Netanyahu thinks we’re his ‘frayars’ (suckers)!

It’s a saying you hear when you come to Israel, and once you’ve heard it once, you tend to hear it a lot more — Israelis refuse to be ‘frayars’. The slang word ‘frayar’ means ‘sucker’, as in someone played for a fool, and Israelis hate to be one. It’s a point of pride, even of national resilience. We have survived, goes the logic, because we will not be anyone’s frayars. And yet the election happening in Israel this coming week, this most-critical election in Israel’s history, is an election that is, underneath it all, about whether or not Israelis are frayars. Specifically, Benjamin Netanyahu’s frayars.

Even though the current governing coalition is they’re trailing the Opposition bloc in mainstream surveys, and Netanyahu himself is losing to both Gadi Eisenkot and Naftali Bennett on the important question of whom Israelis want as Prime Minister, the fact that the and they are as high as they are, is shocking. To recap, this, measurably the worst government in Israeli history by far, is the miserable bunch who have brought their country:

* The horrors of October 7th, including the biggest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust
* Other stunning basic security lapses such as the failure to check pilots, leading to the Fly Dubai hijacking (unspeakable catastrophe only averted by luck and the bravery of the passengers) – and this after October 7th!
* Hamas, the Iranian regime, Hezbollah and the Houthis still up and running
* Refusal to draft the charedim, while the IDF is desperate for more soldiers
* Some of the Prime Minister’s closest advisors revealed or alleged to have been on the payroll of Qatar including during the war, even while it hosted Hamas leaders and maligned Israel through its Al Jazeera network
* Skyrocketing domestic crime, the murder rate more than doubled
* Ballooning cost of living
* Multiple downgradings from the international ratings agencies, even before the war
* A rushed and anti-democratic, nation-splitting judicial overhaul
* A government of corruption, with around 1 in 5 of government members either criminal convicts or under indictment or serious investigation
* A string of horrendous failures on the PR and diplomacy front – Israel has had no Ambassador to London for a year, for most of the war the Israeli PM didn’t even have an English-speaking spokesperson
* Transport chaos — Ben Gurion Airport closed on one of the busiest days of the year
* The PM found to have ‘endangered state security’ through subverting proper procedures for arms procurement
* A collapse in schools test results (the government’s answer? To scrap the tests)
* A refusal to establish a State Commission of Enquiry for October 7th, or, so far, for  the FlyDubai hijacking
* An out-of-control government’s incendiary comments and memes that have needlessly increased hatred of Israel and made us all less safe

Not only are there a dizzying number of failures of a magnitude that would bring down governments mid-term in most countries (step forward the UK’s Liz Truss, who resigned for far less)  — it is very hard to think of a single area in which this government fully achieved a lasting goal. Netanyahu campaigned during the previous election on two main things, security and cost of living, and has failed spectacularly at both.

Undoubtedly that is why Netanyahu’s Likud are running a campaign of negativity. When you’ve got nothing to boast about, you call your opponents names. When you’ve been running the country during its worst-ever security lapse and then (despite some hugely impressive achievements by the IDF) failed to deliver the “total victory” you promised, all you’ve got left is to try and scare the electorate that the opposition would be worse. Quite a claim when no government before, including one incorporating an Arab party, has been as dreadful as yours. And when you’ve surrounded yourself with some of the most divisive and, let’s face it, racist extremists in Israeli political life, you must desperately try to delegitimise those standing against you — by insisting that the left-wing party is a security liability, even though Netanyahu himself made a previous head of the left-wing party (Ehud Barak) his Minister of Defence.

Yet it strikes me that the two leading opposition parties, Bennett’s B’yachad and Eisenkot’s Yashar! are matching this negativity with tremendous positivity. Eisenkot, a politician and former IDF chief who is liked and respected by almost everyone on both sides of the aisle, a man from a working-class background who has worked for everything he has achieved, radiates warmth and a calming kind of surety that everything will be OK again. Meanwhile Naftali Bennett (who, full disclosure, has my vote) has presented a team of extremely impressive professionals and by far the most detailed plans of anyone’s campaign — from day one, they know what they will do and how they will do it, to fix the country (take a look at their website, it’s all there, in meticulous detail). And he has seemingly walked the length of Israel over weeks, explaining and listening, often in towns that are the most hostile to him.

And it’s worth noting that, when you look at the stats, in almost every area the previous Bennett / Lapid government did far better than both this current Netanyahu government, and the same period of the previous Netanyahu government. And I mean far better. The difference is stark. As stark as the words ‘success’ and ‘failure.’

So ignore the sleek haircut and well-turned phrase. What Netanyahu has brought Israel in this government has been disaster and incompetence, corruption and chaos. What is he really selling us in this election? Well, since it turned out that single major policy of this government was to downgrade our democracy, and Smotrich was the one who mentioned that in the campaign, not Netanyahu, we should look again to Smotrich to see the truth of what Netanyahu will try to deliver. And Smotrich has already announced an even more radical overhaul.

Let’s be clear about what this means. Because we’re not frayars, right? So we need to talk turkey. Cut to the chase. Don’t try to pull a fast one.

What he is selling, is a complete negation of Israel’s democracy, just like Erdogan has done in Turkey, where the government and especially the PM will have complete, unrestrained power to do whatever they like. For reference, Erdogan threw his nearest electoral rival in prison. Putin’s mysteriously died in gaol.

We can expect no more free press, no working courts or rule of law, and highly manipulated elections. And this won’t just be for another Netanyahu government. It will likely be for generations. Can you imagine an Israeli Erdogan with that kind of power? Never mind that, can you imagine what a Prime Minister Ben Gvir would do with it (or, if you love the extreme right, a far-left PM, one day)?

So this Netanyahu, this man who has failed at his job so spectacularly, who has even failed to take any shred of responsibility for that failure, or do anything to try to reduce the massive burden on Israel’s soldiers, asks us to give him his job back. And if we do, he will undertake to give himself unlimited power, making it supremely hard, if not impossible, to ever unseat him again. Of course he doesn’t actually say this, he’s too busy looking stern and (ridiculously) claiming that the opposition, comprising as it does many people who have spent their lives in uniform defending the country (and far more Zionists and former soldiers than are in his bloc, incidentally) would rush to create a hostile Palestinian state — all in the hope that we don’t notice what’s really on the table.

You want to know the true definition of that word, ‘frayar’? The true definition is voting for Netanyahu or his bloc in this election. And the question we should all be asking ourselves, and asking deeply, is “Are we really, after all, a nation of frayars?”

After October 27th, we’ll know the answer. We will know who we are.