Middle Israel: Netanyahu's election lies pose a dangerous threat to Israeli democracy - opinion

NOVEMBER 6, 2026 12:52Realizing he stood no chance against war hero Dwight Eisenhower, Adlai Stevenson had no illusions about the 1952 presidential race, which he indeed lost in 39 of 48 states.Still, as a respected lawyer, he cared for truth, and thus offered the rival party a deal: “If the Republicans stop telling lies about us, we will stop telling the truth about them.”Now a variation of this quip must be said about the battalion of Arab lawmakers elected to the new Knesset.The truth is that most of them have problematic attitudes toward the Jewish state. But the charge that they were elected fraudulently is a lie.That the election-theft charge is a lie was made plain by Supreme Court Justice Noam Sohlberg, in his capacity as chairman of the Central Elections Committee, in a joint televised statement with head of the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) Maj.-Gen. (ret.) David Zini and Attorney-General Gali Baharav-Miara.’ Here, the prime minister sits with ‘The Jerusalem Post’ on the eve of the election. (credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM/THE JERUSALEM POST)The latter is classified by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s groupies (with no evidence) as a “lefty.” Sohlberg, however, lives in a West Bank settlement, and Zini spent years in messianic yeshivas, including one in Hebron.These are no lefties. When they refuted the lie of a stolen election, they spoke for no political cause. They spoke for truth.That is not what Netanyahu did. The outgoing prime minister, like Stevenson in his time, realized he was going to lose the election, as he indeed did, yet his response was not to celebrate truth, but to invent a lie.Netanyahu's election lies make his removal a priority over haredi enlistmentYes, lying had laced Netanyahu’s political career for decades, but this lie, in terms of its substance, mechanics, and implications, was on an entirely different scale, so much so that this lie should make middle Israelis redefine their priorities thus: Netanyahu’s ejection first, ultra-Orthodox enlistment later.Netanyahu’s last lie was prepared ahead of the election and trumpeted on Election Day by the man himself. “The Muslim Brotherhood’s backers are raiding the polls and stealing the elections,” he wrote on social media while we voted, and someone in the Prime Minister’s Office called police to complain about vote theft.There was no theft. Yes, as has happened here in every election, with multiple parties, there were some local irregularities. And yes, Arab parties may have received foreign financing. That’s bad, and should be treated severely.But no one paid thousands of voters. Zini, Netanyahu’s personal appointee, made that clear. Moreover, “stealing the election” would mean much more than thousands, since one Knesset seat required 44,865 votes.That Netanyahu didn’t care about the truth is no surprise. The man lied when he claimed Iran’s nuclear project was gone; he lied when he said he would destroy Hamas; he lied when he signed a rotation deal with Benny Gantz; and he lied when he said he would not promote a law for his own immunity.This list is but a sampling of the lies that, for Netanyahu, have been tactic, strategy, habit, and norm. Even so, his last lie is different.Netanyahu accused of trying to use police and Shin Bet for political endsFirst and foremost, this lie is different because of the tools it utilizes, namely, an attempt to use the police and the Shin Bet for a political purpose and a brazen lie.Then again, this lie is different because of its substance. This lie was not about a plan Netanyahu did not intend to execute, or a deal he did not intend to keep. This lie framed hundreds of thousands of citizens – “the Arabs” – in its cook’s own words. It was a libel.Worse still was this lie’s potential consequence: a devastating blow to the public’s trust in our democracy’s fairness and strength. But Netanyahu, whom his close ally, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, called “a liar, son of a liar,” doesn’t care.Netanyahu doesn’t care for truth; he doesn’t care for justice; he doesn’t care for democracy and its institutions; he doesn’t care about pitting us against each other; and he doesn’t care about tearing apart the most delicate tissues of our social flesh.Like the fake mother in King Solomon’s trial when she faced defeat, Netanyahu’s response to his own defeat is to do to our country what she said about the baby she claimed: “Cut it in two!”Netanyahu’s response to his defeat is worse than all his previous lies. It means that the new coalition must be built in such a way that Netanyahu will not be there in any role, even as a window cleaner. And that does not mean a coalition with anti-Zionist Arabs. It means a coalition with anti-Zionist Jews.As noted here in the wake of Netanyahu’s war on the Supreme Court, and as this writer argued in The Jewish March of Folly, the civil war that Netanyahu tried to kindle was driven by the three engines of ancient Israel’s fateful civil wars: the royalists, the zealots, and the separatists.The royalists think the king should be above the law; the zealots want Armageddon; and the separatists want to carve a state within a state.A coalition with haredi parties could offer a path to replacing NetanyahuThe election’s results do not offer Middle Israel the power to fight and win on all three fronts simultaneously. One fight must for now be delayed, and it should be the fight with the separatists – the ultra-Orthodox parties that, until this week, were our political “enemy number one.”Should they be promised the draft-evasion law they want? Of course not. We can, however, agree to suspend all constitutional legislation until the next election, and also give some funding for their yeshivas. In return for this, we will ask them to abandon Netanyahu, and also support the establishment of a judicial commission of inquiry concerning the recent war.Will this be the coalition of justice we crave? It won’t be. It will, however, be a coalition of truth.www.MiddleIsrael.netThe writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is the author of the bestseller, The Jewish March of Folly (Yedioth Books 2026), now available in English on Amazon.Follow us on Google