Grok
Prof. Sam Lehman-Wilzig – If Israel’s Government Changes, It Won’t be from Right to Left
If you were surprised by Israel’s election results, you shouldn’t have been. As opposed to almost all other democracies where elections are fought over domestic issues, once again Israeli Jews were more concerned with national security. (Israel’s Arab sector was also mostly worried about security – violent crime in their midst.)
But wait: didn’t most of the Opposition parties emphasize local issues (the army draft; judicial reform; etc.)? Yes, but most of them are also to be found ideologically on the “Right”: Lieberman, Bennett-Lapid, and even Eizenkot to a great extent.
In short, other than the Yair Golan-led “Democrats” party, no other Jewish party that passed the voting threshold necessary to enter the Knesset (3.25%) this past Tuesday can be considered “Left.” Of course, there’s a wide range within the “Right,” but regarding the core issue of a Palestinian state and Israel retaining at least parts of Judea & Samaria / the West Bank, there isn’t a whole lot differentiating the Likud from the three Opposition parties mentioned above.
The major question is WHY?
The simple (but overly simplistic) answer is Oct. 7. Any country that was viciously attacked as was Israel back in 2023, would immediately strike forcefully against its enemy, concomitantly reverting psychologically to a more a far militaristic mindset. For example, FDR kept America out of WWII for over two years, until Pearl Harbor. Upon being brutally and suddenly attacked, the U.S. then declared war against Japan a mere one day later (Dec. 8, 1941) – and just two months after that (Feb. 19, 1942) FDR signed an Executive Order placing Japanese residents and even Japanese-U.S. citizens in detention camps where 120,000 eventually were incarcerated during the war.
There’s an obvious parallel here with what Hamas did on Oct. 7, 2023. However, another critical aspect is quite different. The Japanese goal was relatively narrow in scope: trying to undermine America’s ability to control the Pacific theater of war. There was no thought of decimating the U.S. population at large or even taking over large territorial areas. But that’s exactly Hamas’s “totalistic” goal then and now: to completely destroy Israel, throwing its population into the sea (at least metaphorically – and literally if they could pull it off).
Another key difference. The Japanese public was not asked nor were they told ahead of time what their government and army intended to do. Not so the population of Gaza. In 2017 Hamas issued a revised “Constitution” (A Document of General Principles and Policies) that expressly “rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea.”
No less relevant to the issue is Hamas’s original 1988 Charter framing the Israel-Palestine struggle not as a secular dispute over land but as a zero-sum religious war between Moslems and Jews. And it was within this charter that Hamas received 44.5% of the vote in the 2006 Palestinian elections, and close to 50% in all of Gaza. In other words, although survey polling showed that most Gazans (and Palestinians in general) wanted a two-state solution (Israel and Palestine), in political practice they went with the party that worked for Israel’s destruction.
But all that was before Oct. 7. Polling now can obviously not take place in Gaza given the destruction and displacement of the population. But one can assume that their opinion regarding Israel (present and future) is no less antagonistic than their compatriots on Israel’s eastern flank. And here we find the bottom-line reason for Israelis steadily moving rightwards.
Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Issues conducted an in-depth survey of West Bank Palestinians in 2025. The major findings:
More than half of the Palestinian public in the West Bank (54%) thinks that the State of Israel has no right to exist, while 38% believes it does, and 8% did not express an opinion. Among 18–34 year-olds in the West Bank, the proportion opposing Israel’s existence is particularly high (75%) compared to older age groups. (https://www.inss.org.il/publication/survey-palestinians/)
In short, not only do most Palestinians consider the State of Israel to be illegitimate, but the “future” looks even worse with a full three-quarters of the youngest adult cohort holding this opinion!
So, what do most Israelis make of this? Indeed, what is the only conclusion that one can make of this? There is no realistic partner for peace. A massive, murderous attack – combined with political (opinion) support for Hamas’s stated goal – what is the average Israeli supposed to think? Whether wrong or right, s/he will think and vote Right.
Thus, for the foreseeable future the “2-state solution” issue is a dead letter, and the Israeli public’s moving Right is their way of guaranteeing that it remains a non-starter as long as the Palestinians (especially Hamas) don’t change their stripes or leave the scene.
Indeed, foreign supporters of the Palestinians – especially those who (absurdly) charge Israel with “Genocide” – are actually working counterproductively. The more they cry “Genocide,” the more Israelis are reminded of Hamas’s truly genocidal intentions as propounded in its Charter. When it was published, the world laughed at Hitler’s Mein Kampf; no Israeli is laughing at (or ignoring) the Hamas Charter.
From the election results it’s not yet clear who will form the next government (if any are at all capable, given the Arab parties’ large support). But what is clear is that whatever the new governing coalition, the “Palestinian issue” will remain on the back burner. For Israel’s Jewish mainstream, internal issues – haredi draft; Oct. 7 Commission of Inquiry; Constitutional change; the nature of Israeli democracy, etc. – is what will command the country’s attention in the coming years. Paradoxically, that’s precisely because those were not the issues that concerned most of Israel’s Jewish voters this past election. Perhaps by putting the Palestinian issue to rest (at least for the foreseeable future), the country can start to resolve numerous internal issues.
P.S. As pure speculation, it’s possible that as the hours of Election Day moved forward and all of Israel’s media continued to report the huge Arab turnout supporting the Arab parties, many Jews who voted later in the day “switched” their intention and moved “back” to the Likud as the “safe” anti-Arab haven. As Yogi Berra once said: “It ain’t over until it’s over.”
