The Politics of Broken Promises
The Israeli election may not have settled anything, but it did deliver a message to the country’s political leaders: campaign promises can be bent, if not broken.
Israel has, after all, developed a distinguished record of politicians abandoning their electoral commitments, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu setting a standard few could match. In 2019, Netanyahu promised that Benny Gantz would never serve as Defense Minister. Yet, in 2020, Gantz became Defense Minister in the very governing coalition Netanyahu assembled. In 2019, Netanyahu ridiculed the idea of rotating prime ministers; a year later, he agreed to precisely such an arrangement, only to break the agreement when it came time to relinquish the Prime Minister’s office to Gantz. In 2021, he went further, promising that Na’il Zoabi, an educator from Tamra, would become Minister for the Advancement of Arab Society—not Ben-Gvir. As he campaigned for reelection, Netanyahu even invited voters to call him “Abu Yair,” adopting a familiar Arabic expression to signal his appeal to Arab citizens.
The political deadlock following the October 27 election has created an unusual opportunity to recover some measure of national unity. The question is whether party leaders will recognize and seize it. After all, policies, not personalities, are what have the capacity to remake a political landscape. To insist on campaign pledges that categorically rule out joining a coalition with one leader or another would effectively seal the divisions within Israeli society in political cement. Such rigidity would do little to establish a path toward the country’s future.
The configuration of the new Knesset, which convenes on November 10, gives Gadi Eisenkot considerable leverage to help establish a different political tone and advance more realistic national priorities. He could spearhead an effort to appoint a new Knesset Speaker, whose authority extends to setting the legislative agenda and shaping the membership of parliamentary committees. These institutional changes could create the conditions for establishing a state commission of inquiry into the October 7 attacks. They could also open the way to repealing those elements of the judicial overhaul that have yet to be implemented.
None of this should underestimate the political advantage Netanyahu derives from incumbency. Israel’s parliamentary system allows an outgoing prime minister to remain in office when no alternative governing coalition can be assembled, potentially carrying the country toward another election in April 2027. Yet a caretaker government operates under significant constraints. It cannot initiate new legislation or freely appoint and dismiss senior public officials. And while another election might offer Netanyahu an opportunity to challenge an opposition that has thus far failed to fulfill its promise of replacing him, it could also introduce risks of its own. What if a commission investigating the October 7 catastrophe were to issue a preliminary report in March 2027 identifying serious security failures for which Netanyahu bore responsibility? The October 27 election should have made one point unmistakable: electoral outcomes cannot be taken for granted.
The establishment of a state commission to investigate the circumstances that produced the October 7 disaster could, in itself, unsettle Netanyahu’s political calculations. His sustained opposition to such an inquiry over the past three years is especially striking given that commissions of this kind have been a routine feature of Israeli public life, even following events with considerably fewer casualties. The demand for an independent investigation is not simply procedural. It reflects a public interest in establishing what happened, why it happened, and who must be held accountable. As head of a caretaker government, Netanyahu would have limited means to prevent the inquiry from proceeding.
Paradoxically, the prospect of such a commission might provide Netanyahu with an incentive to find common ground with the opposition and consider joining a national unity government. That arrangement would undoubtedly require several parties that campaigned on replacing Netanyahu rather than serving alongside him to reconsider their pledges. But Eisenkot could insist on a set of policy conditions that would give such a government a distinct purpose and identity.
A coalition built around these priorities would exclude Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, and the Haredi parties. It could advance legislation requiring Haredi military conscription while reversing some of the recent measures that have expanded rabbinical authority over public life. Those commitments might be sufficient to bring Avigdor Liberman into the government, since they address several of his central policy objectives.
Such a coalition could also reorder national budgetary priorities, restore professionalism to the police, and direct new resources toward education and economic development, particularly in Arab communities whose needs have been neglected, marginalized, or damaged by government policies over the past four years. Ra’am, having secured sufficient Knesset representation to participate as a full coalition partner, would have an important role to play. Its inclusion would also signal a commitment to repairing the damage to public institutions and democratic norms that has accompanied the governing coalition’s policies.
Of course, such a unity government would require the leaders of the Change bloc to abandon their pledge to replace Netanyahu personally. But the election has presented them with a choice between organizing politics around individuals and organizing it around policies. They could use their parliamentary leverage to insist that Netanyahu and Likud confront questions that have too often been evaded rather than addressed openly. More importantly, they could demonstrate that political leaders need not remain prisoners of their own campaign rhetoric or partisan loyalties. Their responsibility is to a public that has too often paid the price for politicians pursuing power and ideological objectives at the expense of the country’s broader interests.
The prospect of a unity government would respect the election results while offering Netanyahu an opportunity to return to the Zionist principles he so frequently invokes but whose political implications he has too often avoided. Zionism provided the foundation for a Jewish state committed to protecting all its citizens, regardless of religion or ethnicity, and extending to them the opportunities and protections of democracy and modernity. A society that must repeatedly send its children to war has an obligation to build a country that offers more than survival. It must provide its citizens with a meaningful present and the prospect of a future worthy of the sacrifices demanded of them.
There may be an additional incentive for Netanyahu, a student of history who has often cast himself in Churchillian terms when describing his wartime leadership. Winston Churchill enjoyed an approval rating of approximately 83 percent in 1945, yet his Conservative Party lost the British general election that same year. The British electorate, having endured years of war, was ready to turn its attention from wartime leadership to the possibilities of peace and reconstruction. The country wanted to look forward, not remain politically anchored to the extraordinary demands of the past.
Netanyahu might consider the lesson. Churchill’s wartime stature did not guarantee him a political future, nor did his historical achievements exempt him from the electorate’s desire for a different national agenda. By joining a unity government, Netanyahu could attempt something more consequential than another campaign victory: he could help establish the political conditions for Israel to move beyond the October 7 catastrophe and the divisions that have followed it. Whether he could thereby surpass Churchill’s postwar legacy is another question. But the opportunity to place the country’s future ahead of his own political survival may be the most consequential choice available to him.
