These Elections Terrify Me

After 43 years of living in Israel and voting in every election, I have never felt that a vote carried the kind of weight it does now. The last four years have been the most tumultuous in our history, and the coming election may determine whether Israel remains the democratic Jewish state so many of us dreamed of. This is not a partisan complaint; it is a warning, written by someone who chose to make Israel his home so many years ago, and who has too many proven reasons to fear what another Netanyahu government would bring.

The Judicial Overthrow and Its Unintended Consequences

The turmoil the nation has been deeply exposed to these last years actually began with the government’s plan to weaken the judicial system and make itself more powerful than the courts. It sought the legal right to overturn court decisions in favor of the government, and to neuter the Attorney General and the legal advisors in every ministry. Under the plan, their rulings would become recommendations at best, rather than binding mandates. These positions would completely lose their independence and become political appointments beholden to the politicians who appointed them.

The plan produced a very unexpected outcome: the largest and longest-lasting protest movement in Israel’s history was born. Every Saturday night, hundreds of thousands of protesters gathered throughout the country. The recognition was by so many that this judicial overthrow would be so far-reaching and would be one of the strongest nails in the coffin of Israel’s democracy.  Reserve soldiers began signing declarations that they would stop serving if the overthrow went forward because they could not morally serve an undemocratic country, and many Air Force pilots signed as well. The politicians and the prime minister stated that these reservists and volunteers should be thrown out of the army and they wouldn’t be missed at all. The heads of every security organization warned Netanyahu that continuing the judicial overhaul, together with the growing and painful divisions in the population, much of it fueled by Netanyahu himself, was creating a dangerous situation. The army, Shin Bet, Mossad, and intelligence chiefs issued warning after warning, and all were ignored. They warned that our enemies were watching closely and viewed us as being at our weakest point in decades, our weakest since the Yom Kippur War. Even Netanyahu’s self-appointed Likud Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, a former general, issued warnings. When he felt they were falling on deaf ears, he made a public televised announcement urging Netanyahu and the government to stop and freeze the judicial overthrow immediately. Netanyahu’s reaction? Fire Gallant as Defense Minister (the first time, the second time was during the war).

To make matters worse, dire warnings also came from the Egyptian Intelligence chief and the Emir of the UAE directly to Netanyahu and his closest advisors. Both of these foreign officials are both allies and peace partners of Israel. None of the warnings were heeded, and then came October 7: the worst attack on Israel in our history and the worst day for the Jewish People since the Holocaust.

The next three years brought us the longest war in our history: over two thousand killed, including on October 7, with 251 hostages, thousands of wounded soldiers, and an unending number of soldiers and civilians suffering from post-trauma, myself included.

Netanyahu’s True Legacy

I have never been a Netanyahu fan, going back to his time as Israel’s ambassador to the US. I did not agree with his politics at any point in his career. In his early years, however, I did not see him as a threat to the well-being of the State. That changed long before October 7. Years before the war, I was told by an impeccable source that his mentor, Moshe Arens (died in 2019) the person directly responsible for bringing Netanyahu back to Israel from his intended permanent life as a businessman in the US, became so embarrassed by what Netanyahu had become that he would not even speak about him.

As I have said many times, Netanyahu has never presented a strategic plan for anything relating to the country. All of his strategic thinking and planning have been focused solely on his political career and his legacy. He built that career on division, hate, and fear, working divisiveness into his speeches and meetings. That divisiveness was structured around hatred for anyone who was not his supporter. Netanyahu brainwashed his followers with the mantra that anyone on the left was evil and an enemy of the state, turning the word “left” into a profanity for his supporters to use at every opportunity. No one can forget the famous pre-elections open-mic moment with Shas Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, when Netanyahu said, “The left, they forgot what it is to be Jewish!”

He never missed an opportunity to divide and sow hatred, but that wasn’t enough. He studied and knew that the most successful autocrats and non-democratic powerful world leaders always create an ‘enemy of the people’ to give the populace a group to blame for anything that is wrong and a victim for them to hate. But how do you make them hate? By creating fear. By convincing his supporters that ‘the other’ – anyone who is not a supporter – is evil and dangerous, and that if the people allowed the left to get back into power, the left would hand the country over on a silver platter to our enemies. What an absurd thought: convincing unquestioning followers that those on the left could not possibly love their country and be willing to fight for it. Netanyahu literally brainwashed them to believe that only his supporters could possibly love the country.

In order to put together this latest government, with his incessant need to remain Prime Minister, he did the unthinkable, the thing he himself had stated repeatedly he would never do. He brought the most extreme fringes of society into his government in order to create a coalition and remain Prime Minister. He normalized their radical racism and penchant for violence: violence against Palestinians and anyone who protects them, soldiers, peace activists, clergy, journalists, foreign politicians, and others. And when the violent attacks occur, Netanyahu is silent, thereby providing a green light for more and worse violence.

Division, hate, and fear: this is Netanyahu’s true legacy.

International Isolation and Economic Danger

Both the massive destruction of Gaza and the exponentially increasing, government-sanctioned violence in the West Bank by Jewish terrorists are drawing reactions from foreign governments and the world courts. Netanyahu himself already faces an international arrest warrant. Many European countries have passed sanction laws against goods, services, and people from the West Bank, and this is only the beginning. In an interview on a financial channel last week, Netanyahu forewarned the public that economic sanctions are likely to get worse and expand, and that the US may also begin to pass sanction laws against Israel, and that banking sanctions will follow. Banking sanctions could include the prevention of Israel and Israelis access to the international banking system. He is looking toward a crypto economy to go around the banking system. His warnings are, in essence, portents of a complete economic collapse for Israel and the devastation of any quality of life for most of us. Netanyahu can already feel these sanctions creeping up on us, and he has given instructions to prepare these plans for a crypto economy no matter the implications.

This is just another indication of the damage he has personally wrought upon Israel. Instead of plans to repair any of it, which should be the first order of business of a responsible prime minister and government, Netanyahu looks to pull us deeper into the quagmire of a pariah nation. He offers no hope, no repair to the broken soul of the nation that began on October 7, no responsibility for anything. He only promises band-aids for amputations. This man and his government are directly responsible for so much devastation, yet they refuse to take any responsibility and are devoid of any vision or strategy to repair.

The Brain Drain

Prior to the war, the number of Israelis leaving for six months or longer was under 40,000 per year. Since the war, the numbers have increased yearly and are heading toward 90,000 for 2026. In 2025, for the first time in Israel’s history, more Israelis left the country than came (returning Israelis and immigrants), and the negative trend is heading toward becoming the standard.

These numbers reflect a vastly different reality than we have known. The overwhelming majority of those leaving are not newly released soldiers looking to explore the world or make their millions. Most are doctors, high-tech professionals, and other skilled people. Israel’s brain drain is happening and is forecast to worsen and reach economically devastating proportions. There are real estimates that up to a million people may leave Israel in the immediate future if Netanyahu is elected again.

For myself, this is more personal than I could ever have imagined. Among that million are people very close and dear to me, people who have dreamed of living in Israel since childhood, people who have never wanted to live anywhere else in the world. But they recognize that if Netanyahu is elected again, this country’s hope of being the democratic Jewish state with ideals of equality and responsibility for all is over. It is the beginning of the end for the Israel we have always dreamed we could be. Netanyahu, with his never-satiated need for power and position, has put himself once again, far above and removed from the needs of the State and the People, to the point of devastation and the destruction of hope. That is what another term of a Netanyahu government really looks like.

This election is so fateful because the past four years have shown what this government does when unconstrained: it attacks the courts and the legal system, the press and the non-supporters, ignores the warnings of its own security establishment, invites the most extreme fringes into power, and isolates Israel internationally at enormous diplomatic and economic cost. The result has already been the worst attack in our history, the longest war in our history, and a growing brain drain that could soon reach a million people. Netanyahu’s legacy is division, hate, and fear, and his only plan for the future is to deepen the damage. For those of us who have built our lives here, the choice before us is whether Israel remains the democratic Jewish state we believed in, or becomes something we can no longer recognize.