The Case for Change
The Case for Change: Why Israel’s Democracy — and Its Bond with the
Diaspora — Require a Post-Netanyahu Government
A center-right case for replacing Netanyahu, ahead of the October 27, 2026 election
Israeli politics has moved to the right over the last few decades, and October 7 accelerated it. Surveys of this cycle’s first-time voters find only about five percent identify as left-wing; the country’s fastest-growing constituencies, the Haredi and religious-nationalist communities, sit on the right as well. This argument is built where the votes actually are. The figures positioned to end Netanyahu’s run — Naftali Bennett, Yair Lapid, who now runs jointly with Bennett on a single list, Gadi Eisenkot, and Benny Gantz — are men of the right and center, not the left. Bennett ran the settler movement and served as Netanyahu’s own defense minister. Eisenkot and Gantz both ran the IDF as Chief of Staff; Eisenkot buried a son and a nephew in this war. The case against Netanyahu isn’t a case against conservatism. It’s a case that Israel’s own conservative and religious-nationalist mainstream — the people who built the settlements, run the security establishment, and are inheriting an increasingly right-leaning electorate — don’t need this particular man leading them anymore.
Count I: A Security Failure, and a Refusal to Own It
No single leader is responsible for October 7, 2023. But responsibility isn’t a pie that splits into equal slices, and Netanyahu’s slice is inseparable from the office he held. For years before the attack, his government propped up Hamas as a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority, letting Qatari cash flow into Gaza on the theory that a divided Palestinian leadership beat a unified one that might eventually have to negotiate. That bet blew up. Israel’s own military investigation, released in 2024, found that the IDF misread Hamas’s intentions and capabilities and wasn’t ready for the attack — a failure that happened on Netanyahu’s watch, under policies he set.
Israel was told. The Atlantic reported in September, citing officials from seven countries, that Egypt’s intelligence chief, Abbas Kamel, flew into Ben Gurion Airport on September 26, 2023 — eleven days before the attack — for a visit lasting 67 minutes. One former Israeli official later briefed on it summarized his message: if Israel didn’t change course, Gaza would “blow up in your faces.” Egypt kept warning until shortly before the attack. The report doesn’t say whom Kamel met, and it notes that the alerts carried no dates, targets, or battle plan; Netanyahu’s office calls the account false, and Egypt denied issuing any warning in 2023. But an intelligence chief doesn’t fly in personally to deliver a routine assessment — the messenger was itself the message. A warning delivered at that level is a warning to the government, not just to its generals.
What followed is worse than the failure itself: he won’t own it. Netanyahu is the only senior official connected to October 7 who hasn’t resigned. He has spent three years blocking the state commission of inquiry that the families of the dead and the hostages have demanded — the same kind of independent review Israel convened after the Yom Kippur War and the first Lebanon war. Instead, as the third anniversary approaches, he has run an escalating campaign to shift blame onto the Shin Bet and the IDF — amplifying a claim that former Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar considers Netanyahu himself illegitimate, and releasing his own timeline of that morning, a document that on close reading shows a three-and-a-half-hour gap before he was actually running the response. David Horovitz, the founding editor of the Times of Israel, put it plainly in a September 2026 column: “nobody in Israel — literally nobody — has seriously claimed that Israel’s security chiefs were not profoundly to blame.” Netanyahu is alone in insisting the failure belongs to them, and not, in any part, to him.
That independent accounting has never happened, and the officials whose failures remain unexamined aren’t some rogue, apolitical bureaucracy operating outside Netanyahu’s own government. Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi and Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar were both appointed in the final months of the brief 2021–22 government that interrupted Netanyahu’s rule. But they served their entire terms under the government Netanyahu formed in December 2022 — carrying out the Gaza containment policy and the Qatari-cash strategy his coalitions had
built. A man who has run Israel for all but eighteen months since 2009 doesn’t get to treat his own security establishment’s failures as someone else’s. To paraphrase Truman: the buck stops with Netanyahu.
This isn’t accountability deferred so much as accountability purposefully denied. A state commission of inquiry is the one tool in Israeli law built to investigate a government independently of that government — its members are appointed by the president of the Supreme Court, not by the cabinet under scrutiny. That’s exactly the tool Netanyahu has spent three years blocking, offering instead a government-picked alternative that Lapid said was designed to “bury the truth.” That refusal is why every specific question raised here about the run-up to October 7 — what became of Egypt’s warning, and whether pulling forces from the Gaza border to the West Bank in the war’s final days mattered — is still unanswered. A prime minister who believed the record would clear him would have convened that commission years ago.
A leader who can’t own his share of the worst catastrophe in Israel’s modern history isn’t the man to prevent the next one.
Count II: Governing Through Extremists
Netanyahu’s coalition since late 2022 has run on the votes of Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir — men who, not long ago, would have been unthinkable as senior ministers. He didn’t bring them in because he believes what they believe — he brought them in because they were the votes available to keep him out of a courtroom. Israel’s standing in the world, its relationship with the diaspora, and increasingly its own security establishment have all paid for that bargain.
Under this government, settler violence in the West Bank has risen sharply — sometimes, as Horovitz has documented, carried out by attackers riding with uniformed IDF soldiers or using state vehicles and weapons. Ben Gvir, as national security minister, has repeatedly overridden policing decisions in ways current and former security officials say wreck operational discipline. Smotrich, who in practice runs civil administration in the West Bank, has pushed settlement expansion specifically designed to rule out any future territorial deal. None of this is in dispute among Israel’s own security professionals; the only dispute is whether it should matter to voters. It should. A government that indulges settler extremists, to borrow Horovitz’s phrase, isn’t defending Israel’s security. It’s trading long-term position and legitimacy for short-term coalition math.
The cost has been more than reputational. In the days before October 7, 2023, roughly 100 soldiers from two Commando Brigade companies at the Gaza border were pulled to the West Bank town of Huwara, reportedly to help guard a Knesset member’s protest camp during rising settler-Palestinian tension. The IDF’s response to this was narrower than a real rebuttal: spokesman Daniel Hagari said the companies were reserve troops, not part of the regular border force, and that the weekend move was routine. That tells you how the troops were classified. It doesn’t tell you whether their absence mattered two days later — a question nobody has independently checked, because no state commission has ever convened. A unit does not sit on the most dangerous frontier in the country for no purpose. A hundred additional trained fighters, in the right place on the morning of October 7, would more than plausibly have blunted the initial breach at even one crossing point, buying minutes or hours that could have meant saving lives at one or more kibbutzim. And the body giving this account isn’t fully independent on questions of the political leadership’s own blame: the IDF Chief of Staff is nominated by the defense minister and appointed by the cabinet, so the institution investigating the events answers, structurally, to the government being investigated. Ynet reported in September 2025 that release of the IDF’s own October 7 findings had been frozen amid “suspicions… that political leaders are steering the fallout to shield the government” — a concern about the broader process, not proof about Huwara, but
reason for skepticism toward any single-source account.
This didn’t end there. In March 2026, the IDF pulled forces off operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon and sent them to the West Bank to contain a surge in settler violence — a move that, according to IDF sources, needed Netanyahu’s personal sign-off after field commanders asked for more manpower. Netanyahu said nothing publicly about the violence itself. By his own government’s account, he has acted against Jewish attacks on Palestinians only when Washington pushed him to. A government that keeps pulling trained soldiers off active fronts to clean up after its own coalition partners’ incitement isn’t treating settler violence like the emergency its own field commanders say it is.
Count III: The Assault on Israel’s Courts, and the Trial No Other Sitting Prime
Minister Has Faced
In July 2023, Netanyahu’s coalition passed a law stripping Israel’s Supreme Court of the power to strike down government decisions as “unreasonable” — the opening move in a judicial overhaul that set off the largest sustained protest movement in Israel’s history, months before October 7. The Supreme Court struck the law down in January 2024, 8–7 — a margin that shows how close Israel came to a real constitutional crisis over judicial independence, manufactured by a government elected with less than half the vote.
That fight can’t be separated from the fact that Netanyahu is the first sitting Israeli prime minister ever to stand trial on criminal charges — an ongoing prosecution across three cases (1000, 2000, and 4000) alleging bribery, fraud, and breach of trust. The trial, which resumed this week after the summer recess, isn’t expected to reach a verdict before 2027. Netanyahu calls the prosecution “an attempted coup.” He has asked President Herzog for a pardon instead of waiting for a verdict, and his allies have floated legislation to grant him immunity outright. Whatever you believe about the underlying charges — and he’s entitled to the same presumption of innocence as any defendant — a prime minister with a direct personal stake
in weakening the courts that will judge him has a real conflict of interest with judicial independence. That’s not a partisan point — it would be just as true of a Labor prime minister in the same spot.
Count IV: A Fractured Diaspora
Israel’s founders understood — and every prime minister until recently understood — that the state’s long-term security depends partly on a durable, bipartisan relationship with world Jewry, especially the largest diaspora community, American Jews. Netanyahu has spent much of the last decade tearing that down. In 2015, he arranged to address a joint session of Congress at Republican leadership’s invitation, over the objections of the sitting Democratic president — an unprecedented move inserting an Israeli leader into American partisan politics. In 2024 he effectively endorsed Donald Trump. This year, his government moved to install a hardline, anti-pluralist ally as consul general in New York, the most sensitive diplomatic post connecting Israel to American Jewry — a community whose large majority belongs to the Reform and Conservative movements this same appointee has spent years attacking.
The numbers back this up. A Pew Research Center survey from March 2026 found that 56% of Jewish Americans have little or no confidence in Netanyahu’s handling of world affairs. Confidence is lowest among younger American Jews, the generation that will decide this relationship’s future. Netanyahu didn’t create every strain in this relationship. But he has, on purpose, turned a bipartisan strategic asset into a partisan Republican one, at the exact moment Israel can least afford to lose a single ally.
Count V: A Pattern of Catastrophic Confidence, Predating Everything Above
This isn’t new behavior. On September 12, 2002, Netanyahu — then a private citizen between terms as prime minister — told the U.S. House Committee on Government Reform there was “no question whatsoever” that Saddam Hussein was building toward nuclear weapons, and that removing him would bring “enormous positive reverberations.” He was completely wrong, and his confidence helped pave the way to a war that cost the United States nearly 4,500 dead, tens of thousands wounded, and roughly three trillion dollars — and that removed the one regional power that had, for all its own crimes, functioned as a check on Iran. The next two decades of Iranian expansion across Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen aren’t solely his doing. But they’re part of the same picture he helped paint in 2002: total confidence in his own judgment, deployed toward an outcome that ended up strengthening Iran, the very country he’s spent his career warning about.
This same instinct resurfaced in the run-up to October 7 — and again, bigger, in the war Netanyahu finally got in 2026. On February 28, 2026, Israel and the United States struck Iran together, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, after years of Netanyahu pushing American administration after administration toward exactly this fight. Six months later, the results don’t match the confidence the war was sold on. Danny Citrinowicz, a former senior Israeli intelligence analyst on Iran, called it “a colossal failure of Israeli strategy.” Iran, far from collapsing, appears to have survived and come out emboldened, keeping much of its missile arsenal and its grip on the Strait of Hormuz. A ceasefire was reached, reportedly without Israel even at the table, leaving even Lapid — who backed the war itself as “a just war against
evil” — complaining that Netanyahu had “turned us into a protectorate state that receives instructions over the phone.” The mistake is the same as in 2002: total certainty that hitting a Middle Eastern adversary would produce a clean strategic win, followed by a messier, costlier reality that a more careful leader might have seen coming.
The Alternative on the Ballot
The defeat of Netanyahu does not require a move to the left. Most of the anger at Netanyahu right now is coming from his own side of the political map. Bennett and Lapid run together this cycle on a single list, Together (BeYachad) — pairing Bennett’s appeal to religious-nationalist and security-minded voters with Lapid’s secular-centrist base, and polling competitive with Likud itself. Eisenkot, heading his own new party, brings a security résumé no honest critic can dismiss, plus a personal stake in this war that gives his push for an October 7 reckoning a moral weight Netanyahu doesn’t have. Gantz brings his own former chief-of-staff credibility to Blue and White, along with the experience of actually trying to govern beside Netanyahu in a wartime unity government — and walking away when it didn’t work. Gideon Sa’ar’s New Hope and Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu round out the bloc: both unambiguously right-of-center parties whose leaders have concluded that Netanyahu himself, not conservative governance, is the problem.
Even together, that bloc may not be enough on its own. Polling in late August had the pro- and anti-Netanyahu camps deadlocked at 53 seats each, eight short of the 61 needed to govern, with two Arab parties — Ra’am and the Joint List — holding the balance of power between them. That’s the uncomfortable arithmetic of Israeli politics in 2026: removing Netanyahu without also empowering Smotrich and Ben Gvir will likely require the anti-Netanyahu right and center to bring in what remains of the Israeli left, Yair Golan’s Democrats, and at least the tacit cooperation of Arab parties willing to support a government from outside the coalition, as Ra’am has done before. That isn’t a left-wing outcome. It’s what the math requires when a country that has moved right is trying to remove one man without handing power to its most extreme fringe.
A government built from that bloc wouldn’t abandon Israel’s security posture or tear down settlements overnight. What it would plausibly do is three things Netanyahu’s coalition can’t: convene the independent state commission of inquiry into October 7 that victims’ families and hostages’ families have been denied for three years; govern without needing Ben Gvir and Smotrich, restoring both discipline in the West Bank and Israel’s room to negotiate regional deals that don’t require permanent occupation; and start repairing a relationship with diaspora Jewry that’s been treated, for a decade, like a resource to spend rather than a
partnership to keep.
Why This Matters Beyond Any Single Election
Israel’s enemies don’t need to beat it on the battlefield to hurt it. A state that governs by leaning on its own extremist fringe, that can’t give a fair accounting of its worst security failure, that treats its own Supreme Court as an obstacle for a prime minister facing his own criminal exposure, and that has alienated a big chunk of the diaspora whose support has backed Israeli security for generations — that state is weaker, not stronger, no matter how many wars it wins. Keeping Netanyahu in power risks exactly this kind of erosion: not Israel’s destruction, but its isolation, brought on from the inside by a leader whose interest in staying in office has drifted away from Israel’s interest in staying secure, democratic, and connected to the Jewish world.
Voting for Bennett, Eisenkot, Lapid, Gantz, or the broader coalition running against
Netanyahu this October isn’t a vote against Israel, against Zionism, or against a strong Israeli security posture. It’s a vote for the idea that twenty years in power doesn’t entitle one man to treat the state’s courts, its military command, its coalition partners, and its relationship with world Jewry as tools for his own survival. Israel’s democracy is strong enough to make this change. This election decides whether it will.
Sources consulted: The Atlantic (September 2026 reporting on Egypt’s pre–October 7 warnings); The Times of Israel (timesofisrael.com); Al Jazeera; The Jerusalem Post (jpost.com); Haaretz; NBC News/AP wire reporting on the IDF’s 2024 October 7 investigation; Pew Research Center, “US views of Israel, Netanyahu more negative in 2026” (April 2026); C-SPAN archival footage and VOA wire reporting of Netanyahu’s September 12, 2002 congressional testimony; Wikipedia, “2026 Israeli legislative election” and associated polling aggregation.
