Rarely in democratic history has a negative election campaign been more justified than the one Israel’s opposition should be waging.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s record is devastating: October 7 itself and the obstruction of an inquiry, thus endangering more lives; subservience to haredi (ultra-Orthodox) parties whose demands for military exemptions threaten security; attacks on the security establishment and judiciary amid efforts to concentrate power; corruption scandals, indifference to the lives of hostages and soldiers, and failure to translate costly wars into strategic victories.
Just: wow. This lamentable record cries out for a jackhammer negative campaign, but instead the opposition has chosen caution, terrified that attacks on Netanyahu will alienate his supporters, whom it hopes to win over. Its timorous advisers preach restraint, and the result is that Netanyahu is closing the gap in the polls.
Meanwhile, Yisrael Beytenu party chairman Avigdor Liberman’s potentially catastrophic insistence on boycotting the Arab parties compounds the danger. If he refuses even parliamentary support from them, which has already been offered for free, he could make Netanyahu’s removal impossible despite an opposition majority. Together, these failures have brought Israel to the edge of a national emergency.
What’s the emergency, you ask? Well, the international system is coiled like a spring, waiting to see whether Israelis will use this election to change their country’s direction. My assessment, informed by direct knowledge of discussions abroad, is that governments have delayed devastating economic measures partly to see whether the Israeli electorate reverses course.
If Netanyahu returns with essentially the same coalition and policies, that restraint will almost certainly disappear.
Israel faces the very real prospect of severe international economic sanctions, and they could come much faster than most Israelis imagine. It will be almost immediate from Europe, and will gather momentum in the United States toward the election in 2028, where Israel will be a huge political factor.
As is now well known, a majority of the American public no longer supports Israel and sympathizes with the Palestinians – and on the Democratic side a groundswell is forming for an arms embargo. That, Israelis should know, would mean Israel can no longer prosecute and prolong wars the way it has since Oct. 7.
The consequences would extend beyond diplomatic embarrassment or weapons supply. A weaker shekel, more expensive imports, declining investment, lost export markets, higher borrowing costs and increasing difficulties for Israeli businesses, banks and universities could substantially impoverish the country.
Britain’s and France’s measures against settlement activity and settler violence will extend to anyone doing business with the settlements, including Israeli banks. Critically, because of Israel’s passivity and indifference, this will apply to all settlements, including those near the old border which Israel – and the Palestinians – have long assumed will become part of Israel.
To be clear, I’m not proposing Israel give up on policies that serve it well just in order to avoid poverty. The policies that the world intends to punish are also terrible for Israel, dragging it in the direction of a non-democratic binational state that increasingly resembles a cross between Putin’s Russia and the ayatollah’s Iran.
And, as said, Israel will be globally isolated. Basically, the cruel truth is that if you vote for Netanyahu, you’re voting for economic and military decline and a vulnerability that will invite attack.
Why has Israel reached this point? The optimists will ascribe everything to the devastating war in Gaza – and that is indeed important and has been a useful lever for Israel’s enemies.
I supported removing Hamas from power after October 7, but Israel’s failure to develop a credible framework for civilian protection, postwar governance and international cooperation has inflicted enormous damage on its standing and has handed a colossal gift to the global antisemitic mafia that was always primed to charge “genocide.”
Israel's ruling of the West Bank
But the primary reason has been and remains the West Bank. Israel cannot indefinitely rule millions of Palestinians without granting them independence or equal political rights and expect the democratic world to accept the arrangement. Instead, Netanyahu’s government has expanded settlement beyond the security fence line, and coddled Jewish terrorists with pathetic excuses.
The fact that some of the criticism is automatic and unfair does not mean you have to validate it by supplying the anti-Israel narrative with a geyser’s worth of ammunition. Yet that is precisely what Netanyahu’s coalition does.
Every time National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir stages another despicable provocation, or extremist settlers assault Palestinian civilians, journalists or diplomats, Hamas should send them flowers.
Consider the attacks of October 16 and 17. Near Abu Falah, masked settlers beat American photojournalist Heidi Levine, working for The Washington Post, leaving her with serious injuries requiring surgery.
I have known Heidi for decades – she is a moderate, reasonable, careful person and great photographer who has in many ways attached her life to Israel, and the attack on her was a crime and a disgrace.
The following day, near the Christian Palestinian village of Taybeh, settlers attacked olive harvesters and a European delegation, assaulting Bernard Baudoux, a 78-year-old French mayor, and damaging a Belgian diplomatic vehicle.
Netanyahu’s response was astonishing. Rather than unequivocally condemning the attack, his office emphasized that the diplomats had entered a sensitive area without coordinating with the IDF, noted the French mayor’s political affiliation, questioned what the available images proved (they proved a disgusting and premeditated attack), and warned of a “coordinated campaign to smear Israel and the Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria.”
The proximity to Taybeh makes this particularly damaging in the United States, where allegations that Israel tolerates attacks on Palestinian Christians are already eroding support among some Christian constituencies.
I KNOW many Israelis are inclined to dismiss warnings. People resent being told that their political choices could produce disaster. “They can’t frighten us,” they’ll say. “Don’t lecture to us. Take care of your own problems. Islam will take over Europe, and then you’ll see. Antisemites!”
They will argue that Europe needs Israeli defense technology, that economic confrontation would hurt Europeans too, and that predictions of isolation have repeatedly proved exaggerated. Some of these arguments have merit.
But public opinion is turning so decisively against Israel that only a new face for the government, backed by radically different policies, can change the tide.
A new government must crush this lawlessness in the West Bank through arrests, prosecutions and meaningful punishment.
It must also reverse Netanyahu’s assault on judicial independence, and his coalition’s accommodation of haredi demands for military exemptions and subsidies, which threaten economic sustainability, civic solidarity and Israel’s relationship with American Jews. Without their backing, the relationship with Washington will wither.
History is full of accurate warnings that were ignored because accepting them would have required people to reconsider cherished assumptions. Financial markets, despite incorporating the judgments of millions, can be spectacularly mistaken; electorates are no more infallible. Cassandra’s tragedy was that she accurately foresaw disaster, but nobody believed. The lesson is not to believe every prophet of doom, but to examine the evidence.
I very much hope that I will never be proven right, because the Netanyahu government, on Oct. 27, will be thrown into the dustbin of history where it belongs.
An Israel led by patriotic, determined, rational, and honest people should be able to heal and repair society, to avoid economic war with the world, and to fight Israel’s enemies when needed, while also restoring its global standing.
On Oct. 27, Israelis must think, if they are to be.
The writer is a former Cairo-based Middle East editor and London-based Europe/Africa editor of the Associated Press. He served as chairman of the Foreign Press Association in Jerusalem and authored two books about Israel.