Eisenkot or Netanyahu: No matter who forms government, democracy is dead

If Israel were a democracy, as the Jewish diaspora claims, a government would now be formed that reflects the result of last night’s election. This would be a majority or minority administration of Gadi Eisenkot with the participation, either formal or informal, of the two Palestinian blocs. If Benjamin Netanyahu honoured this result, there would be no way back to power for his ultra-rightwing bloc. For Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, it would be the end of an era. But Israel is not a democracy, and Netanyahu is no democrat. It is a settler state that has moulded itself increasingly tightly around the identity and views of Jewish fascists. New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters It’s an occupying power where Palestinians are ejected from their homes, as they are in Hebron, with no court judgement, no right of redress or compensation, nor any legal process at all. The central issue Jews face was not even on the ballot. On the ballot were Netanyahu’s leadership, his judicial coup, the refusal of the ultra-Orthodox to take part in military service, Israel’s international isolation - anything but the genocide in Gaza, the pogroms in the occupied West Bank, and the future of Palestinians. Existential threat Every Zionist party in this campaign acted as if one half of the population of the land Israel dominates did not exist and should be excluded. Several parties made the deportation and displacement of Palestinians key parts of their campaign. Religious Zionism, led by Bezalel Smotrich, promised to “Judaise” the Galilee and the Negev (Naqab), home to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. The Palestinian population of Israel rightly concluded that they were facing an existential threat, and voted in record numbers in an attempt to prevent this from happening. Palestinians who had boycotted the vote for decades went to the polls. “We do not feel safe. A sense of security has completely vanished - and I mean security on every level,” Ibrahim Said told Middle East Eye. “I feel not just like a second-class citizen, but like a twentieth-class one.” In any other country, a result like this would clearly put the Arab parties in the position of kingmaker … But we do not live in an age of graceful losers Around 80 percent of Palestinian citizens of Israel voted. This result will be a red flag for National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who will remember the shock of this election in future attempts to restrict and limit the voting power of Palestinians. Jewish and Palestinian citizens were never equal, but the disparity between them has now become grotesque. Nor were their politicians, one of whom - Sami Abu Shehadeh, the leader of Balad - was barred for running for election because of an article he wrote analysing the 7 October Hamas attack and its ramifications. Nor are their votes. Israel is now a country where you can be beaten up and stabbed for speaking Arabic, as happened to three Druze citizens in a nightclub in Tel Aviv. If you are a doctor or health worker, you can lose your job. Being a Zionist Arab, like the Druze who serve in the military, is no protection from fascists. Arabs are seen as the existential enemy not just of supremacist Jews, but of all Israeli Jews - and consequently, Eisenkot himself and each of his partners, bar one, have specifically pledged that they would not come to power on the back of a deal with the two Palestinian blocs: the Joint List and Ra’am. A Jewish state cannot be run by Arabs, whether Zionist or not, they said. Political manoeuvring In any other country, a result like this would clearly put the Arab parties in the position of kingmaker, as they were projected to take 17 seats combined. But we do not live in an age of graceful losers. Like Flavio Bolsonaro, who refused to concede after a stunning victory by President Lula da Silva in Brazil, or indeed US President Donald Trump after Joe Biden was declared the victor in 2020, Netanyahu is not about to go quietly. We already know he tried hard to reignite the war with Iran in the days leading up to the election, and only failed when army chief of staff Eyal Zamir refused to play ball, according to Israeli media. Netanyahu is going nowhere until Israel's Palestinians are taken seriously Read More » When that attempt failed, Netanyahu posted an AI-generated image of a mushroom cloud over Tel Aviv, and briefed widely on Zamir’s betrayal, to cast military chiefs as soft on Israel’s defence. In the weeks or months of political manoeuvring to come, an attack on Iran is more, not less likely - if only to predetermine the policy of his successor. Like Trump, Netanyahu is a pathological liar. But he is far more intelligent and deceptive, hence his longevity. Facing justice for corruption, or a commission of inquiry for the gross security failings that left southern Israel exposed to the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023, are the lesser of his three primary concerns. The third and most important is to fulfil the dream of his father, Benzion Netanyahu, the Polish-born scholar and Revisionist Zionist, to annex the occupied West Bank, or in their words to return the kingdom of Judea and Samaria to the Jewish state. To underestimate the fundamentalism of Netanyahu is to be lured by his Pennsylvanian American English into a carefully laid trap that one US president after another has walked into. Netanyahu has also been in this position before. He knows how to offer his political enemies a national unity government and then crush them. He knows how to play for a second election, aware that the second time around, thousands of Jewish voters from abroad would not fly in again to vote against him. And he remains a caretaker prime minister, a position that could last for many months. As leader of the largest party, Likud, Netanyahu could even be pardoned by Israeli President Isaac Herzog on the corruption charges he is facing, and Herzog could ask him to form the next government. Settler terrorism It would be the same folly to imagine that Ben Gvir and Smotrich will walk away with their hands up. They now have their own armed militia, after Ben Gvir announced that 100,000 gun licences had been issued by his ministry since 7 October. Most of these guns go to settlers. Even before the Hamas attack, settlers were prioritised for gun ownership, because they were living in a “danger zone”. According to a 2024 analysis, one third of all adults in the settlements of Adora, northwest of Hebron, had a gun licence. In truth, Ben Gvir and Smotrich should be wearing military fatigues, not suits - for they also have the youth vote. In the US, almost half of Jews under 35 have rejected the concept of a Jewish supremacist state, in favour of equal citizenship for Palestinians and Jews in a single binational state, according to a recent poll conducted by the Jewish Voters Resource Center. In Israel, the youth vote has gone in the opposite direction. Polling conducted of first-time voters showed that if the result was contingent on the youth vote, Ben Gvir and Smotrich would together secure more than 16 percent, or 29 seats. Ben Gvir has every reason to consider himself a prime minister in waiting. The CIA’s warning that growing fissures among Jews in Israel could lead to civil war is not a rhetorical or polemical flight of fancy. If Eisenkot succeeds in forming the next government, his first and major task would be to defang the settlers - and that would not be easy. They might have already grown too powerful. As editor Aluf Benn wrote in Haaretz, settlers and their political patrons would launch a determined campaign to preserve the achievements gained under Netanyahu. For them, these times are a heaven-sent opportunity to establish the kingdom of Judea over the modern map of Palestine. Western folly But there is a much more fundamental mistake that the western backers of the Zionist project are about to make. Even a temporary fall from power of Netanyahu, Ben Gvir and Smotrich, would be greeted with audible sighs of relief from Britain and every western capital. They would conclude that Israel is once again run by a pragmatist who knows the West Bank well, and who would stop the E1 settlement block from splitting the occupied West Bank in half and dooming a Palestinian state before it is even born. Israel would still consider itself at war with all of its Arab neighbours - for the truth that no-one wants to address is that Israel has changed forever All the pressure on western governments to isolate Israel with sanctions would evaporate, and after three long years, it would be back to business as usual. But nothing would have changed for Palestinians, who would still be starving under siege in tents, scrambling through the rubble in a mass grave called Gaza for the body parts of their slaughtered family members. Palestinians in the occupied West Bank would still, under Eisenkot, be terrorised by gangs of Jewish settlers under the protection of the army. In Israel, anyone who dared to speak Arabic in public would still be lynched. Nor would anything have changed for Israel’s increasingly impotent neighbours. Areas of southern Lebanon and Syria much bigger than Gaza would still be under Israeli army occupation, and the Druze lands of Syria would still be an Israeli protectorate. Israel would still consider itself at war with all of its Arab neighbours - for the truth that no-one wants to address is that Israel has changed forever. All its liberal camouflage has been torn away in its collective desire for vengeance in Gaza. In the last three years, it has revealed itself for what it has always been: a colonial project incapable of living in peace with the people whose lands it continues to seize. 'A one-person show' This point was driven home by the last person on earth who anyone would call a Palestinian sympathiser. He is Ronald Lauder, the 82-year-old Jewish billionaire who serves as president of the World Jewish Congress. Lauder has become a one-man Zionist enterprise. He financed the establishment of Jewish schools in Eastern Europe, and significant portions of his wealth have gone to institutions in Israel. His wealth earned him friendship with 40 world leaders, but his closest bond was to Netanyahu. Yet in a truly remarkable interview with Haaretz, published this month, Lauder broke a silence of 30 years. What happens to Netanyahu’s ICC warrant if he leaves office? Read More » “What you have is a dictator, a one-person show. Israel is a democracy, but Netanyahu is not playing by the rules of democracy,” Lauder said. “I spoke with the king of Jordan a few weeks ago. Jordan has been one of the most loyal countries to Israel that we have out there, and we turned the most loyal country into a hater of Israel because of what Ben Gvir has done,” he added. “And when [his supporters] beat up a photographer for the Washington Post - how stupid can you be? The Washington Post will hate Israel because of this. Hate! For what purpose?” A deep sense of disgust appeared on his face, according to the Haaretz report, as Lauder recounted cutting his own ties with Israel. “I’ve sold my apartment in Tel Aviv, I gave my home in Be’er Sheva to the Jewish National Fund, of which I’m also the chairman. I basically cut my ties there. Because it has become so …” Lauder trailed off and made a gesture of vomiting. He further described Israel today as being in a “very difficult position. More difficult than they realise … Israel has lost not only Europe and other places, but the diaspora. Yes, they still are loyal to Israel, but they don’t feel Israel’s protecting them.” This from a man who was once Netanyahu’s closest confidant, used for the most delicate of diplomatic missions, such as mediation with Hafez al-Assad in Syria over the Golan Heights. Lauder now backs the man who liberated Syria from dictatorship, Ahmed al-Sharaa, with whom he is convinced a deal could be done. “I only spent a little time with him, but I know him very well now,” he said. “He is a tough guy, very smart, and will turn out to be a good leader. He wants to rebuild Syria in the right way. If Bibi were smart, he would call me and say, ‘Let’s work together.’ He won’t do that because he wants everything for himself.” Lauder gets what British Prime Minister Andy Burnham will all too easily miss in his haste to sweep this conflict under the carpet. Israel will continue to “take everything” for itself, until it falls apart. The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.