Israel Votes. Why Should a Soccer Mom in Nebraska Care?

The ballots are Israeli. The consequences are not.

On October 27, Israelis will vote.

I won’t.

Neither will most of you reading this outside Israel.

And somewhere in Nebraska, a soccer mom will probably be considerably more concerned about whether she remembered the shin guards than who can assemble 61 seats in the Israeli Knesset.

Fair enough.

But I think she should care anyway.

Not because everyone in America needs to become an expert in Israeli politics.

Not because the Israeli election should matter more to her than her own country, her own community or the children waiting impatiently in the back seat.

But because one of the recurring mistakes we make when talking about foreign countries is assuming that distance means insulation.

It doesn’t.

What happens in Israel does not remain neatly contained within Israel’s borders. It moves through Tehran and Washington. Through military alliances and intelligence networks. Through markets, technology and agriculture. Through American politics and American universities.

And, as it turns out, all the way to Nebraska.

So for the next two months, I want to follow this election from several thousand miles away, but not only through polls and politicians.

I want to ask a different question:

What is Israel actually deciding about what it wants to become next, and why should the rest of us care?

First, 61

For Americans, Israeli elections require a little translation.

Israelis do not walk into the voting booth and cast a direct ballot for Benjamin Netanyahu or Gadi Eisenkot for prime minister.

They vote for a party list.

The Knesset has 120 seats, elected through proportional representation. Parties must clear a 3.25 percent electoral threshold to participate in the allocation of seats. Knesset: Distribution of Knesset Seats

And then comes the number that matters:

61.

A prospective prime minister needs to put together a coalition capable of commanding a majority in the Knesset.

That means the party receiving the most seats does not necessarily determine who ultimately becomes prime minister.

Election night gives Israel numbers.

Then Israeli politics begins.

Coalitions have to be assembled.

Parties negotiate.

Smaller parties can suddenly become extremely important.

Politicians who spent months explaining why they could never sit with one another occasionally discover the persuasive qualities of arithmetic.

So over the next two months, when you see a headline announcing that somebody is “winning” the Israeli election, keep reading.

The real question is who can get to 61.

But What Are Israelis Actually Voting About?

That question is much harder.

It would be easy, particularly from America, to describe October 27 as another referendum on Benjamin Netanyahu.

But Israel has lived through too much for this election to fit neatly into one man’s political career.

October 7.

The war.

The hostages.

Gaza.

Iran.

Hezbollah.

Years of reservists being pulled from their homes, families and careers.

The fight over Haredi military service.

The judiciary.

The cost of living.

International pressure.

And underneath all of it, an enormous question about trust.

Think about that.

The world has spent years discussing Israel almost exclusively through the language of war.

Meanwhile, Israelis still have to buy groceries.

Pay mortgages.

Raise children.

Go to work.

Decide who serves in the army.

And decide whether they trust the institutions governing all of it.

Countries don’t stop being countries because the rest of the world has turned them into geopolitical arguments.

And Then There Is October 7

There is another issue hanging over this election that can’t be measured entirely by asking voters to choose from a list.

Trust.

October 7 was not only a terrorist attack.

For Israelis, it represented a catastrophic failure of systems that existed to protect them.

Political leadership.

Military leadership.

Intelligence.

Deterrence.

Assumptions about Hamas.

Assumptions about the border.

So this election inevitably asks something larger than Who do you want to be prime minister?

Who do you trust with what comes next?

And perhaps even more importantly:

What do you believe Israel should have learned from what happened?

Two Israelis can experience the same national trauma and reach profoundly different conclusions about its lesson.

That is one of the things I want to understand before October 27.

The Twenty-Somethings May Surprise Us

This is the group I am particularly curious about.

There will be young Israelis voting in October who were teenagers when Hamas attacked on October 7.

Some subsequently entered the IDF.

Some have spent their formative years watching friends serve.

Some have lost people.

Some have protested.

Some have left Israel.

And some have moved there.

For many, this will be their first Knesset election.

The Israel Democracy Institute recently surveyed 576 Israelis ages 18–22 whose first opportunity to vote in a Knesset election will be this year.

The results surprised me.

Across every population group surveyed, between 80 and 95 percent said they think they will vote or are certain they will vote. Israel Democracy Institute: First-Time Voters Ahead of the 26th Knesset Elections

More than four-fifths described the opportunity to vote as meaningful, and more than four-fifths believed citizens’ votes could meaningfully influence what happens in Israel.

That doesn’t sound particularly apathetic.

Statistics tell me something.

But I want to know what that feels like.

And fortunately, I know someone I can ask.

My 22-year-old niece made aliyah two years ago.

Israel isn’t simply the country she inherited.

It is the country she chose.

So I asked her a very simple question:

Are you voting?

Yes.

She doesn’t yet know for whom.

And I found that answer interesting enough that I kept asking questions.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to talk not only to her, but to other young Israelis — Israeli-born twenty-somethings and young people from other countries who chose to make aliyah.

Are they voting?

What issues will determine their vote?

Where do they get their political information?

Do they feel represented by any of the parties?

Did October 7 make them more politically engaged — or simply more exhausted by politics?

And perhaps most importantly:

What do they want Israel to become next?

Not because a handful of twenty-somethings can represent an entire generation.

They can’t.

But polling can tell us what people answer.

Sometimes people can tell us why.

I’ll bring their answers back here one month before the election.

Meanwhile, From New York

I am watching all of this from New York.

And Israel rarely feels particularly far away here.

There are families with children serving in the IDF.

Families with relatives in Israel.

Synagogues raising money.

Israeli flags.

Palestinian flags.

Campus protests.

Counterprotests.

Security outside Jewish institutions.

Political arguments about Gaza.

Arguments about antisemitism.

Arguments about Zionism.

Arguments about what Israel should do — frequently conducted by people thousands of miles away from the Israelis who will actually live with the consequences.

And the consequences of this election will not remain purely political.

JPMorgan analysts recently estimated that the October 27 result could move the shekel by as much as 3 percent in either direction, depending on the outcome. The bank also said the result was likely to affect Israel’s relations with Western allies and international investors’ perceptions of the country. Reuters: Israel election could swing shekel by up to 3%, JPMorgan estimates

You don’t have to agree with JPMorgan’s political assumptions.

Markets don’t vote.

But they do price risk.

And money is already paying attention.

Okay, But What About Karen?

Which finally brings me back to Nebraska.

If you read my three-part series about what would actually happen if Israel disappeared, you already met someone in Nebraska.

I just never formally introduced you.

Her name is Karen.

Karen is a soccer mom.

She has groceries to buy, bills to pay, kids to shuttle to and from soccer practice, and approximately eleven thousand things more immediately relevant to her Tuesday afternoon than Israeli coalition arithmetic.

Karen does not wake up wondering whether Likud can get to 61.

She is not analyzing Israeli polling over her morning coffee.

She may not know the difference between one Israeli political party and another.

And honestly?

Why should she?

She lives in Nebraska.

Jerusalem is thousands of miles away. She doesn’t vote in Israel. Her kids aren’t serving in the IDF. And whether one Israeli politician gets 28 seats or another gets 24 probably seems about as relevant to soccer practice at 4:30 as the composition of the Norwegian parliament.

Fair enough.

Except here’s the problem:

Geopolitics doesn’t care that Karen has carpool.

And this time, the Nebraska connection is considerably more literal than you might expect.

In 2024, Nebraska exported $13.5 million in beef products to Israel. According to the Nebraska governor’s office, Nebraska accounts for more than 99 percent of US beef exports to Israel. Nebraska agricultural manufacturers have also worked with Israeli agricultural-technology companies on crop management and water-use technology. Nebraska Governor’s Office: Trade Mission to Israel

In other words, Karen may be closer to Israel than she thinks.

Maybe the field she drives past on the way to soccer uses technology with an Israeli connection.

Maybe beef produced down the road ends up on a dinner table in Jerusalem.

Maybe innovations developed thousands of miles away are helping someone in Nebraska figure out how to grow more with less water.

Suddenly Jerusalem and Nebraska don’t look quite so unrelated.

Karen lives in a country whose government, military, intelligence agencies, universities and businesses interact with Israel.

Cybersecurity does not recognize the Nebraska state line.

Neither does the price of energy.

Neither does instability in the global economy.

Neither does technology.

Distance does not equal insulation.

Karen does not need to become an expert in Israeli coalition politics.

She doesn’t need to memorize every party platform.

She definitely doesn’t need to spend October 27 refreshing Israeli election results from the soccer-field parking lot.

But she should understand something:

What happens in small countries can have very large consequences.

And sometimes the election you don’t get to vote in can still affect the life you are busy living.

Even in Nebraska.

And No, I’m Not Endorsing Anyone

Something funny happened to me back in July.

While I was writing about New York politics, a woman commenting on one of my posts began telling me about Dr. Einat Wilf and her new Oz Party.

She sent me information about Wilf’s platform.

Then she asked whether I would endorse her.

Apparently, somewhere along the way, I had accidentally been recruited into Israeli electoral politics from Long Island.

I read what she sent me.

And actually, I agreed with quite a bit of it.

But I didn’t endorse her.

Because agreeing with several positions on a campaign website is not the same thing as knowing the person asking to govern a country.

I don’t know enough about Wilf yet.

I want to know her record.

What did she actually do when she held office?

What positions has she changed over time, and why?

What has she gotten right?

What has she gotten wrong?

How would the ideas on her platform survive contact with coalition politics?

Who would she govern with?

And what do Israelis who have followed her career far more closely than I have think of her?

The same standard applies to Netanyahu.

I have “known” Benjamin Netanyahu — from thousands of miles away, obviously — for far longer than I have known Einat Wilf.

And there is still considerably more I want to understand about his record, his decisions and the alternatives before I tell anyone what I think Israel should choose.

That may sound like an oddly modest position in the age of social media.

I think it should be the normal one.

You can agree with an idea without endorsing its author.

You can admire someone’s position on Israel without deciding they should run Israel.

You can criticize Netanyahu without automatically endorsing whoever opposes him.

And you can support Netanyahu without pretending his record doesn’t deserve scrutiny.

An endorsement should be the end of an investigation, not the beginning of one.

So no, I’m not going to tell Israelis how to vote.

I’m going to spend the next two months doing something that seems increasingly radical:

I’m going to learn before I decide what I think.

And I’m going to listen to the people who actually get a ballot.

So What Happens Between Now and October 27?

As I write this, the race remains fluid.

Recent analysis treats both another Netanyahu victory and an opposition victory led by former IDF chief Gadi Eisenkot as plausible outcomes, while emphasizing that coalition arithmetic remains complicated. JPMorgan’s August 27 analysis assigned a 55 percent probability to an Eisenkot-led opposition victory, while noting that polls have underestimated Netanyahu’s Likud in the past. Reuters, August 27, 2026

Those numbers will change.

That’s precisely why I’m not particularly interested in pretending today’s poll tells us what Israelis will do two months from now.

Instead, I’m going to keep watching.

And listening.

On September 27, exactly one month before the election, I’ll come back to this.

By then, I want to have spoken with Israelis who will actually cast these ballots and live with what follows.

Young Israelis.

People who chose to make aliyah.

IDF soldiers.

An October 7 survivor.

And Israelis whose political views may have very little in common with one another.

I want to know what people are talking about around dinner tables, at work and among friends.

We’ll look again at the polls.

We’ll look at the path to 61.

We’ll look at the candidates.

We’ll look at their records.

And we’ll look at what has changed.

Then I’ll come back again on October 27 — Election Day.

Not to tell Israelis how to vote.

To tell the rest of us what to watch.

Turnout.

Young voters.

Arab voters.

Parties hovering around the electoral threshold.

The blocs.

The path to 61.

And whatever surprises Israeli politics has undoubtedly invented between now and then.

And then I’ll come back once more when the voters have spoken.

Because in Israel, election results and the formation of a government are not necessarily the same event.

October 28 may tell us a great deal about what Israelis decided.

It may not yet tell us exactly who will govern them.

The Question Isn’t Only Who Wins

That is ultimately what interests me about this election.

Not simply:

Who won?

But:

What did Israelis tell us?

What does Israel want to become after October 7?

What does security mean now?

What does responsibility mean?

Who should serve?

What institutions do Israelis trust?

What relationship does Israel want with Washington?

What comes next in Gaza?

What comes next with Iran?

And what happens internally among Israelis who have spent years bitterly divided but still have to inhabit the same tiny country the morning after the election?

In my last series, I kept asking what happens if Israel disappears.

This time, Israel isn’t disappearing.

It is choosing what kind of Israel comes next.

On October 27, Israelis will cast the ballots.

The rest of us will live with some of the consequences.

In Tel Aviv.

In Tehran.

In Washington.

On Wall Street.

Here with me in New York.

And yes, Karen —

even in Nebraska.

But here’s the part I didn’t realize when I started writing about her:

I am Karen.

Maybe you are, too.

Israel votes. The consequences travel.