The prime minister is expected to campaign on regional military gains while opponents focus on accountability for the country’s worst security failure
Israel’s next election is shaping up as the country’s first full political reckoning over October 7, 2023: the failures that preceded the massacre, the wars that followed, and the unresolved argument over who can be trusted to lead the country through what comes next.
The mechanics are familiar. Israel endured five elections between 2019 and 2022, each revolving in one way or another around Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s dominance of the political system and the inability of rival camps to build stable governing coalitions. But the next campaign will begin in a different national mood. October 7, the wars in Gaza and on Israel’s northern front, the confrontation with Iran, the hostage crisis, the burden on reservists, and the judicial overhaul have fused into a broader public test of leadership, responsibility, and governability.
That is likely to make this election less a standard referendum on Netanyahu than a clash between two rival claims about Israel’s recent past and immediate future. Netanyahu and his allies will argue that, after the worst security failure in the country’s history, he led a military response that reshaped the region and proved that no rival has the experience to manage the threats still ahead. His opponents will argue that no wartime achievement can erase the failure of October 7, the refusal to accept political responsibility, the damage to state institutions, and the erosion of public trust that began before the attack and continued after it.
Dr. Raphael BenLevi of the Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy told The Media Line that October 7 remains “a big stain” on Netanyahu’s record, but he said he expects the prime minister to turn the campaign away from the day of the failure and toward what came afterward.
Three years later, we’ve changed the Middle East
“What I imagine is that he’s going to focus on the future,” BenLevi said. “He’s going to talk about how, yes, it was a failure but look where we are now. Three years later, we’ve changed the Middle East.”
Netanyahu cannot campaign as though October 7 never happened. But he can argue that Israel’s response weakened enemies on multiple fronts, reshaped regional calculations, and required decisions that his rivals would not have taken.
They’re all maybe a win by points, but not by knockout
BenLevi described the military record as real, but not complete. “There already are very large and very significant achievements on all of the different fronts,” he said. “On the other hand, none of the fronts have had total victory. They’re all maybe a win by points, but not by knockout.”
That formulation may define the prime minister’s difficulty. A “win by points” gives a campaign something to work with. It allows Netanyahu to point to Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, and the broader regional map, and to argue that Israel is no longer in the same strategic position it was on October 6, 2023. But a win by points is not the same as closure. It does not return displaced families to normal life, answer every question about hostages and reservists, or remove the public memory of how the war began.
BenLevi said Netanyahu was likely to present the election less as a judgment on past failures than as a choice between leaders. The message, he said, would be that his rivals would not have gone into Rafah, would have acted less forcefully in Gaza, and likewise would not have gone as far against Hezbollah or Iran.
That argument helps explain why the Netanyahu bloc has not collapsed, even after the worst security failure in Israel’s history. In many democracies, a disaster on that scale might have ended the career of the leader in office. In Israel, the picture is more complicated.
Likud has lost support compared with its last election result, but Netanyahu remains one of the strongest figures in the system. BenLevi said the broader pro-Netanyahu bloc—Likud, the ultra-Orthodox parties, Religious Zionism, and Otzma Yehudit—has remained intact because of overlapping forces: core loyalty to Netanyahu, right-wing distrust of the center-left, religious-sector priorities, and the practical benefits coalition partners gain from staying with him. For the ultra-Orthodox parties, those interests include draft exemptions, education budgets, religious authority, and influence over state policy.
“There is a certain amount of core Netanyahu supporters in the Likud that believe in him, and they’re loyal,” he said. But he added that parties to Likud’s right understand that the choice is probably between “a Netanyahu-led government” and “a centrist or center-left-led government,” and still prefer Netanyahu, even if they criticize him from the right.
That is the core of Netanyahu’s survival argument. His opponents ask how a prime minister can remain in office after October 7. His supporters, and some voters who are still open to him, ask who else can manage the next confrontation with Iran, the next decision in Lebanon, the next negotiation with Washington, or the next security crisis that may arrive without warning.
Dr. Lior Yohanani, a political sociologist at the Israel Democracy Institute, told The Media Line that the election should be understood through two sharply different readings of the same period. He noted that one part of the public believes that Israel was fortunate Netanyahu was prime minister on October 7 and afterward, because “otherwise our situation would have been much worse.” But for others, he said, the refusal to take responsibility and the effort to point blame toward the security establishment or the previous Bennett-Lapid government is “intolerable.”
We are living in a security reality that is completely different from everything we knew before in Israel
Yohanani said October 7 has not ended as a political or security event. “We are living in a security reality that is completely different from everything we knew before in Israel,” he said. By the time Israelis vote, almost three years will have passed since the massacre, but “this event has not really ended until today.”
The election campaign will be fought in a country whose security map has changed but has not settled. Hamas was badly damaged. Hezbollah was hit hard. Iran was attacked directly. Yet northern Israel remains unstable, the Iranian threat still shapes Israeli strategy, and the experience of alerts, displacement, reserve duty, and uncertainty remains part of daily life for many Israelis.
Yohanani noted that before the most recent direct Israel-Iran exchanges, there was a legitimate argument that Israel’s security position had improved dramatically after the shock of October 7. He pointed to military achievements against Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran. But he said recent developments had weakened the claim that “our security has never been better.”
He described Hezbollah as having renewed drone and missile activity in a way that surprised many Israelis and referred to threats that still lack a full answer. His point was not that Israel had no achievements. It was that achievements do not automatically translate into a stable sense of security.
The economy adds another pressure point. Netanyahu’s older political brand rested not only on security but also on economic management. For years, he presented himself as the leader who understood markets, growth, and global positioning better than his rivals. But the current government also presided over rising costs, expensive coalition agreements, heavy war spending, and growing frustration among families who hear that the economy is resilient but still struggle with rent, groceries, taxes, mortgages, and lost income from reserve duty.
BenLevi said Netanyahu will still have an economic argument. “Despite the war, despite it all, Israel’s economy has continued to grow,” he said. He acknowledged that critics may answer that growth came “in spite of” the government rather than because of it, but said the overall economic picture would still be part of Likud’s message.
The opposition is likely to argue that household pressures were worsened by coalition priorities: costly agreements with sectoral parties, the appointment of Bezalel Smotrich to the Finance Ministry despite criticism of his economic background, and a government that often appeared more focused on political survival than economic strain.
Then there is the judicial overhaul—or judicial reform, as supporters call it—the issue that defined the government before October 7. The coalition did not begin its term with a national recovery program or a security reset. It began with a struggle over the balance of power between the government, the Knesset, the Supreme Court, and the legal establishment.
Netanyahu’s opponents argue that the government came to power promising stability and instead opened a confrontation that shook the state from within, sent hundreds of thousands into the streets, and turned institutional trust into a daily political battlefield.
BenLevi said the issue has been overshadowed by October 7 and the wars but has not disappeared. “It definitely won’t occupy the same level of centrality in the elections,” he said. “On the other hand, it has certainly not gone away.”
From the right’s perspective, he said, the ongoing confrontation with the attorney general and the courts has reinforced the view that the legal system has too much power. He referred to the government’s effort to dismiss the attorney general and the fact that she remains in office as part of what keeps the issue alive for right-wing voters. Still, he said, Likud is unlikely to make judicial overhaul the center of its campaign, partly because it did not succeed in producing major change.
“They don’t have any achievements on that front,” BenLevi said. “To put it in the front and center, it would probably be problematic.”
Yohanani sees the judicial issue as one of the clearest points of common ground inside the anti-Netanyahu camp, which includes Yesh Atid, Yisrael Beitenu, the Democrats, figures from National Unity, and Bennett’s expected political vehicle. That camp’s parties disagree on Gaza, settlements, religion and state, Arab parties, economic policy, and the boundaries of military force, but they share broad priorities on checks and balances, judicial independence, and the protection of state institutions.
Yohanani said that concern extends beyond the courts. He pointed to Regional Cooperation Minister David Amsalem’s public defense of appointing political allies and associates as an example of the governing culture the opposition says it wants to replace. For the anti-Netanyahu bloc, the fight is not only about judges. It is about whether the state is administered as a professional public system or as a political asset of the ruling coalition.
A second area of shared opposition ground, Yohanani said, is military service, especially the ultra-Orthodox draft. After years of war and hundreds of days of reserve duty for many Israelis, the question of who serves and who doesn’t has become more than an old religion-and-state dispute. It now sits at the center of the argument over fairness, security, and the future of the “people’s army.”
Yohanani said there is overwhelming support among Jewish Israelis, outside the ultra-Orthodox public, for changing the existing arrangement. He described support for drafting ultra-Orthodox youth, in one form or another, as extraordinarily high across the Jewish public, including among many right-wing and Likud voters. But he warned that this does not necessarily mean those voters will abandon Netanyahu. For some, the ultra-Orthodox draft is a bitter pill they are willing to swallow for other priorities.
That is one of the government’s exposed vulnerabilities. Yohanani said the Netanyahu bloc is out of step with many of its own voters on issues tied to national resilience: the ultra-Orthodox draft, a state commission of inquiry into October 7, political appointments in security-related institutions, and public trust.
The reservists may become one of the most important social groups in this debate. They are not a party and not a single ideological bloc, but the war has given them a shared experience that no previous election had to absorb at this scale. Many have served for long stretches, carried family and business costs, and watched the ultra-Orthodox draft debate from inside a system that asked more and more of the same people.
BenLevi cautioned, however, that any new political force built around reservists or other postwar movements would face Israel’s electoral threshold, which requires enough votes for roughly four Knesset seats. “It’s not enough for it to actually have enough support to get it past four seats,” he said. Voters also need to believe the party will cross the threshold, or they may fear wasting their vote.
That structural barrier helps explain why public anger does not always produce successful new parties. Reservists, protest leaders, mayors, activists, and public figures may influence the campaign, but unless they join larger parties or build a list that voters believe can cross the electoral threshold, their support may not translate into Knesset seats.
The opposition’s most obvious vulnerability is its dependence, explicit or implicit, on Arab-party support. Yohanani said the most sensitive question for the change bloc is cooperation with Arab parties after the election. Yair Golan and the left may see Arab participation in a government as both mathematically necessary and morally legitimate, but parties to his right—especially a Bennett-led slate, Yisrael Beitenu, and parts of the centrist bloc associated with Gantz and Eisenkot—are far more hesitant. That hesitation, he said, gives Netanyahu’s campaign a familiar opening.
Netanyahu’s political machine, Yohanani said, can “scratch that wound” again and again, by warning voters that Bennett, Lapid, or others will sit with Arab parties, and then escalating the rhetoric by claiming they will sit with Hamas. The purpose would be to frighten soft-right voters who are considering a move away from Likud.
This is the opposition’s central problem: It may be closer to the public mood on accountability, institutional repair, and the burden on reservists, but shared dissatisfaction is not the same as a governing program. Such a bloc might be able to reach 61 seats on paper. Governing would be harder because its members disagree sharply over Palestinian issues, settlements, religion and state, Arab-party participation, and the use of military force.
BenLevi said the opposition’s bet on Bennett is uncertain. Bennett may draw right-wing voters who no longer want Netanyahu, but he remains damaged among many on the right because of his previous coalition with Arab support. At the same time, BenLevi questioned whether center-left voters will be enthusiastic about placing Bennett at the front, given that on many substantive issues, he is to the right of Netanyahu.
“It’s a bit of a gamble,” BenLevi said.
He added that he has not seen a detailed opposition strategy on the major issues, including the ultra-Orthodox draft. In his view, that lack of detail may be deliberate, because the opposition is trying to hold together former Likud voters with right-wing views and center-left voters with very different instincts.
The campaign may therefore become less about platforms than about trust. Netanyahu will argue that his rivals cannot govern together. His opponents will answer that he has already governed, and that the country paid the price.
The unresolved question of responsibility also invites comparison with Israel’s last great intelligence and leadership trauma: the 1973 Yom Kippur War. After that war, elections were held within two months, and Golda Meir’s Labor-led alliance still won. But the public reckoning continued after the vote, especially after the Agranat Commission examined the failures that preceded the war, and Meir resigned in 1974.
Since October 7, Yohanani said, Israel has seen no comparable resignation by the elected leadership. “We did not see a prime minister resign,” he said. “In fact, we did not see anyone from the political level resign.” By contrast, several senior military and security officials have left or announced plans to leave their posts.
That gap may become one of the campaign’s most powerful themes. Netanyahu’s opponents will argue that elected leaders cannot place responsibility only on generals and intelligence chiefs while remaining in office themselves. His supporters will counter that many of the assumptions that failed before October 7—especially the belief that Hamas could be contained in Gaza—were shared across much of the political system, including by previous governments and senior security officials.
BenLevi made that argument directly. If the criticism is that Israel allowed Hamas to remain in power in Gaza and allowed the threat to grow, he said, then voters will ask who would have done something fundamentally different before the attack.
“Everyone across the board was supporting what Israel was doing in Gaza,” he said.
From that perspective, BenLevi said, the right can argue that the lesson of October 7 is not to move toward the center or toward diplomacy, but to be more forceful.
“If anything, the logic of what was wrong with our policies toward Gaza is that we were too moderate,” BenLevi said. “That logic still says vote right.”
Yohanani pointed to a public shift that complicates that conclusion: Israelis are not abandoning military power, but they have become less willing to see force as sufficient on its own.
A recent Israel Democracy Institute survey suggests that Israelis are placing less emphasis on military power alone than they did earlier in the war. In May 2024, 40% of Israelis said strengthening military power was the best way to ensure Israel’s short-term security, compared with 28.4% in April 2026. Over the same period, the share choosing diplomatic agreements with states in the region rose from 19% to 30.5%, while the share choosing both military power and diplomacy remained roughly stable, at 36% in May 2024 and 38% in April 2026.
On long-term security, the largest group in April 2026—45.2%—said both military strength and diplomatic agreements were equally important, up from 38% in May 2024.
That may be one of the deeper arguments under the surface of the campaign: not whether Israel needs military force—there is broad agreement that it does—but whether force alone can produce lasting security without a political strategy.
The same coalition arithmetic could turn the post-election period into a fight over legitimacy. Polls published in late April showed the anti-Netanyahu camp ahead of the current coalition, but not always with a clear path to a majority without Arab-party support. A Channel 12 poll published April 28 showed Netanyahu’s bloc at 50 seats, non-Arab opposition parties at 60, and Arab parties at 10, while a Walla/Lazar Research poll published a day earlier put the coalition at 51, the opposition at 59, and Arab parties at 10.
Without Arab parties, Yohanani said, it is entirely possible that no bloc reaches 61 seats. He mentioned the possibility of a “technical bloc,” or temporary external support from an Arab party, most likely Ra’am, simply to replace the current government and avoid another cycle of elections.
That scenario would quickly become a legitimacy battle. The opposition would say it is using parliamentary tools to form a government. Netanyahu’s camp would say the government depends on Arab parties. Israelis have seen that argument before, but after October 7, the emotional weight around it is heavier.
Yohanani’s broader warning was that the election could test not only who wins, but whether Israel’s political actors accept the rules afterward. If no bloc wins a clear majority, coalition negotiations, possible Arab-party support, court rulings, and disputes over legitimacy could all become flashpoints. In a polarized system with one parliamentary chamber and constant security pressure, he said, democratic stability depends on politicians accepting legal outcomes even when they dislike them.
The coming election may decide who forms the next government, but it is unlikely to settle the deeper argument over what October 7 revealed about Israel’s leadership, institutions, and security doctrine. Netanyahu’s camp will tell a story of wartime leadership, hard choices, military achievements, and the absence of a reliable alternative. His opponents will tell a story of institutional damage, failed responsibility, unequal burdens, and a government that lost the public’s trust before and after October 7.
The campaign will ask Israelis to choose a government, but it may also force a harder judgment: whether wartime achievements can outweigh political responsibility, and whether a fractured opposition can turn public anger into a governing majority.
