The State Must Return

A poll is not a covenant, and a majority is not yet responsibility. Numbers may indicate a political opening, but they do not by themselves constitute repair. They become meaningful only when they are carried by a public act capable of restoring measure, limit, and obligation.

This is why the latest Israeli surveys should not be read with premature relief. They may show that a majority against Benjamin Netanyahu is now politically possible, that Gadi Eisenkot is emerging as a more trusted figure, and that the anti-Netanyahu camp can cross the numerical threshold required to form a government. Yet Jewish political life cannot be reduced to arithmetic, and Israel cannot be repaired by counting alone.

The question, therefore, is not only whether Netanyahu can be removed. The deeper question is whether Israel can be returned from possession to responsibility. A government may change while the structure of capture remains intact, and a coalition may replace another coalition while the state continues to function as an object held by those who claim to protect it.

For too long, the state has been treated as a private instrument: a fortress of personal survival, a family asset, a coalition machine, a shield against accountability, and a mechanism through which fear is translated into obedience. Institutions have been bent toward one man’s continuity, public language has been exhausted by permanent emergency, and security has been invoked so often that it has sometimes ceased to protect life and has begun to protect power.

This is not merely a political problem. It is an ethical one. In Jewish terms, the danger is idolatry, not the crude idolatry of ancient images, but the more sophisticated idolatry of political indispensability. It is the belief that one man, one faction, one machine, or one permanent emergency can stand where responsibility itself should stand.

A society begins to lose its freedom when it is taught that without the ruler there will be chaos, without the ruler there will be enemies at the gate, and without the ruler there will be no Israel. This is how political dependency replaces covenantal responsibility. It does not ask citizens to think, judge, or answer for the state; it asks them to cling.

But Israel is not the property of any ruler, and the state is not a golden calf. The people are not fuel for a survival machine, and a Jewish polity cannot be founded on the worship of necessity, especially when that necessity is manufactured by those who benefit from it.

This is the ethical threshold before the anti-Netanyahu bloc. If it becomes only a coalition of fatigue, it will fail even if it wins. If it defines itself only by removal, it will inherit the ruins without knowing how to repair them. If it treats the election as a technical passage from one government to another, it will misunderstand the depth of the damage that has been done.

What is required is teshuvah in public form. This does not mean repentance as sentiment, pious language, or moral decoration. It means the return of function, limit, and responsibility. It means the return of law from partisan use, public office from private possession to accountable service, security from manipulation to protection, and society from exhaustion to dignity.

This return cannot mean a fantasy of purity. No state returns to innocence, and no institution is a neutral machine waiting to be restored by morally superior hands. Institutions are made of people, interests, loyalties, habits, fears, bureaucratic inertia, and accumulated damage. After years of capture, repair will itself be political. It will require appointments, dismissals, confrontations, compromises, and decisions that will immediately be denounced by the old machine as a new form of capture.

That accusation cannot be avoided, but it can be answered honestly. The distinction is not between dirty politics and pure administration, because such a distinction would be false. The distinction is between political action bound by limits and political action that abolishes limits for the sake of survival. It is between power used under conditions of accountability, reversibility, and public justification, and power converted into private continuity.

This is why teshuvah in public form cannot mean a return to a mythical zero point. It means the reintroduction of measure into a damaged field. It means accepting that the state is always political while refusing the idolatrous conclusion that politics belongs to whoever can dominate it most efficiently. The repair of the state will not be clean, but it must be answerable.

This is where Eisenkot’s rise matters less as a personal endorsement than as a symptom of a public hunger for gravity. After years of performance, seriousness itself begins to look almost redemptive.

Yet the difficulty must not be hidden. Sobriety does not seduce a wounded society as easily as spectacle does. Institutional seriousness does not travel through fear, rage, and resentment with the speed of populist myth. A politics of limits is difficult to offer to citizens trained for years to experience politics as emergency, identity, revenge, and protection.

This is the weakness of the anti-Netanyahu alternative, but it is also its truth. It cannot win by imitating the intoxication it claims to oppose. If it becomes another machine of charisma, panic, and tribal mobilization, it will defeat Netanyahu only by preserving the deeper grammar of Netanyahuism.

The task is therefore harder than electoral victory. It is to make responsibility politically audible again. It is to show that procedure is not weakness, restraint is not surrender, institutional dullness is not lifelessness, and a state that ceases to intoxicate its citizens may finally begin to serve them.

In Jewish terms, this may be the most difficult lesson. The golden calf was attractive because it was visible, immediate, collective, and emotionally satisfying. Responsibility is slower, law is less theatrical, and covenant does not flatter panic. It asks for endurance without worship.

No individual, however serious, can replace the deeper act that is required. Israel does not need another indispensable man. It needs a political order in which indispensability becomes impossible again. That is the difference between replacing a ruler and repairing a state.

The coming election, if it takes place under fair and trusted conditions, will not merely decide who governs. It will test whether Israeli society can still distinguish between leadership and possession, loyalty and servitude, security and fear, Jewish responsibility and tribal panic.

The fear that elections may be disrupted should therefore be taken with utmost seriousness. A political machine that senses defeat does not always surrender to democratic arithmetic. It tests thresholds, weakens trust, prepares its followers to experience loss as betrayal, and turns procedure into suspicion before the vote has even taken place.

That too is an ethical danger, because a state cannot survive when its own institutions are made suspect whenever they cease to serve the ruler. Once procedure is trusted only when it confirms power, the state has already been hollowed from within.

The anti-Netanyahu majority, if it is real, must therefore become more than a majority. It must become a public refusal of idolatry. It must say clearly that no leader is Israel, no coalition is Israel, no party is Israel, and no emergency grants ownership over Israel.

Israel belongs neither to the ruler nor to the mob. It belongs to the fragile responsibility of those who refuse to turn fear into worship and who understand that political repair begins when public life is rescued from possession. A majority may now exist, but only responsibility can make the state return.

Yochanan Schimmelpfennig