Nothing will change? It all will

“Nothing will change.” You hear it all the time. Doesn’t matter who’s in the hot seat, they say, the policies will be the same, so may as well stay with the guy we know. Well, apart from the massive incompetence and corruption and assault on democracy of ‘the guy we know’ — and boy do we know him — the “nothing will change” canard is just that. Because, certainly domestically, everything will change. If the opposition win this election. For the better.

Those who charge that the parties ranged against Netanyahu’s coalition are only about ‘just not Bibi,’ fundamentally, or willfully, misunderstand. It’s not about what the opposition parties are against, it’s about what they’re for. They’re for good governance, law and order, democracy, the taking of responsibility, being answerable to the public for whom they work, observing reasonable norms, and being good at their jobs, just as we need them to be. These are not small things, they are vital to Israel’s success. And the current government stands for none of that, in fact it pretty well represents the opposite in each case. That’s the main reason Bennett, Eisenkot et al are set against them.

Let’s imagine the change. How would it play out, if Netanyahu is indeed toppled again? Well, we could do worse than take a look at how the Naftali Bennett / Yair Lapid government of 2021/22 fared, for a glimpse of what we might reasonably expect under a returning PM Bennett, or Eisenkot, who appears to share many of the same principles, or even Liberman (a highly successful Finance Minister under Bennett and, incidentally, the one who as Defence Minister exactly foresaw October 7th).

For the first time in 35 years, they handed Israel a Budget surplus, 9.8 billion shekels. GDP was up, unemployment down. They passed a State Budget, which should be basic, but which Netanyahu had failed to do since 2018. A program to tackle violent crime was a success under Deputy Internal Security Minister Yoav Segalovitz (now running with the Ra’am party), pushing the murder rate down for the first time in years, breaking up crime syndicates and raising the number of indictments.

They stabilised hospital budgets, greatly expanded mental health care, introduced Ministry of Education oversight for preschool and daycare (previously rife with abuses), gave school principals more say in where budgets were spent in their schools, passed a multi-billion-shekel welfare services law to help those in need, approved the Tel Aviv Metro project, tackled the housing shortage by approving the building of more homes than at any time since the mid-1990s, gave free public transport to the elderly, and much more.

But something else, too. That government was made up of diverse people from across the political spectrum, yet they talked to each other, they worked well together. Despite the backdrop of hysterical shows and yelling from Netanyahu’s bloc in opposition (behaviour they have only intensified since re-taking office four years ago), Bennett’s government eschewed dramatics. A friend working in a government ministry told me how, in those days, the minister would come in having done exemplary research, and “would know the subject better than anyone else in the room.” Informed decisions would be made, things would happen, on to the next. That’s not the case today, and it wasn’t the case under the previous Netanyahu government. Now, and then, ministry workers would quietly despair.

Those were the politics of hard work, consensus, results, public service. The politics of tikva — hope. What we have now is the politics of failure, rage, fear, corruption (check out the jaw-dropping number of investigations, indictments and criminal convictions among this government’s members) and an unbalancing cult of personality unprecedented in Israel’s modern history.

So we can expect an Eisenkot or Bennett or Liberman to calmly and methodically and expertly to bring crime back under control (no more grenades thrown into branches of high street restaurants, would be nice), to rescue billions of our budgets from people who refuse to work and from political handouts, to properly tackle the cost of living, to stem the flow of emigration of many of our most productive citizens, to help give the IDF what it actually needs — reliable budgets and manpower. To genuinely get on top of the draft issue, and to aid struggling reservists and conscripts. To approach rebalancing our constitution in a measured and balanced way. To bring a State Commission Of Enquiry into October 7th, to help us heal and help us learn. Above all, to bring transparency in our politics, to govern professionally and to lower the flames of division that Netanyahu and his poison machine have so expertly stoked, turning us against each other as a political tool.

As for the war, as for international affairs, it’s true that most people agree on much. But the details can also make for big improvements. Bennett, for instance, posits that when fighting is to be done, the IDF should go in harder, more decisively, and finish faster. Having a more trusting relationship between the IDF and politicians would surely make us feel safer (we’ve all seen this week’s headlines about a reported rift between the Chief Of Staff and the Prime Minister over what, we’re told, Eyal Zamir sees as Netanyahu’s desire to needlessly strike Iran just days before our election; just as we read all about the clashes over officer promotions between Zamir and the Defence Minister, and on, and on). As for planning and thoroughness and judgement, do you feel safe under Netanyahu? I don’t. Not after Bennett’s revelation that Netanyahu had let the attack plans against Iran go out of date (Bennett urgently renewed them as PM, and thank goodness he did). Not after October 7th. Not after the FlyDubai hijacking of just a few weeks ago.

And surely we don’t need to say, that it is not unreasonable to expect that some of the Prime Minister’s closest advisors wouldn’t be embroiled in scandals about taking payments from Hamas’s sponsors, Qatar, even during the war.

We could list this government’s failings and liabilities for pages — but that’s not the point of this article. The point is to imagine what would be better under the new guys.

The new guys would have proper communications and diplomacy to reach out to the world. Even if many still disagree with us, the damage can be greatly lessened by avoiding needless provocations and lunatic memes, by not having racists and supremacists in the heart of government (most Israelis still don’t understand the vastness of the damage that Smotrich and Ben Gvir and their allies have done to us in the world), by a proper, strategic approach. It’s not a coincidence that the military conflict during the tenure of Yair Lapid, a media expert, is the only one in recent memory in which Israel won the information war (even while the IDF took out the heads of Palestinian Islamic Jihad).

Much of the same goes for diplomacy. A professional approach — not the current situation in which we haven’t even had an ambassador to London for more than a year — can help us tremendously. The Bennett/Lapid government did much to repair and further relations with many countries — France, the UK, the UAE, Egypt, even Turkey. US President Trump already, at various times, said how much he likes various of Israel’s opposition leaders, and he will work well with Bennett or Eisenkot. Meanwhile, Israel must be ready for a change of government at the next US election, with the major challenges that might pose. And for that, new leadership on our side is essential.

Forget Netanyahu’s offering of a blanket cut in US support, of international isolation so dire that we have to rely on digital currency like a criminal organisation. Imagine instead, what a change in our government could bring.

Imagine that, and everything can feel different. Better. Our present, and our future.

And only we can make it happen, when we cast our votes. For the sake of the country, for the survival of the country in these most difficult of times, I pray that we do.