After the October 7 disaster, open-ended wars, and the collapse of Israel’s diplomatic standing, the ballot box offers citizens their final chance to bring down Netanyahu’s government.
According to Atlas Diplomacy, an editorial titled “Haaretz Editorial: Israel Cannot Afford Another Four Years Under Netanyahu” by the Haaretz Editorial board has been published in Haaretz. Published on the day of Israel’s parliamentary election, this editorial argues that the Netanyahu government is responsible for the worst security disaster, institutional rot, and international isolation in Israel’s history, urging voters to hold him accountable at the polling station. Below is a summary of the piece.
In Tuesday’s parliamentary election, Israeli voters must present Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with the bill for his years in office and exact a political price for his failures, his abandonment of citizens, and the severe damage inflicted on the nation’s security and resilience. Remarkably, a government that presided over the worst security failure and catastrophe in Israel’s history neither resigned in shame nor fell to mass protests, instead serving out its full term while ordinary citizens were forced to step into the void left by the state’s collapse on October 7, 2023, and fight for the release of hostages against the dubious political interests of their own prime minister.
The damage wrought by the Netanyahu government is immeasurable: a judicial overhaul that tore Israeli society apart, rampant Jewish terrorism in the West Bank, a war in the Gaza Strip that degenerated into a boundless campaign of vengeance, and multiple other war fronts that were opened without ever being resolved. Simultaneously, government corruption and Kahanist extremism have spread across state institutions, including the police and education system. Under Netanyahu’s leadership, Israel has become a pariah state and is now even alienating the United States, the one ally it cannot survive without.
Above all stands the massacre of October 7, which occurred after years in which Netanyahu fostered the delusion that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could be ignored while dismissing repeated warnings of mounting security threats. Even in the wake of the disaster, he refused to accept any shred of responsibility. Today, Israel has exhausted its strategic reserves, the erosion of its diplomatic credit has reached dangerous levels, and its exhausted citizens are at the limit of what they can endure.
Four years ago, fragmentation and a lack of coordination within the opposition “bloc of change” caused both Meretz and Balad to fall below the electoral threshold, allowing a well-organized right-wing bloc to win a narrow vote majority that translated into a stable Knesset coalition and ushered in the worst years in Israel’s history. Having learned from that mistake—and bolstered by tens of thousands of Israeli expatriates who have flown home specifically to vote—opposition voters can now cast their ballots without fear of wasting their votes to rescue the country from its collision course and send Netanyahu’s government home./ Source
