This election is not about ‘left’ and ‘right’

One hears a great many misleading statements during election campaigns. That’s par for the course. This time though, with the Israeli election in a month’s time, there is a fundamental, and highly significant, piece of misinformation that you hear everywhere: That this election is “left vs. right”.

From my own conversations and arguments, in-person and online, it is clear that a great many right-wingers are voting for the Netanyahu-led bloc primarily because they see a vote for any of the parties in the opposition camp (Bennett’s B’Yachad, Eizenkot’s Yashar, Liberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu and Golan’s Democrats) as a vote for “the left”. Except with regard to Yair Golan’s party, this is simply not the case. It’s a misunderstanding that could have huge consequences for the election result, and for Israel. As I argue in my recently published book, this election is a hinge moment in the history of the state.

Let’s boil this down. In the Israeli context, left vs right used to mean what it meant everywhere – a larger state vs. a smaller state; socialism (or social democracy) vs. free market capitalism. From the eighties onwards, “left” and “right” was primarily an indicator of where you stood on the matter of settlements in Judea & Samaria (the West Bank), and whether or not some/most of that territory should be exchanged for peace. Into the nineties this debate became concretized in the question of a two-state solution: for (left) or against (right).

But the last Israeli prime minister actually elected on a platform of making peace with the Palestinians was the Labor Party’s Ehud Barak in 1999, and he lost power less than two years later. Another Ehud, Olmert was elected PM as leader of the new centrist Kadima party, having migrated from the Likud, and he ended his tenure in 2009 having offered the Palestinians the most far-reaching two-state deal yet proposed. Mahmoud Abbas rejected the offer, just as Yasser Arafat had walked away from previous attempts to create the state that the international community continue to tell us the Palestinians are so desperate for.

Since then, the left has been moribund and the issue that had been the dividing line in Israeli politics has been practically an irrelevance. Only a tiny sliver of the electorate believe the government’s priority should be pushing to negotiate a two-state solution with a Palestinian leadership that remains unreconciled to the legitimacy and permanence of a Jewish state in at least part of the land we share with them. In the last election, the two parties that could be said to represent that minority opinion – Labor and Meretz – together received less that 7 percent of the vote. Since October 7, the idea of giving up land to the Palestinians has, understandably become even less popular.

WHAT we have seen during the tenure of this incumbent government is a tragically successful attempt by the government and its supporters in the media to redefine “right” and “left”. To be “right” is to support the coalition’s program, to be “left” is to oppose it. So, conservative Supreme Court justices appointed under right-wing governments are “left-wing” because they don’t agree with a judicial “reform” which would effectively neuter the Court; or with attempts to give the government unprecedented control over the broadcast media. Likewise opposition to these plans from vetaran former Likud ministers such as Benny Begin or Limor Livnat has rendered them  “leftists” in the pro-Netanyahu media.

The reality is that at least two of the opposition party leaders, Naftali Bennett and Avigdor Liberman, have right-wing credentials and records at least as serious – if not more so – than Netanyahu’s. A new coalition comprised of the opposition parties – whether led by Bennett, Liberman or Eizenkot – would not be racing to negotiations with the Palestinians. This is a fantasy spun by Bibi’s well-trained propaganda machine. Neither woukd it be any less hawkish against Israel’s foes. In fact, it’s simply ludicrous to view Netanyahu as our best hope for national security after October 7; even more so now we know he ignored warnings from Arab leaders, as well as from the IDF and the Shin Bet  And that’s without even getting into his capitulation to the ultra-Orthodox on their exemption from military service, even as the IDF leadership routinely cries out for a larger pool of reservists.

Left and right are simply irrelevant categories at this election. The divide, as I explain at length in my book, is about competing notions of just what Israel should be: a Jewish nation-state, run according to liberal democratic principles; or a quasi-authoritarian Jewish state where democracy means unchecked majority rule. This is about whether Israel will continue to be a democracy like the UK and the US; or transition to the ‘democracy’ of Hungary under Orban, or Turkey under Erdogan.

And for any tribal Likud voters reading this, it’s worth knowing that the single most explicit prophetic warning about this government’s plans came from Menachem Begin, who wrote, back in 1951 that a democratically elected majority “can be an instrument in the hands of a group of rulers and can act as a camouflage for their tyranny” and that citizens must be protected by “the Supremacy of Law.”, that is, a judiciary empowered to to invalidate any law which threatens basic civil rights. It’s not coincidence that the government and the judicual “reform” have been opposed by many senior Likud figures from yesteryear.

All of that is not to rule out any reform of the judiciary. There have long been criticisms of its outsize role in Israel – from left and right. (Though a sober analysis would determine that this has as much to do with the absence of other checks and balances in Israel’s system of government, as with any ‘activist’ tendencies in the Court.) In my book I go through various components of the government’s judicial “reform” plans and describe how there would be many ways to tackle the alleged overreach by the legal establishment that would not result in unchecked power for the prime minister. But unchecked power is clearly the intention of this prime minister and this coalition.

By contrast, Bennett’s B’yachad party has pledged to enact a constituion “in the spirit” of the Declaration of Independence. One of their campaign ads highlights the importance of recommitting to Israel’s founding values, shared by both left and right (Ben Gurion and Begin in the ad) but rejected by this current government.

ביחד חוזרים למגילת העצמאות.

לפני ה7.10 הגענו לסף מלחמת אחים. אנחנו צריכים לחזור להסכמה הישראלית הרחבה ביותר – מגילת העצמאות.

בממשלה הבאה נחוקק את מגילת העצמאות כמבוא לחוקת המדינה. pic.twitter.com/JZQIpIfBtq

— יאיר לפיד – Yair Lapid (@yairlapid) September 2, 2026

So when you go to vote next month, recall what you are actually being asked to choose between. It isn’t “left” and “right” in any sense that would have been recognisable 10 years ago, let alone 40. Its two very different Israels: one where a government can still lose in court, still be held to account by a free press, still be checked by institutions it doesn’t control – and one where winning an election becomes a licence to rule without checks and balances. Plenty of Israelis who are right-wing on security and territory do not want to live in a country where the government controls the judiciary, the media and the other institutions meant to hold it accountable.

That is why this election is so critical, and why the “left vs. right” framing being pushed by Netanyahu and his alliesis not just misleading but dangerous. Whatever else divides the opposition parties, what unites them is a commitment to Israel remaining the liberal democracy that its founders – left and right – believed in.

My new book is “To Be a Free People in Our Land” and is available from Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1066835810