October as a Weapon
October as a Weapon
There are moments when an election is no longer simply an election. It becomes an operation performed on public memory.
Benjamin Netanyahu now appears to be entering precisely such a moment. His problem is not only that his old strategic narrative has weakened. His problem is that the catastrophe of October 7 still stands before him as an event that has not been politically neutralized.
For years, Netanyahu mastered the art of reclassification. Failure could be renamed prudence. Paralysis could be called restraint. Corruption could be framed as persecution. Dependency on extremists could be sold as loyalty to the national camp. Even disaster, under sufficient rhetorical pressure, could be folded into the mythology of the indispensable leader.
But October 7 is harder to absorb. It is not a scandal. It is not a tactical embarrassment. It is not another item in the endless machinery of coalition bargaining. It is a wound in chronological form.
That is why the date of the coming election matters so much.
Netanyahu had hoped to approach the polls as the architect of a transformed Middle East: Iran weakened beyond recovery, Israel elevated as a regional power, diplomacy and force fused into one grand image of historic leadership. In such a scenario, October 7 would not disappear, but it could be displaced. It could be made to look like the terrible prelude to a larger victory.
That larger victory has not arrived.
Iran has not collapsed. Lebanon has not become a clean success. The war has not produced a political horizon that can be sold as redemption. Even the relationship with Donald Trump, once so useful as theatrical confirmation of Netanyahu’s global stature, now appears less stable than the required myth.
So the strategy changes. If triumph cannot erase the catastrophe, timing must contain it.
This is the real meaning of the electoral calendar. The question is not merely when Israelis will vote. The question is when they will be asked to remember, under what atmosphere, after which speeches, amid which ceremonies, and against which opponent.
That is not democratic timing. It is memory management.
October is not a neutral month in Israel. It carries the anniversary of abandonment, invasion, murder, failure, and the collapse of state protection. To hold an election near that month is not just a scheduling decision. It is a wager: that grief has already been politically sorted, that mourning will remain trapped inside bloc loyalty, that catastrophe can be domesticated by partisan habit.
This is the most chilling assumption beneath the strategy. The public is treated not as a civic body capable of judgment, but as a set of hardened reflexes. The question becomes not what citizens know, remember, or demand, but whether their memory can still be made politically inert.
The choice of opponent belongs to the same logic.
Naftali Bennett is useful because he can be turned into an object of emotional punishment. For Netanyahu’s camp, Bennett is not merely a rival. He is the symbolic betrayer, the man who crossed forbidden lines and can therefore be used to reactivate old right-wing resentments.
Gadi Eisenkot is more dangerous because he threatens a different monopoly. He does not merely oppose Netanyahu politically. He challenges Netanyahu’s claim to embody security seriousness. That is much harder to neutralize. A rival can be demonized. A credible alternative in the language of responsibility is more difficult to turn into a cartoon.
The ultra-Orthodox crisis exposes the same structure from another angle. A state at war cannot indefinitely ask one part of society to carry sacrifice while another part is shielded by coalition necessity. The draft exemption question is therefore not a side issue. It is a structural exposure of the regime itself.
Netanyahu’s silence before ultra-Orthodox attacks on state institutions is not accidental. It reveals the hierarchy of obligations. The state is no longer the supreme object of responsibility. The coalition is.
This is the deeper danger. Elections are supposed to test governments. Here, the election risks becoming another device for postponing the test. Instead of answering October 7, the campaign may try to rearrange the conditions under which October 7 is judged.
A speech at the United Nations. A possible Trump visit. A religiously charged calendar. A convenient opponent. A media operation. A recovered narrative of strength. Each element is meant to produce one effect: not accountability, but containment.
This is no longer the politics of vision. It is the politics of the threshold.
At the threshold, one decides what may enter public judgment and what must remain outside it. Netanyahu’s campaign will not simply ask Israelis to choose a government. It will ask them whether October 7 can be converted into another episode in the long biography of his survival.
That is the question behind the election.
Not whether Netanyahu can produce one more warning, one more enemy, one more dramatic speech, one more appeal to destiny. He can. He has done it for decades.
The real question is whether Israel can still distinguish survival from responsibility.
A leader may survive a disaster. A coalition may survive moral exhaustion. A political machine may survive almost anything, provided the public can be persuaded that judgment must wait.
But a state cannot live forever inside postponement.
At some point, the calendar stops being a tactic.
It becomes evidence.
Yochanan Schimmelpfennig
