For more than a decade, every Israeli election has been sold to the public as a referendum on one man, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. We are told that the choice is simple: Yes Bibi or no Bibi.
On October 27, Israelis have an opportunity to reject the premise of this doctrine.
After three long years of war and bloodshed, the question on the ballot in the election, arguably the most significant in the country’s history, is far simpler, yet far more demanding and decisive for the future of the State of Israel: what kind of country do we want for ourselves, and for our children? A sane nation among the nations, or an unsustainable pariah state?
It is, above all, a referendum about whether it will be led by those who cherish accountability, including for the failures of October 7, and those who would rather bury it to shield themselves and avoid giving answers.
Surely, none of the current political options is flawless, and the real dividing line is not between ultimate good and ultimate evil. Instead, it runs between those who believe in the state and its institutions and those who view them as an obstacle.
It is between those who can – and must – make the burden of building this country, defending it, and making it prosperous and more just for all be shared, and those who glorify sectarianism and identity politics to safeguard personal and partisan political survival.
Israels toxic sectarian political culture
On the one hand, the opposition – stretching from nationalists and liberals to social democrats, socialists and Islamists – is fractured, and full of contradictions. Most of its leaders insist on presenting themselves as the ultimate alternative while promising more of the same toxic sectarian political culture.
Nowhere is this clearer than in their rhetoric toward Arab and haredi (ultra-Orthodox) political representation. Their pledge to form a “Zionist government” – a term that whitewashes the normalizing of excluding 35% of Israelis, Arab and haredi citizens alike – has proved again and again to be not only undemocratic, but counterproductive.
Polls show the opposition falling short of the 61 seats needed to govern, precisely because of their decision to rule out a fifth of the country’s population, and a fifth of Israel’s Jewish population, thus not only failing to embody the alternative they claim to present, but also adopting Netanyahu’s terms, and handing him the deadlock he needs to survive.
On the other side stand those who cast their leader as the ultimate savior of the Jewish people, the Churchill of his time, the one and only leader capable of “finishing the job” and safeguarding Israel’s security – while gaslighting Israelis and ignoring the fact that he had two decades in power to do exactly that.
Certainly, some of the military achievements of the last three years under Netanyahu are real. Hezbollah has been hit hard, Hamas has been significantly weakened, and Iran’s Islamic regime’s network of proxies has been badly damaged.
But a country is not a battlefield scoreboard, and it cannot be sustained through life on the sword. After all, the same years delivered the worst failure in our nation’s history: the deadliest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust, and the largest massacre in the history of the Jewish state – on this outgoing government’s watch, not to mention the alleged Qatari infiltration into the Prime Minister’s Office.
Three years later, no one at the top has taken responsibility, and a state commission of inquiry is still being resisted.
Meanwhile, the government continues to relentlessly smear the country’s democratic institutions and security establishment; the prime minister’s criminal trial drags on, an international wave of sanctions is isolating Israel, and the arrest warrant against him has burst his attempt to cast himself as the only one capable of safeguarding Israel’s deepest strategic depth – its international standing.
The same honesty is owed to the opposition.
Surely, Arab parties are mostly outdated, sectarian closed clubs that have failed to offer their constituents real change, and they share their part in the responsibility for the decline in Arab voting turnout.
But that doesn’t mean Arab citizens should be sidelined and excluded from governance. After all, it was the historic participation of an independent Arab party in a governing coalition that ousted Netanyahu for the first time in 12 years.
The “Government of Change” was messy and short-lived, but it revealed a largely unseen side of Israel and proved something many had insisted was impossible: that Arab citizens can and, in fact, must be partners in governing the state, not just subjects of it. Abandoning that precedent now, out of fear of Netanyahu’s attacks, means choosing his rules over our future.
The same logic applies to the haredi public. The problem is not haredi Israelis; it is the political alliance Netanyahu has solidified with corrupt, misogynist ultra-Orthodox politicians to safeguard the continuity of his rule, and the stability of his coalition.
With exemptions for some and endless reserve duty for others, with sectarian allocations of public money to settlements and illegal outposts while draining the country’s Galilee, Golan and Negev regions, his coalition managed to survive a full four-year term – the first Israeli government in decades to do so.
A sane government does not demonize an entire sector of society. It brings it in – into the army or national service, the workforce and shared responsibility – on equal terms. A sane country is one in which institutions outlive any one leader, the national burden is carried by all, and accountability is cherished.
An insane country, on the other hand, is one that mistakes isolation for strength, and confuses the survival of its leader with the survival of the state. It is a country governed by those who wage war against the very same institutions that have shielded the country throughout many of its existential crises.
Indeed, no option on the ballot is optimal, and this election is not about whether you love or hate Bibi. Instead, it’s about whether we still know the difference between a leader and a state, and whether we want more of the same reality, or an alternative that revolves around equality for all, and positions collective and national interests of the nation and its future on top of their priorities.
On October 27, we must choose sanity over insanity.
The writer is an independent queer Arab Israeli writer, speaker, and political and geopolitical commentator. A former LGBTQ activist and reporter, during the Bennett-Lapid government, Eden was a co-creator of the Knesset’s first-ever Arab LGBTQ forum promoting the rights LGBTQ Arabs, and secured government funding that facilitated the launch of Beit Almeem, one of Israel’s first Arabic speaking LGBTQ centers.