THE NEW YORK TIMES: Israeli Jews across the spectrum face an election of fears

At an event in Jerusalem in July, an opposition candidate for Israel’s Parliament kicked things off by asking what voters feared most if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing, religious government won another four-year term. The answers were startling.

Israel would become even more of an international pariah, one said. “I’m afraid my children would leave,” said another. “I’d want my children to leave,” said a third.

It got darker from there. “Tyranny of the majority.” “Civil war.” “Collapse.”

Every national election is important, and many play on voters’ fears. But none has felt so consequential and dire to so many Israeli Jews as the one on Tuesday.

And no wonder: They have the chance to render a verdict on polarizing decisions that have torn the country apart for years — and to choose between starkly different visions for Israel’s future.

Perhaps the rawest emotions among Netanyahu’s opponents surround the question of whether the long-serving prime minister, legendary for his political survival skills, will be held accountable for the worst national-security failure in Israel’s history, the October 7, 2023, massacre.

As traumatic and shocking as that attack was, many other deep questions about Israel’s character hang in the balance.

Will the country weaken its judiciary and grant the government far more power? Will it rewrite the social contract to demand service and sacrifice from all sectors of society?

Will it arrest accelerating emigration before a brain drain threatens its tech-driven economy and, close behind, its vaunted military?

Will Israel defy global opprobrium and try to thwart Palestinian aspirations to statehood once and for all, potentially risking its relationship with the United States? Or will it reverse course and attempt to repair ties, at least with Washington?

Finally, will it end Netanyahu’s tenure precisely at a moment when his staunchest supporters believe that his fortitude and skills are most needed to face down Israel’s adversaries on the global stage?

These issues are so divisive, and the country so polarized, that even a clear election result may not begin healing the rifts.

“Whoever wins, the other side will feel that they’re not part of the Israeli state,” said Yuval Eylon, a retired Israeli rear admiral and researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, Israel.

In a recent poll, the institute found that 39 per cent of Israelis fear violence between different segments of society — as many as fear an Iranian nuclear weapon.

“It’s really a danger for the Israeli state as an idea,” Eylon said. “Ten years ago, people said we could deal even with a nuclear Iran, because we’re strong as a country, strong inside. But if you don’t have unity of the people, then the external threat becomes a mortal threat.”

Targeting the Ultra-Orthodox

Dan Ben-David, president of the Shoresh Institution for Socioeconomic Research, has been warning for years that Israel faces a demographic point of no return.

He focused largely on the ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi Jews, who tend to have many children and educate them in religious schools that don’t teach math, science, English or civics. They also receive far more subsidies than they contribute in taxes, largely thanks to Netanyahu, who has relied on their support to stay in power.

The ultra-Orthodox are doubling as a percentage of the population every 25 years, even as fewer of them are prepared for jobs in a modern economy.

That is an unsustainable trend, Ben-David warns, and a key driver of another: Already, just 20 per cent of Israel’s workers supply 93 per cent of all income-tax revenue, while half of all Israelis are so poor that they pay no income tax whatsoever.

Crucially, the ultra-Orthodox have also avoided military service — first under a decades-old exemption, and then, after the Supreme Court ordered in 2024 that conscription begin, by simply draft-dodging.

The Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip brought that issue to the fore. Roughly half of Israel’s citizens serve in the army, bearing the burden, in casualties and reserve duty, of defending the country, while many Haredim loudly declare they would rather die than be drafted and shut down highways and train lines with protests.

“We ourselves hang in the balance here,” Israel Friedman, editor-in-chief of Yated Ne’eman, a Haredi daily newspaper, said in an interview. “What is at stake is our right to be Haredi.”

Ben-David, whose recommendations have been embraced to varying degrees by most opposition leaders, says the resulting fury at the ultra-Orthodox has created a rare chance not only to make them enlist but to cut their subsidies, overhaul a failing education system and reorient Israel toward a sustainable future.

If the opposition fails to dislodge Netanyahu and the Haredi parties now, he says, Israel may never get another chance.

A brain drain is already underway: The country faces an acute shortage of doctors, more people are moving out of the country than immigrating to it, and those leaving are better educated and better earners than those staying behind.

Should enough of Israel’s roughly 300,000 physicians, tech workers, professors, engineers — the citizens who could most easily take jobs elsewhere — decide to emigrate, Ben-David said, those left behind would be too unskilled to save the economy or defend themselves.

Israel simply “won’t be,” he said. “It’ll be over.”

The Threat of International Isolation

Even erstwhile Netanyahu allies worry that Israel’s international isolation could cost it dearly.

Michael Oren, who was Netanyahu’s deputy prime minister and ambassador to the United States, said the spread of sanctions against Israel as it backs settlers in the occupied West Bank could devastate the economy.

“We’re going to have a choice of whether we’re going to build in E1 or have an economy,” he said, referring to a vast tract outside east Jerusalem where the government is pushing for new Israeli settlement. Critics say doing so would effectively cut the West Bank in two, making a contiguous Palestinian state all but impossible.

Oren said that a new government, by contrast, could buy some global goodwill by ending vigilante violence and illegal settlement construction in the West Bank, stating its desire for peace with Palestinians and disavowing territorial ambitions in Gaza, Syria or Lebanon.

But he added that the damage in relations with some US Democrats was done: “It’s no longer what we do but who we are, and no matter who the prime minister is, it’s not going to make much difference.”

Fears Over Security and the Courts

Many Israelis who oppose the government describe Tuesday’s vote as make-or-break.

“The building is burning,” said Paul Gross, a British-born author of a new book on Israeli democracy, “and this election is about putting the fire out.”

What worries him most, Gross said, is the prospect that the government could finish what it started in 2022: an effort to undermine the judiciary and give itself effectively unchecked power.

“The last time, we could always say, this isn’t what people voted for,” he said. “Netanyahu ran in 2021 on security and Iran, not on judicial reform. This time, no one can claim they don’t know what the government’s intentions are.”

Without a strong judiciary, he could envision some demonstrations being barred, he said, noting that Netanyahu’s allies have already voted to ban some political parties only for the Supreme Court to stop those moves. Without that judicial check, “you really are in authoritarian territory,” he said. “That is very scary.”

Backers of the judicial overhaul, of course, see it positively, as a chance to bolster democracy by removing power from “deep state” judges and bureaucrats, and returning it to elected lawmakers and ministers.

But the prospect has many Israelis obtaining or renewing foreign passports and considering options elsewhere.

Alexandra Benjamin, who moved to Israel from London a quarter-century ago, said she was eyeing the exits out of despair over the country’s politics.

She mentioned the widespread denigration of the rights of Arab citizens and political leftists, and how some citizens had been willing to write off Israeli hostages held in Gaza for the sake of destroying Hamas.

“If we end up with the same government, I just can’t see how to be in Israel anymore,” Benjamin said. “Do my kids really have a future here? Do I? Is the state of Israel even sustainable?”

Benjamin, 49, has lived in Israel through difficult times, including the Second Intifada, when about 1,000 Israelis were killed in attacks, but had not considered leaving till now. “External” threats like from Iran, she said, had never made her afraid to stay.

“That didn’t challenge my sense of purpose and the sense of identity around this society and who we are, and who we want to be,” she said. “But you have to decide, has the country changed in a way that I can’t stay bought all-in?

She added, “It’s hopelessness about the country, but also, like, who are these voters who will reelect these people?”

Fights Over Identity and Faith

Few supporters of the current government talk about emigrating.

Rather, many right-wing Israelis say that their determination to stay, no matter what, makes them the real Zionists, and grants them a moral superiority over others, said Shraga Bar-On, a settler and a professor of Jewish thought at the Shalom Hartman Institute.

But they, too, see the stakes as enormous.

For Israeli settlers led by the far-right Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister in Netanyahu’s government, reelection would be a chance to drive a stake through the heart of a two-state solution and declare Israel’s sovereignty over the West Bank — land they see as their biblical birthright, and the heart of a potential Palestinian state that they consider a fundamental threat.

Smotrich calls for Palestinians to submit to Israeli rule or leave.

“If, God forbid, a government from the left comes to power, its view of Judea and Samaria would be entirely different,” said Yair Frank, rabbi of the Amihai settlement, using the biblical names for the West Bank. “Development could come to a halt, or things could become even worse.”

For Netanyahu’s die-hard supporters, Israel’s international isolation is only an added reason to keep him in power. No one else, they often say, is capable of defending the country, prosecuting multifront wars and standing up to President Donald Trump, let alone to the rest of the world.

The rhetoric is even more apocalyptic among the ultra-Orthodox. Some say they feel hated or demonized, and compare their situation to how it felt to be Jewish in 1930s Germany.

Friedman, the Haredi editor, argued that yeshiva students ought to be exempt from the draft because the military threatens the Haredi way of life. “This is an army with a gender agenda, an army with an educational agenda,” he said. “This is what we oppose: the melting pot. I don’t want a melting pot. I want to be Amish.”

Deep Divisions

To some, perhaps the most frightening thing about the election is the possibility that the outcome does nothing to cool the tensions bubbling over in Israeli society.

Ehud Olmert, a former prime minister, said he feared the polarization could spark violence. “It was always underneath the issues of the day, but never did we arrive at a point of physical confrontation as it is now,” he said.

It felt, Bar-On said, as if “every segment of Israeli society is completely sure that the others want to crush it.”

Some Israelis have been reaching back to ancient times for comparisons, noting that Israel, at 78 years old, is roughly the same age as two Jewish states that didn’t survive their third generations: the biblical kingdom of Saul, David and Solomon, and the Hasmonean dynasty, which fell to Pompey the Great of Rome.

Amotz Asa-El, a veteran columnist, argues in a new book that modern Israel is failing to heed the grim lessons of ancient Jewish civil wars.

“I feel the willingness and ability to assault fellow Jews,” he said. “That’s how civil wars begin. Talk to people and you feel that they hate each other.”

He recalled a first-century historian’s observation: “Josephus at one point says the Jews were so divided, while the Romans approached, that arguments invaded families and split them down the middle,” he said. “I feel that happening here.”