Hey Likud… if you lose that doesn’t mean it is fraud

Apparently, asking voters for another term is no longer enough. According to reporting published here in The Times of Israel today (Tuesday), senior Likud figures have discussed preparing a “stolen election” campaign if Benjamin Netanyahu loses. Because why bother accepting the public’s verdict when you can prepare an argument that the public somehow voted incorrectly?

The resemblance to Donald Trump’s approach is hardly subtle. The reported discussions explicitly invoked his 2020 election campaign. This is political plagiarism of a particularly embarrassing kind: importing an American assault on democratic legitimacy and apparently deciding that Israel could use a version of its own.

Precision matters. The report says Netanyahu was not personally involved in those discussions, although he was reportedly considering the option. These are reported deliberations, not proof that every allegation has been coordinated or that a challenge will happen. That distinction deserves respect, even when the underlying proposal deserves contempt.

But the principle is straightforward. Investigating specific evidence of wrongdoing is legitimate. Preparing to describe an election as stolen because your party might lose is something else entirely. The first protects democracy. The second makes democracy conditional on keeping the preferred leader in office.

And then there is the targeting of Arab voters.

Arab citizens are citizens. Their votes are not suspicious because they might help produce a government Likud dislikes. Their participation requires no special apology, and their political influence is not a loophole in Israeli democracy. It is part of Israeli democracy.

A party claiming to defend the country should understand that distinction without requiring a remedial civics lesson.

As a Jew who cares deeply about Israel’s future, I find this exhausting. Defending Israel’s right to exist does not require defending every maneuver designed to extend Netanyahu’s political career. Israel is a country, a society and a national home. It is not one man’s entitlement to remain prime minister indefinitely.

There is something profoundly insulting about the assumption behind this reported strategy. It treats supporters as people who cannot handle disappointment, opponents as inherently illegitimate and public institutions as useful only when they deliver the desired result.

What kind of confidence does that demonstrate? If your political program is persuasive, defend it. If your record deserves another term, explain why. If voters disagree, consider the possibility that they understood your argument perfectly and rejected it anyway.

That is not theft. That is an election.

None of this means electoral systems are beyond scrutiny. Every credible complaint deserves examination through the proper procedures. But evidence must determine the allegation. The preferred outcome cannot determine what supposedly counts as evidence.

Likud’s supporters should demand better, too. A serious political movement needs principles that survive a bad election night. Otherwise, what exactly is it defending beyond access to power?

Israel deserves leaders who can distinguish their own political survival from the survival of the state. Those are different things, however insistently a campaign might blur them.

Bibi and Trump may share political instincts. Israel does not need to inherit the consequences.

The test of democratic commitment is not whether you celebrate victory. Anyone can do that. It is whether you accept that your fellow citizens have the right to choose someone else.

If Likud cannot manage that basic obligation, the problem is not the voters. It is a party forgetting whom it is supposed to serve.