The greatest threat to Israel

I have known Benjamin Netanyahu for 39 years. We first met in October 1987, the most difficult time of my life. We had just buried my brother, Alex Singer, who fell in battle in Lebanon on September 15, 1987, his 25th birthday. Netanyahu, then Israel’s UN ambassador, came to Washington to speak at Alex’s shloshim, held at the Israeli embassy. I don’t remember what he said, though I am sure he mentioned his own fallen brother, Yoni Netanyahu. I do remember thinking that he would be a dream candidate for prime minister.

I have voted for Bibi many times since then. I stopped voting for him when he became unrecognizable as the Bibi who defended the independence of the judiciary and shunned the extremists in his bloc. It seemed to me that, one by one, the old Bibi’s principles were giving way to the need to stay in power.

A wide swath of Israel’s Zionist majority now agree on three things. First, the haredim must meaningfully share in the military and economic burdens of the country. Second, changes to the judicial system may be warranted, but only if made through broad compromise. Third, there must be a comprehensive and constructive investigation of the failures of October 7.

This consensus includes many moderate coalition voters. By rights, the opposition should win in a landslide since the coalition is on the wrong side of all three. So why is the election so close?

The reason is that many of these voters are held back from the emotionally difficult step of switching blocs by one overriding issue: security. They believe that if the opposition had been in power, the war would probably have ended before the severe degradation of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran. They also believe that Bibi will deal with the remaining threats more aggressively than the opposition would.

The tragedy, and the irony, is that voting for the coalition contributes to the greatest threat to national security the country has ever faced.

The way to see this is to look at what causes Israelis to lose hope. Wars and threats have never dented our optimism; we know how to handle them. Since October 7, we have greatly reduced the threats to Israel on seven fronts at once. We may not feel more secure than we did on October 6, but we are. The danger we faced then, a simultaneous all-out attack by Hamas and Hezbollah even without Iran, was orders of magnitude greater than what happened on October 7. Netanyahu, it must be said, is as responsible for allowing, and even abetting, that danger, and for the failure of October 7, as he is for the military successes that followed.

What does cause Israelis to lose hope is national division. The reasons are simple. We know that no one can defeat us except ourselves. The fear of “baseless hatred” is deeply ingrained in the Jewish soul. We know that, like Samson, our strength can desert us. Without our unity, we are eyeless in Gaza.

The other reason that division causes us to lose hope is that Israel, unlike other wealthy countries, has a culture that combines individualism with multi-layered mechanisms to build and maintain solidarity.

And solidarity is not just a nicety. It is what led Israelis to fill flights coming back to Israel, and  what sent hundreds of thousands of reservists running to the front on and after October 7, and hundreds of thousands more holding together the home front when the government was paralyzed.

But in politics, something strange happens to our commitment to solidarity. Each side sees support for its own bloc as a vote for unity. An August survey by The Madad asked voters which candidate they trusted more to unite the Israeli people. Among coalition voters, 59 percent said Netanyahu.

Psychologically, I understand why this is the case. But this is not just a matter of perspective. The gap between the two sides on who promotes division could not be greater, and it does not favor the coalition.

One of the main reasons for my break with Netanyahu is that he dove deeper into the politics of division. From “Peres will divide Jerusalem,” to “Bibi or [Ahmed] Tibi,” to the despicable campaign ad depicting Gadi Eisenkot running past a young Jewish Israeli to embrace Ra’am leader Mansour Abbas, to Netanyahu’s October 25 tweet featuring an AI-generated image of a nuclear bomb destroying Tel Aviv.

But it is worse than that. The most basic requirement of war leadership is to put politics aside and unite the people. Just three weeks after October 7, Netanyahu let loose a tweet blaming the security establishment for not warning him. “On the contrary,” he wrote, “all the security officials, including the head of military intelligence and the head of the Shin Bet, assessed that Hamas had been deterred and was looking for a settlement.” Hours later he deleted the tweet and apologized.

But the fact remained: at the very moment hundreds of thousands of Israelis were running to the battlefield, Netanyahu was focused on shifting blame onto the IDF and the Shin Bet. He and his government went on to escalate their attacks on the IDF leadership, undermining the one institution Israelis trusted most and feeding conspiracy theories that the army had deliberately allowed the Hamas massacre.

The opposition and the media do not like to admit that the “conceptzia” behind the government’s total failure to anticipate and block the October 7 massacre was shared nearly wall-to-wall, not just by the government of the day. There was no public clamor before the war to invade Gaza or Lebanon, or even to stop allowing Qatari money to flow freely to the Hamas regime.

In this sense, Netanyahu does not bear sole blame, even though, as prime minister, he bears ultimate responsibility. What is completely on Netanyahu’s shoulders is his divisive conduct after October 7.

And all of this is before we get to the greatest source of national division: the lack of haredi service. Here, moderate coalition voters agree on the problem; they just don’t see it as a security issue. That is a dangerous blind spot.

The problem is zero-sum: if many haredim continue to refuse to serve, the burden falls on Israelis who serve hundreds of days of miluim, and on their families. In her new book, Mothers at the Front, Efrat Shalvi-Livovich quotes a mother who hung a sign on her door: “Mother of a combat soldier — don’t knock on the door. I can’t hear knocking on the door. Call first.” Some families live with that fear; others are exempt from it. That is a recipe for social explosion, and there is no doubt which political camp is perpetuating the status quo and which insists on solving it.

Naftali Bennett’s simple and elegant proposal is a workable solution to the problem. He proposes setting up yeshivot on the borders. The haredim would, in Bennett’s words, study for 8 hours, guard for 8 hours, and sleep for 8 hours. Haredi soldiers could serve in an completely haredi environment, not interrupt their studies, and materially reduce the security burden on everyone else. No one would be forced to serve, but those who didn’t would not receive any state financial support.

Usually, voting means choosing the least bad option. This time, I will vote for Naftali Bennett with conviction. He is made to order for this moment. He’s a unifier by action and by nature. But it is also about competence. There is a track record of defeated leaders coming back far more capable the second time around. Like them or not, this was true of the comebacks of Yitzhak Rabin and Netanyahu (after his defeat by Ehud Barak).

While Trump seems to think differently, I don’t see why Eisenkot or Bennett would be worse partners in defeating Iran. If anything, a new government would be eager to demonstrate its defense bona fides to Israelis, the US, and our Gulf allies.

In short, dear coalition voter, at this moment in history, we must think of national unity as our paramount national security issue. The Kaplan protest movement committed a grave sin against national unity when they politicized the hostage issue by using it as a cudgel against Netanyahu. But Yair Golan is not running for prime minister. So there is no equivalence between the blocs when it comes to national unity.

At his press conference on leaving the hospital after being critically wounded in Gaza, the singer and Fauda actor Idan Amedi ended with a few words in English. He said, “The Israeli people are the strongest in the world. When we are united we are invincible.” That is why, just this once, the vote for invincibility is a vote for the other bloc.