Middle Israel: Why Naftali Bennett should be Israel's next prime minister - opinion

The issues are clear. Israelis will judge their leaders next Tuesday on three fronts: accountability, duty, and merit.

This failure alone is a self-made Mark of Cain, an unwitting admission of guilt and a shameful flight from blame. Worse, it is the most un-Jewish response to failure, the opposite of the biblical Jonah’s response after having been woken by the captain of a tempest-tossed ship: “I know that this terrible storm came upon you on my account” (Jonah 1:12).

The second value voters should weigh is duty.

Millions will go to the polls after having seen at least one family member, and often many more, spend hundreds of days in the battlefields. Thousands personally knew a soldier, often more than one, who had been wounded or killed.

These Israelis, the ones who serve and sacrifice, fumed when they saw that ultra-Orthodoxy’s draft-exemption deal survived the war intact, and worse: that the ruling party tried to make this flight from duty a constitutional right, even while we were burying war casualties day after day.

Lastly, voters must judge the outgoing government’s administrative merit.

Yes, any democratic election is about performance, but next Tuesday’s is about what happened once we faced war: how good, bad, or scandalous our leaders’ handling of the war’s home front challenges has been.

The government, according to its own September 2025 State Comptroller’s report, failed to arrive at the war with an emergency-management organization, and then failed to create one even while thousands of businesses collapsed and more than 50,000 citizens were displaced.

This agency’s improvised substitute, the cabinet’s committee for socio-economic affairs, did not discuss compensation for damaged homes, ruined businesses, and lost jobs. Its chairman, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, did find time and money to promote assorted West Bank causes that are dear to his 5% electorate.

Voters who are fine with this record will vote for the preservation of the existing order. The rest of us will vote for the opposition. The government’s civilian performance, these voters will effectively say, reflected the Likud’s decay, much the way Labor appeared between its failure to prevent the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and its downfall in 1977.

Then again, the opposition offers four alternative ballots. Whom, then, should its voters choose?

The next prime minister should be vetted according to his personality, team, and plans. In terms of personality, two of the opposition’s candidates are problematic.

On the Left, the Democrats’ Yair Golan has made irresponsible statements, once comparing current-day Israel with prewar Germany, and another time insinuating Israel was “killing babies as a hobby.”

Golan can make a very good minister in someone else’s cabinet, but as prime minister he would lack the caution and reservation this job demands.

On the Right, Yisrael Beytenu’s Avigdor Liberman has a similar problem, having also made, over the years, some reckless statements, including a warning to destroy Egypt’s Aswan Dam. He is also too impulsive for the top job.

B’Yachad’s Naftali Bennett once did say something he regrets to this day – his vow not to sit in a government headed by Yair Lapid. Is such rashness part of his personality? Judging by his subsequent performance as prime minister, it isn’t. This, then, leaves us with him, and with Yashar’s Gadi Eisenkot, whose public statements may be bland, but are never irresponsible.

Then there are the teams.

All four parties are fielding impressive new faces on their candidate lists. Liberman, for instance, has Col. Talya Lankri, a former deputy head of the National Security Council; Golan has social justice activist Rabbi Avi Dabush; Bennett has former director-general of the Treasury, Keren Turner-Eyal; and Eisenkot has former budget department head Shaul Meridor.

Even so, one of them would make a better prime minister: Naftali Bennett.

Eisenkot became a politician four years ago. It’s a lot less than Bennett’s 13 political years, but it still gave Eisenkot enough time to say something about our economy, crime, schools, hospitals, transportation, and the rest of our pressing domestic problems. Yet he never did.

Bennett, by contrast, has delved into all these problems, and also emerged with action plans, from deregulating business, creating new jobs, and reducing road accidents to rebuilding war-ravaged towns in the North and imposing a core curriculum on every state-funded school.

The details are all debatable, but collectively these plans reflect a quest to rebuild, reform, and heal a country that has been militarily bruised, socially rifted, and morally abused. This is besides the modern-Orthodox Bennett’s urge to bridge between religious and secular Israelis, and the right-wing Bennett’s resolve to prevent Jewish terrorists’ tinkering with civil war.