What Israel’s Election Won't Change

When Israelis go to the polls on October 27, much of the world will be rooting for the defeat of the country’s longtime prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Under his nearly two decades of rule, Israel has become steadily more aggressive.

It has abandoned any pretense of supporting a two-state solution; started constructing hundreds of new Jewish settlements in the West Bank; and, following Hamas’s cross-border attack on October 7, 2023, laid waste to the Gaza Strip, occupied parts of Lebanon and Syria, and launched war against Iran, its archnemesis.

Meanwhile, its democratic institutions have faced endless attacks by Netanyahu and his allies, who have proposed laws that would, among other things, greatly curtail the power of Israel’s courts. Should he return to power for an unprecedented seventh term, many fret that the country will permanently transition into a rogue theocratic actor.

To many voters, this election thus marks a crucial turning point in Israeli domestic policy. The prime minister’s main political opponent, former Israel Defense Forces Chief Gadi Eisenkot, holds a more liberal worldview than his competitor. He supports an independent judiciary, a free press, and a professional civil service.

Should he win, he will likely try to reverse Netanyahu’s efforts to curtail each institution’s independence. But an Eisenkot victory is unlikely to change Israel’s foreign policy or approach to the Palestinians. Almost all of Israel’s Jewish political parties, Eisenkot’s included, are opposed to Palestinian statehood, not just Netanyahu’s Likud.

They all believe that Israel’s brutal war on Gaza was morally just and practically necessary. And almost all of them think that Israel was right to attack Iran and to establish and create what its government and military call “security zones”—occupied territory—in Lebanon and Syria.

In fact, the only real disagreement between Eisenkot and Netanyahu on matters of security is whether the latter made the right tactical decisions in each of these conflicts, such as when Netanyahu rejected a cease-fire in Gaza that would have freed Israeli hostages earlier. That is not to say he will follow the same exact course.

Eisenkot and Netanyahu differ in important ways on the barrage of West Bank settler attacks against helpless Palestinians, which are aimed at driving them out of their land. The prime minister, committed to his far-right allies, shrugs off the issue, whereas his competitor calls their behavior “Jewish terror.”

Even if Eisenkot has little pity for the Palestinian victims, he realizes that the West Bank is on the verge of a bloody explosion and that Israel is at risk of even greater international opprobrium because of its reckless policy there. But overall, no matter what happens in the elections, Israel will continue to repress the Palestinians and strike its enemies.

It will thus face diplomatic and economic costs, as the country’s frustrated partners begin cutting off aid and perhaps even enacting sanctions. STYLE OVER SUBSTANCE There are many issues at play in Israel’s election. Politicians, for example, have debated ultra-Orthodox exemptions from the draft, Netanyahu’s corruption charges, and what, if anything, the government should do about Jewish terrorism.

But on the whole, the contest has been focused on who is to blame for failing to stop Hamas’s October 7 attack, which killed 1,200 Israelis and resulted in 251 more being taken hostage in one day.

The opposition has argued that Netanyahu is responsible for the country’s worst-ever security failure, pointing out that he sustained Hamas with Qatari money, ignored intelligence warnings about Hamas plots, and then blocked an independent investigation into what happened.

Eisenkot, who lost a son and two nephews to fighting in Gaza, has been particularly unsparing in his criticism, repeatedly hammering Netanyahu for refusing to take any accountability for the calamity. The prime minister and his supporters, for their part, have brushed off these missives. Instead, they have blamed October 7 on the military and security services.

They have also promoted conspiracy theories that there is what Netanyahu’s cronies and supporters call “treason from within”—or that someone inside Israel helped facilitate Hamas’s brief invasion. But despite this blame game, both sides agree on the tragedy’s primary lessons: that Israel is surrounded by diehard merciless enemies and that the Palestinians can never be trusted.

This attitude is, in part, a raw expression of anti-Arab racism, which is more visible in Israel’s post–October 7 Jewish society. But it is also an electoral play. If the polling is correct, Eisenkot will need the support, however tacit, of Israel’s two Arab parties to put together a government.

Netanyahu is thus trying to win over voters who, much as they hate him personally, cannot stand the idea of a government propped up by Palestinians. This strategy is unlikely to work on liberal Israelis, who view this election as the last chance to save their homeland from sliding into dictatorship.

Many Israelis who live abroad, including immigrants who left the country because of Netanyahu’s leadership, thus intend to come home and vote for his replacement. But these election day visitors and likeminded liberal voters are rallying to protect and preserve their way of life in a country that is becoming more religious and nationalistic.

And even many of the anti-Netanyahu voters would be unhappy about partnering with the Arab parties to replace the current government. Few would bother to think about the two-state solution, viewing the idea as a relic from the overly optimistic 1990s.

Eisenkot, the current leader of this electorate, has declared his personal opposition to a Palestinian state, as have Israel’s other centrist and conservative opposition figures. Only Yair Golan, the leader of Israel’s sole left-wing Jewish party, supports what he calls “separation from the Palestinians” and a return to diplomacy—and even he lacks a plan for how to make that happen.

Both sides agree: Israel is surrounded by merciless enemies and the Palestinians cannot be trusted. In one sense, the country’s rejection of a two-state solution is not new. The last detailed negotiations over Palestinian statehood took place in early 2001.

Most Jewish Israelis turned against the idea following the second intifada and Hamas’s 2007 takeover of Gaza. Netanyahu has railed against Palestinian sovereignty for his entire political career. (His brief ostensible endorsement of such a state, in 2009, was heavily conditioned and widely considered insincere.)

And after October 7, opposition to the notion has become far more resolute. Before the attack, some major Jewish parties would still pay lip service to the notion of making peace with the Palestinians, and their politicians expressed tentative openness to a settlement. Now, they either reject it out of hand or simply dismiss the issue altogether.

Israeli officials have also become far more aggressive. The country may have turned against Palestinian independence years ago, but for most of the last two decades, it avoided full-scale wars and preserved the low-cost status quo.

That restraint, even if disrupted by periodic rounds of fighting with Hamas, endeared Netanyahu to mainstream Israelis, who could pretend that the conflict was a thing of the past and all but forget about the Palestinians. Yet this attitude changed when Hamas crossed the border.

Afterward, Israel adopted its current policy of destruction and occupation—which Netanyahu’s election campaign is bragging about, since it knows that bombing Iran and invading Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria have been extremely popular among the population at large. The prime minister’s main opponents all endorsed these tactics—criticizing him only for failing to achieve his pledge of “total victory.”

Netanyahu, in turn, blamed Eisenkot for being soft on Hamas when he served in the country’s war cabinet. Eisenkot then said that he had voted for a more aggressive invasion than what the prime minister ultimately undertook. Eisenkot later pledged to “end Hamas rule in Gaza within 18 months” if elected.

This line is not necessarily as hawkish as Netanyahu’s posture, since it suggests a willingness to consider diplomatic means of removing the group from power. Eisenkot has also strongly criticized Netanyahu’s campaign pledge to overthrow the Iranian regime. Instead, he supports measures to take the enriched uranium out of Iran and to put its nuclear program under a verification regime.

“You can’t overthrow a government from the air; it’s a delusion,” he said. But he nonetheless backed bombing the country to weaken its military and nuclear program, even if he disagreed with the ultimate end. ANGER MANAGEMENT The rest of the world, of course, does not share Israel’s view.

Quite the contrary—in the wake of the destruction of Gaza, polls show that Israel’s international approval ratings have hit new lows. Politicians in every region are arguing that Israel is guilty of major human rights violations, with many claiming that the country has committed genocide. Even some of Israel’s friends are warning that the state has gone overboard.

In July 2025, for example, U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer declared that although Israel “has a right to defend itself and end Hamas’s brutal rule,” the “reporting and images out of Gaza—depicting the devastating levels of hunger, starvation, suffering and death—are wholly unacceptable.”

Outside countries are also particularly furious about its settlement expansion in the West Bank, which cannot be justified as a reaction to October 7. As a result, sanctions have reached Israel’s shores.

British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband declared on September 8 that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is unlawful and announced a sanctions regime against the settlements and companies involved in their financing and construction. Given that London is a major financial center, Israeli banks—which are financing the major settlement projects—are now in trouble.

Across the Atlantic, Israel still has the support of U.S. President Donald Trump, who has endorsed Netanyahu’s reelection campaign. But most of the Democratic Party’s politicians—and even many Republicans—now want to stop or limit U.S. aid and technology transfers to the Israel Defense Forces, citing the use of American munitions in the destruction of Gaza.

Many prominent Democratic Party officials want to sanction the country, too. If Democrats take control of at least one house of Congress in the midterms, the United States could stop sending blank checks to Israel. Eisenkot will likely win over more international partners, at least for a time.

Israelis generally attribute such rising international anger to anti-Semitism instead of sincerely held concerns about the rights of Palestinians, Middle Eastern stability, or the proper allocation of military resources. But they are nonetheless aware of their growing isolation and fear that, after the election, they might get hit by what former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak has called a “diplomatic tsunami.”

This assessment is widely accepted in the mainstream media and by Netanyahu, who argues that only he—with his superior English skills—can stop such an onslaught, much as he maneuvered to stop the Biden administration from ever imposing real consequences on the country for its war in Gaza.

The Israeli right wing has been arguing for many years, with justification, that Israel can continue its occupation and denial of civil rights to the Palestinians while manipulating the international community with hasbara (public diplomacy and lobbying).

Eisenkot, by contrast, will try to win the world back by being upfront about what his country is willing to accept and then negotiating honestly—two things that Netanyahu has rarely done. Eisenkot’s approach would likely win over more international partners, at least for a time, as did the leaders of two other former military chiefs, Barak and Yitzhak Rabin, who unseated Likud governments.

Netanyahu has burned so many bridges with his parade of lies that Eisenkot would probably get an international grace period simply by virtue of his relative honesty. And Eisenkot might indeed make changes that please Israel’s partners, such as slowing settlement construction.

He opposes the controversial E1 settlement project, which is aimed at slicing a future Palestinian state by half, and has pledged to tackle Jewish terrorism. But eventually, Eisenkot would disappoint any overseas Israel supporters who expect a thorough reversal of Netanyahu’s foreign and Palestinian policies.

And even if he somehow changed his own mind on Palestinian statehood—which he insists he has never supported—his freedom of action would be severely restricted by his governing coalition. Eisenkot’s power bloc relies on two right-wing parties whose leaders strongly oppose the two-state solution and mistrust the Palestinians.

One of them, Avigdor Lieberman, even wants to dismantle the Palestinian Authority and bring in Jordan to rule over the Palestinians who reside in the West Bank (an idea that Amman rejected decades ago). They would bring Eisenkot’s government down if he expressed openness to a Palestinian state. THE MORE THINGS CHANGE Polling shows that the October 27 election will be extremely tight.

In fact, if the surveys are right, neither Eisenkot nor Netanyahu will win an outright majority. The country is thus likely to experience a period of horse-trading, as both politicians jockey to peel off the other’s partners. Netanyahu might even try to lure Eisenkot himself into a kind of unity government, promising to put his judicial overhaul or other culture-war campaigns on hold in return.

(Eisenkot has adamantly rejected the idea of serving under Netanyahu, even for a rotation, but about-faces have been a staple of Israeli coalition politics.) Alternatively, negotiations could fail, and the country would almost immediately return to the polls.

It would not be the first time that an Israeli contest failed to produce a lasting government: the country held five general elections from 2019 to 2022 before its political leaders established a coalition that could hold on to power for more than 12 months.

But no matter the outcome—a Netanyahu caretaker government, a Netanyahu majority government, a unity government, a minority Eisenkot cabinet supported by the Arab parties, or even an Eisenkot majority government— Israel’s next prime minister will keep occupying parts of its neighbors and brutalizing the Palestinians. He will thus have to contend with Israel’s increasing isolation from the rest of the world.

The government might end up spending even more on local arms production to replace U.S.-funded systems, working hard to bypass export controls on military and dual-use items (as sanctioned Iran and Russia do today, and as Israel did in its early years).

Israel might face its ultimate fear—losing the United States’s veto at the UN Security Council, which has protected its occupation since 1967 from international censure, even under critical Democratic presidents like Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama. This may not be the outcome that Israelis actually want. But absent a sea change in how they think about their problems, it is the one they are careening toward.

The odds, however, are particularly pronounced if Netanyahu and his partners stay in power. In that case, more liberal Israelis will not wait to see how badly the world punishes their country. They will instead flee to pursue their way of life in a quieter place.