The bombardment
from all sides against Israel and the current war in Gaza has reached a fever
pitch. A war that began on October 7 with the Palestinians’ murderous attack on
Israeli civilians has now turned its head against those who have been offering
peace.
For almost 80 years, the
Palestinians—only named as such in 1964, with the adoption of their
charter—have refused to accept Israel’s existence. Time and again, they have
launched wars and, failing to achieve their goal of annihilating Israel, have
cried out about injustice while refusing to take responsibility for the
consequences for their own people and to accept Israel’s peace offerings. For
them, peace is not an alternative to the suffering of their population.
These are the people who are not
separate from Hamas because they are the ones who built an immense network of
tunnels, indoctrinated their children to hate and kill Jews, and, most
recently, aided in hiding many of the Israeli hostages. They are the ones who
streamed into the battered Israeli villages to pillage and loot. They are the
ones who, according to polls, supported the October 7 attack.
Generation after generation,
these are young people whose parents put guns in their hands at the age of five
and send them to Hamas after-school programs, whose mothers express hope and
pride that their children would die as martyrs. They are the underage
terrorists who fill the ranks of Hamas.
You may think of it in another
way: In Nazi Germany, there were Germans who risked their entire families in
order to save a single Jew. Yet not one Palestinian tried to do something for
the hostages, even after Israel offered $5,000,000 and a safe passage out of
Gaza to any informant and their family for information that would lead to a
hostage.
Through the international
criticism of Israel’s lingering war in Gaza—and especially the blood libel of
genocide thrown around so freely and frequently that it has become, in many
minds, “a fact”—there has been little attempt to understand the conflict from
the point of view of traumatized Israelis.
Let’s take a look internally at
what Israelis think about the war, using the lens of the upcoming Israeli
election on October 27. If the war in Gaza represents a humanitarian crisis of
starvation and the intentional killing of Palestinians, wouldn’t this argument
be at the top of the political campaigns of those opposing Netanyahu?
Of all five leading candidates
opposing Netanyahu—all good guys, mostly with military backgrounds—not one has
objected to the existential war against Hamas that began on October 7, but
which has a long history going back decades.
Not one is accusing the
government of genocide.
To make this easy to understand,
I asked AI to summarize the positions of each of these candidates so that my
friends can grasp the common denominator: all of them—even those on the
left—understand that there is a ruthless enemy that poses an existential threat
to Israel. They differ greatly over how to move forward.
Here it is:
Israel’s next Knesset
election is scheduled for October 27, 2026. The opposition is unusually
broad ideologically: it includes right-wing, centrist, and left-wing figures.
That is particularly important when looking at Gaza, because opposing Netanyahu
does not necessarily mean opposing his basic war objectives.
Based on the latest polling and
reporting, the five most significant anti-Netanyahu contenders/groups are Gadi
Eisenkot, Naftali Bennett, Yair Lapid, Yair Golan, and Avigdor Lieberman.
Reuters identifies these as the principal rival camps.
The candidates’ Positions on the Gaza war
Gadi Eisenkot
Hawkish, but wants a different
strategy. He argues Netanyahu has failed because Hamas remains in power.
Eisenkot supports replacing Hamas with another governing structure, including
potentially a Palestinian technocratic administration, while maintaining
Israeli security control/a security corridor. He favors using diplomacy
alongside military pressure and is open to phased reconstruction tied to
disarmament. He does not support a Palestinian state in the near or medium
term.
Naftali Bennett
Very hawkish. Bennett says his
Gaza policy is fundamentally different from Netanyahu’s because he favors a
much more aggressive “zero tolerance” security policy. He has criticized
Netanyahu for allowing Hamas to rebuild and has opposed Palestinian statehood.
On Gaza, he is not advocating an Israeli withdrawal or a peace settlement; his
emphasis is eliminating Hamas as a military threat.
Yair Lapid
Hawkish on Hamas, but more
diplomatic. Lapid says Israel should not have ended up in the current situation
in Gaza and argues that Egypt should become the principal outside power
managing Gaza. He wants Hamas removed from power and disarmed, but believes
Israel should combine military pressure with diplomacy, Egyptian involvement
and reconstruction. He has also criticized the Netanyahu government’s handling
of Palestinian civilians and Gaza’s humanitarian situation.
Yair Golan
Most explicitly oriented toward
a political/diplomatic restructuring of Gaza. Golan proposes ending Hamas rule
and replacing it with a Palestinian technocratic government, with Arab and
international involvement. His plan incorporates the U.S.-backed Gaza roadmap,
phased reconstruction in areas cleared of Hamas, international supervision and
pressure on Hamas to disarm. Unlike Bennett and Eisenkot, Golan has expressed
conditional support in principle for a demilitarized Palestinian state as part
of a regional agreement, although he says the issue is not currently ripe for
implementation.
Avigdor Lieberman
Very hawkish toward Hamas.
Lieberman has long argued that Israel was too soft toward Hamas and has called
for dismantling Hamas’s rule. In 2026 he has criticized Netanyahu for failing
to defeat Hamas and has said that, after the election, Hamas should be disarmed
and dismantled. He has also criticized ceasefire arrangements when he believes
they leave Hamas intact.
None of these five is
campaigning on simply ending Israel’s military conflict with Hamas and
withdrawing from Gaza. Even the more dovish opposition figures generally say
that Hamas must lose its military and governing capacity and that Israel must
retain substantial security guarantees. Reuters notes that the opposition’s
criticism has largely been about how Netanyahu has conducted the war and what
political outcome he has achieved, rather than rejecting Israel’s use of force
against Hamas.
The meaningful differences are
more about what happens after Hamas:
* Bennett: security
first; strongly opposed to Palestinian statehood.
* Eisenkot: Hamas must
go, but military pressure needs to be combined with diplomacy and a workable
post-Hamas administration.
* Lieberman: very hard
line against Hamas; emphasizes defeating and dismantling it.
* Lapid: Hamas must go,
but Egypt should play the central role in administering Gaza and facilitating
reconstruction.
* Golan: the clearest
advocate of an internationally/Arab-supported Palestinian technocratic
alternative to Hamas, with a possible eventual political horizon for
Palestinian statehood.
(Bennett and Lapid are running
together on the “Beyachad/Together” ticket, so their Gaza policies should be
understood as a joint political project, even though their personal histories
and ideological emphases differ).
Back to me, Talia.
What is not reflected in the
above is that the huge criticism against Netanyahu is about internal affairs
that range from his judicial reform, corruption of the ultra-Orthodox, and the
rule of the far-right ideology. I'm not getting into this now, but I just want
to add it as a perspective that when I and tens of thousands of Israelis like
me who live abroad will fly to Israel to vote on October 27 (there is no voting by mail) it will be because
of the poor, corrupt, and egomaniac leadership.
I hope that this post will help
you understand that Israel is at war with a murderous enemy, whose ranks a
filled by their own people who do not seek peace with Jews and Israel. The
Palestinians, starting with their 1964 charter committing to the destruction of
Israel, are the ones screaming publicly at every opportunity their genocidal intentions
against the Jews.
Golda
Meir had said, “If the Arabs lay their arms, there will be peace. If Israel lays
down its arms, there will be no Israel.”
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