and he briefed Golan while waiting for an ambulance. When the ambulance finally left, Golan was the senior officer in the field, though he had no orders or command.

Without guidance from the military, he took orders instead from his sister. She called to report that music fans from the Nova festival were being massacred, and a few had run about a mile and half away and were hiding in the desert scrub, waiting to be saved or slaughtered. “They sent a video, and you could hear the shooting around them,” he said. “I drove on the road until I was close, and then I felt much safer driving off-road.” He found the group and brought them to safety. Soon word spread among parents that a one-man taxi service was operating in the desert, and that if the IDF would not respond, maybe he could. A journalist from Haaretz asked Golan to save his son. “So I went back in. And then I got another phone call, from a woman who asked me to save her son.” He was in the center of the killing zone. “That was the first time I truly entered the Nova-festival location,” Golan said. “And it was a massacre. The worst I saw in my life.” By sunset, his impromptu rescue service had become too dangerous to operate, and he returned to headquarters.

Battlefield heroics much less dramatic than these have launched Israeli political careers. But those other politicians have not shared Golan’s views. He enthusiastically welcomes cooperation with Arab Israeli parties, and he says Israel’s “internal cohesiveness” depends on treating minorities with dignity and equality. He believes that the settlement of the West Bank by Israelis will result in the “destruction of Israel” because permanent occupation is undemocratic, and an undemocratic Israel will crumble. Even if the mission were to succeed, it would leave Israel no longer Jewish, due to the absorption of more than 3 million unwilling Arabs into Israeli territory. He advocates instead for a “civil separation”: a withdrawal of illegal settlers from the West Bank, and a security presence that operates indefinitely, while the physical separation of citizens proceeds. Under some future, more enlightened leadership, he says, a Palestinian state could eventually manage its security on its own. In foreign relations, he urges close relations with Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and eventually Saudi Arabia—a “moderate axis” of countries committed to keeping their extremists under control. Domestically, he favors cutting off state funding for Haredi schools that fail to teach Israel’s core curriculum of science, math and English, and integrating Haredim by compelling national service. He favors European-style social programs, including wealth redistribution.

These do not exactly sound like the rantings of a slavering madman. In fact, they sound like an American Democrat’s fantasy of an Israeli politician, which perhaps accounts for Golan’s poor expected showing in the coming election. Golan spent two hours telling me that the Israel he grew up in had been a “flourishing democracy for many, many years,” and that he looked forward to restoring the practical, sensible government that had made his country great. I asked him to tell me when he thought Israel had stopped being a democracy. He thought for a long time, then answered: “2013.” That was the year, he said, that Netanyahu established a new government that included “moderate elements.” He had not yet sold his future to the ultra-Orthodox and “the extreme right.” So his objection was not really to democracy’s end, but to democracy’s results.

He was admirably self-aware of the fact that his position is not as liberal or democratic as some might hope—in fact, it flirts with the opposite. When I suggested that Golan is a leftist, and that the left is in a permanent state of eclipse in Israel, he chided me. “From an American or European perspective, I belong to the far right,” he insisted, noting that just as a German far-rightist wants to minimize Muslim immigration and cordon off natives from newcomers, he wants to separate Israeli Jews from non-Israeli Arabs. “Only in Israel does that make me a leftist,” he said. The main difference is that the German right fears that Muslims will move to Germany. Golan fears Israel will move to the Muslims, shifting its borders to include the West Bank and Gaza, even as the Arab populations in those areas stay put.

He found the Haredim preposterous. “In America, look at the Amish. Who cares?” A big country can afford to have a few thousand butter-churners. But no country, he said, has ever had a quarter of its population “totally isolated at the expense of others.” (This year, roughly a quarter of first-graders in Israel are Haredi.) Even when ultra-Orthodox populations were at their peak in Europe, only a small fraction of the Haredim studied full-time for their whole lives.

There was a paradox at the heart of his position. The population was changing, and the political arrangement that he preferred was unsustainable. Secular leftist Ashkenazim could not govern forever a population that was growing in the opposite direction. And was it not also democratic to let those people vote—and perhaps even vote for extreme positions, such as permanently subsidizing yeshiva students with the blood and taxes of other Israelis? Golan’s politics had stayed put. The country had shifted. And democracy follows the votes, which were conspicuously not being cast in his direction.

In the two hours I spent with Golan, he was bitter toward his enemies but maintained his decorum. His opponents on the right have not shown him the same respect. Last month, Netanyahu’s wife, Sara, suggested in an interview with Israel’s Channel 14 that Golan knew of the October 7 attacks in advance, and that her husband was kept unaware so that he would be damaged politically. (Days later, Israel’s left-leaning paper of record, Haaretz, reported that the U.A.E. warned Netanyahu of an imminent Hamas attack, just 10 days before October 7. Netanyahu did not, according to the report, pass along the warning.) Yishai Fleisher, a podcaster and political leader among settlers, described Golan to me as a “ghetto Jew,” the kind of timorous pre-Holocaust Jew who would have hunkered down and hoped that by playing nice with anti-Semites, he would be allowed a small and pathetic patch of land. This was a harsh judgment on someone who drove a Toyota Yaris into a pogrom.

[Franklin Foer: How Netanyahu lost America]

It is easy to portray Israel’s far-right politicians in a cartoonish manner, partly because they intentionally cultivate that persona. In the spring of 2025, when Israeli hostages were still being held captive by Hamas, I attended a dinner with Netanyahu’s national-security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, in New Haven, Connecticut. I observed how much delight and energy he drew from the crowds full of screaming liberals (plus a few crazies and anti-Semites) that surrounded the private event. Ben-Gvir runs the Israeli prison system and has said that his main goal is to “worsen the conditions” in his prisons, reducing the rights of prisoners to the minimum level required by law. For now, the supreme court, not Ben-Gvir, sets a floor for those rights. During the event, he received mordant questions, posed by Israelis furious at him for his positions, particularly those on the Gaza war. He favored more war, even if more war meant more dead Israeli hostages. He was combative when subjected to hard questions. He was strangely invigorated, though, when he left the event and protesters pelted him with water bottles. I noticed that he went out the front door, where the protesters were waiting, rather than out the back, where he could have avoided being assaulted. My admiration for his willingness to be attacked was diminished by his apparent enjoyment of the experience.

I could see why Golan would think that Netanyahu had sold out by acquiescing to the far-right and incorporating such a clown into the country’s leadership, solely to keep his government intact. Others on the far right are more cerebral, and I daresay more defensible as partners in a government.

Simcha Rothman, a member of the Religious Zionist Party, is the chair of the Knesset’s judicial committee and the legislative force behind efforts to weaken the supreme court. He, along with Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, is often named as the brains behind the right flank of the government.

When I met with Rothman in January, in his Knesset office, his desk was watched over by a commemorative, angelically styled picture of the recently slain Charlie Kirk. Rothman was in warrior mode. He called the government’s critics “a bunch of sorry fascists,” on the basis of opposition members’ saying that they hoped to shut down Channel 14, a right-leaning network. He said “to hell with” the secular elites who threatened to leave Israel—and take their money and expertise with them—rather than submit to a government they found odious. “You’re trying to extort me into listening to you,” he said. Secular Jews hate him, he said, because they secretly hate themselves, and do not like to look at him and be reminded of what a real Jew looks like.

When I raised the issue of settler violence in the West Bank, he said that anyone concerned about such things is either “morally corrupt” or simply crazy. (What distinguished him from a more incendiary type such as Ben-Gvir, I suppose, is that he did not specify which of these designations applied to me.) He said Arabs are “safer in a Jewish settlement” than in their own villages, and that they should be grateful for Israelis’ arrival on their land.

Rothman and Golan unexpectedly agreed on one key point. “The situation today in Israel is not a democracy,” Rothman told me, because the state had retained the power to wiretap citizens, sometimes for political reasons. Like Golan, he felt that the government had drifted too far from the people’s will. But Golan felt that the government had drifted by ceasing to honor the principles that he associated with the Israel of his youth. Rothman sensed a betrayal of another sort, the failure of the government to change with the preferences of the people. He identified a change in Israeli history: from a Zionism of “safe haven,” a place where pragmatism reigned in service of the goal of dignified Jewish survival, to a Zionism of what he called “destiny”—the fulfillment of God’s promise of a land for Jews in a particular geography. Indeed, he said, many of those who came to Israel just to avoid the bloodlands of Europe eventually left when safety became available again elsewhere. The mid-20th-century European filter that had made Israel less religious has been replaced by a new one that screens out the religiously weak. The country has kept those who want “destiny,” in the sense promised by God. It has also kept millions of Arab Israelis who never left, because they consider Israel their home, too. The result is the Israel that exists now.

“There was a story of Israel that the left told itself,” Rothman said. That story was about European socialists’ arrival in a land of benighted people (his own parents among them) who needed the magic European touch for their state to succeed. If that was ever true, he said, it has stopped being true in the new Israel. “You don’t have to be left-wing and secular in order to be an entrepreneur.” He said that to sustain a nation, one needs a narrative grander than mere survival, and that Israel is blessed with one. “Israel will become more and more connected to its destiny and to its religion,” he predicted. And if Tel Aviv tech entrepreneurs do not like that, well, to hell with them.

Among the problems with this vision is the simple fact that the secular Israelis whom Rothman finds so dispensable are the ones who have made Israel function. The Gaza and Iran wars have been air wars, and the Israeli Air Force is almost exclusively the province of secular flyboys and tech people. In peacetime, the sectors that have generated miraculous growth have been tech- and defense-focused, not Talmudic study apps or kosher inspection. The suggestion that Israel can survive without the most educated and productive members of society is, to say the least, optimistic. Rothman suggested, per the Book of Ezekiel, that the mountains of Israel would yield fruit to the Jews, at God’s command.

Rothman’s scorn for the secular is matched by a corresponding loathing for the ultra-Orthodox by more secular Israelis who have fought in wars, and sometimes watched their countrymen die while other Israelis have enjoyed exemption from military service. After the question of fault for the October 7 attacks, Haredi conscription is the single most divisive issue in the current election. Netanyahu has declared that anyone who isn’t actually studying Torah should serve in the military. But that declaration is beside the point, because the whole objection of those who want Haredim conscripted is that even Torah students should serve. Sorry I can’t join you in your tank—I’m busy arguing about Leviticus should not be a valid excuse. Bennet, Eisenkot, and Golan all favor conscription, although Eisenkot would grant a few exemptions for the most serious religious students.

The backlash against the efforts to force service has been fierce, including Haredim blocking traffic for hours to protest conscription. One day in January I planned to go to the West Bank, to visit a Palestinian village and observe the Israeli settlers taking it over. I was prevented from doing so because a Haredi protest had so snarled the traffic in Jerusalem that I was stuck for hours. That summed up the state of Israel: one extreme group clogging up the public spaces in Jerusalem, and incidentally helping another extreme group elsewhere do its business out of sight.

But there are signs of resurgent pragmatism, even among the communities that seem most resistant to change. When change happens, it can happen quietly, not because of the scorn of outsiders but because insiders lead others within the group to change along with them. I found one such insider, Menachem Bombach, in his office in Beit Shemesh, an Israeli city with a strong Haredi community.

Bombach, who was raised speaking Yiddish in an ultra-Orthodox family, has opened a series of schools that aim to teach Haredi children secular subjects. I visited three of them, and watched with amusement as boys put their identical black jackets on pegs and their hats in hat boxes, and spent the whole morning studying religious texts. But a whole morning is rather mild, compared with those who spend all day at this task, for the rest of their lives. Bombach said the goal of the schools is to give the students the education they need to fulfill their civic duties, but to give it in such a way that they do not lose their identity or pride as Haredim. Some of the girls in one school I visited were traveling two hours a day by bus to attend a school where they might learn math and computers, as well as history and philosophy beyond the rich but limited Jewish texts that are standard in their communities. Hadas Neiman, the principal of a girls’ school in Jerusalem and the mother of seven Haredi children, told me she had recently overheard her students arguing passionately about the killing of Israeli hostages in Gaza and debating whether Israel should have negotiated with Hamas. She said that the argument about civic responsibility showed that the schools were working, because the girls “care about what happens in the country. It means they don’t live in the ghetto.”

[Read: The real reason to recognize Palestine]

This broader education would in any other place in Israel be unremarkable. Only in this context did it seem revolutionary. Bombach likened the early support of Haredi scholars by Israel’s first prime minister, Ben-Gurion, to the opening of a “nature preserve,” the way ecologists might put endangered species in a protected space, in hopes that they might survive. “He didn’t dream that 300 people [studying Torah] would become almost 200,000 after 76 years,” Bombach said. “Even the most radical understand that they’ve lived in the nature reserve enough, and they need to go back to life.” Like many religious reformers, he phrased the imperative to go back into the world as a Jewish obligation, not a secular one that calls Jews away from their religious duty. “It’s part of religious life to take responsibility for Jewish society and Israeli society,” he said. “It’s a very Jewish value to help to establish the country of Israel.”

It was a little bit of Athens in the midst of Jerusalem.

Arab Israelis have also resisted joining the Israeli collective project. They are understandably reluctant to support a state dedicated to a religion that is not their own, and the state itself reflects this reluctance in its policies: separate educational streams, lack of conscription, and land policies that allow Jewish communities to grow while keeping the Arab ones contained. Policies encourage Jewish immigration and all but forbid Palestinian immigration and naturalization. The state’s unwillingness to impose burdens on its Arab citizens is implicit acknowledgment that it disfavors them in other ways.

And yet here, too, in Israel’s other indigestible population, there are signs of change. Hamas killed dozens of Arabs on October 7, mostly Bedouins, and some Arab citizens seem to have concluded that if Arab Israelis die like Jewish Israelis, then the Israeli portion of their identity should be more salient than the ethnic one. The more promising shifts, however, are political. Arab parties were until recently pariahs, in part because they marginalized themselves by flirting with Islamism and opposition to Israel as a Jewish state. They have reformed somewhat, tempered their Islamism, and learned to make themselves indispensable. In the current election, the most prominent Arab politician is Mansour Abbas, the head of the United Arab List, or Ra’am. Contentious elections are very good for small parties, because the closer a big party gets to a majority, the more desperately it courts the small ones to join it in a coalition. That is what happened in 2021: A fragile coalition included Ra’am to get a majority, by one seat. That government lasted only briefly, but the material benefits to Arabs in Israel were substantial, including allocations of money and resources unprecedented in previous governments.

“The lesson was: You can only influence from the inside,” George Deek, a senior diplomat and Arab Israeli, told me. “You have to get your hands dirty and work hard.” Deek, who was the ambassador to Azerbaijan until last year, said Ra’am had the right idea, and that making itself politically indispensable—the lubricant necessary to make any deal go through—was the right move. To do this, Deek said, the Arabs had to give up the satisfying but unproductive “position of sitting in the opposition benches and making fiery speeches against the government.”

“Don’t let anyone tell you that Israel has no discrimination,” Deek said, noting that to get a job in Israel, it’s easier to be named Binyamin Zalmanovich than George Deek. But he said the slow successes of political cooperation showed a way forward that does not depend on Jews’ deciding to be less racist. “They will only change if we make them change.” He said the ideal model of Israel should be that all citizens share the same status and responsibilities, although the state could still discriminate when it decides who can become a new citizen. In this election, as in the 2021 election, Ra’am could play tiebreaker, and again enjoy a level of political power to which Arab Israelis are certainly entitled. So far only Eisenkot has left open the possibility of working with Ra’am; Bennett and Netanyahu have rejected the possibility.

The Israeli political analyst who bemoaned the lack of fresh options in this election spoke of a “growing gap between the population and the politicians,” where the politicians are bound to coalitions that made sense decades ago but now no longer apply. He said a politician who reflected the dissatisfied Israeli center would see ways to discard the old paradigms on a number of issues. The right has tried to preserve special privileges for the Haredim while the left has indulged Arab Israelis, and also failed to make sure that they share equally in the burdens and privileges of citizenship. The public is yearning for politicians who would end special arrangements for both, he suggested. On matters of national security these orphaned centrists are hawkish but yearn for a political option on the right that does not require them to put up with religious zealotry in return for security. They also want a left that acknowledges that the security hawks were right when they doubted that peace was just a few handshakes away. Right now, an Israeli searching for a party or candidate that fulfills these criteria will end up voting for one of the stale ’90s options, with great resentment.

Far more interesting than the outcome of the current election, then, is the mystery of who will contend to lead Israel when Netanyahu no longer appears on a ballot. Many Israelis believe that the next generation will be led by those who have known this war. “I suspect that the next election will be an election defined by what you did, or how you responded, in relation to October 7,” Gabriel Mitchell, a Jerusalem academic who served in a tank unit in Gaza, told me. He said the activists who supported hostage returns had political traction. His own experience in combat, he said, put him in contact with other Israelis from very different backgrounds. “Four people are stuck in a tank out there on the edge of nowhere for 12 hours. You have no choice but to talk.”

Of all the Israeli politicians I spoke with, one of the few who said anything directly about a new political dispensation was David Sherez, one of the leaders of a young political coalition called El Hadegel (“To the Flag”). Sherez, who is 42, is a former commando and Gaza-war veteran, part of what he calls the “generation of lions” that returned from service displeased that the country’s political leaders were “losers.” He said these veterans “don’t want to see these bullshit fights between politicians who don’t do anything.” They do not hate religious Jews but desperately want them, along with all other citizens, to serve. “There is no contradiction between studying Torah and being in the army,” Sherez said to me. “They need to make a decision whether they are part of Israel or not.”

We met across the street from the Knesset, in the Wohl Rose Garden. He said that his group’s fundamental orientation is toward “pragmatic Zionism.” In practice, this seems to mean total flexibility and practicality—do anything, adopt any plan, as long as it advances the security and well-being of the Jewish state. Sherez seemed to have heard too much rhetoric from existing politicians, with too much worthless language about liberalism, destiny, and democracy, and decided to react by limiting his own political vocabulary to a single word: Zionism. I asked if he supported Netanyahu, and Sherez said he had no interest in being defined by his attitude toward Bibi. He is a Zionist. He supports some judicial reform, and making permanent the status of perhaps a fifth of the Israeli settlements in the West Bank. “When I have to choose between liberalism and Zionism, I choose Zionism,” he said. But neither is he in thrall to the ecstatic religious visions of the right. “If you ask me if I support settlements, I ask whether the settlements are part of our defense strategy—they are—not whether Abraham sat on this or that hill.”

The radical winnowing of rhetoric is clever, and I could imagine a coalition like this eventually gaining real support. Fighting in Gaza may be discrediting to many outside Israel, but inside Israel, the most politically desirable position is to have fought patriotically after October 7, but not to have been anywhere near power or responsibility when the attacks took place. Even Sherez admits that the political mastery that brought Netanyahu to power will take time for the generation of lions to learn. On September 8, his party tapped out of the elections and acknowledged that Israeli politics was reverting “back to the blocs,” where the lumbering old political machines would keep misgoverning, to the dissatisfaction of nearly everyone. “Netanyahu is a master politician,” he told me, and his movement isn’t politically adroit enough to take over yet. “It will take us a decade to reach that point. But we can get there. And until we get there, we can make it very hard for them.”

[Avi Issacharoff: Israel’s human wrecking ball]

For now, El Hadegel and several other parties that will fail to cross the threshold of four seats, the minimum to sit in the Knesset, are mere annoyances to the blocs. Israelis have a wonderful phrase for these upstarts: miflegot kikayon, or “gourd parties.” In the Book of Jonah, a gourd grows up overnight and shelters Jonah from the blistering Assyrian sun—only to die just as quickly, and leave the hapless Jonah shadeless and heat-stroked.

The ambition of every gourd is to escape ephemerality, outlast its predecessors, and leave Israel less hapless than Jonah and more shaded from the scorching threats that go along with being a nation-in-progress. The parties fill a niche in a bewilderingly diverse ideological ecosystem: For every ideology, there is someone who clings vehemently to its opposite. If there is a religious Zionist movement, there must also be a religious anti-Zionist one, and a secular Zionist one, and a secular anti-Zionist one. Arab nationalism proliferates in nearly as many forms. All of these sects have squabbling subsects, a Babel of opinion that subdivides infinitesimally until the sane thing to do is bellow, even more bitterly than Simcha Rothman, To hell with all of you. Better to stop trying to figure out who is right and just try to figure out how to get along. That pragmatic exasperation is the starting point of liberal democracy.

One reason Israel’s fate matters is that if the delicate arrangement of liberal democracy can be made to work there—where millions of people think God is on their side and wants them to hold the line, and millions of Arabs remain unconvinced that their acquiescence to a Jewish state today won’t mean their expulsion tomorrow—then it can probably work anywhere. If, however, liberal democracy is too weak a solvent to unjam these points of contention, then democracies everywhere may be in trouble.