Netanyahu’s Challengers Are Selling The Same Poison

One would think that after October 7 and the Gaza war that followed, the leaders from the main opposition parties would have drawn the obvious conclusion. Eighty years of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have not made Israel safer. It has made Israel strategically weaker, lonelier, and more reviled than at any moment in its history. Yet the two men most likely to replace Benjamin Netanyahu—former IDF Chief Gadi Eisenkot and, less likely, Naftali Bennett—have already announced what they will not do, nor even imply: take any significant measure to mitigate this endemically self-consuming conflict toward a permanent solution.

Eisenkot, whose new Yashar party now leads or ties Likud in the polls, put it plainly: “I have never spoken about a Palestinian state.” He supports settlement building in the West Bank, albeit has acknowledged settler violence against Palestinians as “terrorism.”

Naftali Bennett went further. He would refuse Palestinian statehood even if it cost Israel normalization with Saudi Arabia. “I will not allow a Palestinian state to be established, and I will not hand over territory. Period.”

That is the alternative. Not a new chapter, but the same chapter, read by different men in a calmer voice. Israeli leaders remain tragically misguided.

I have said this for decades, and I will say it again: the Israeli public was sold a falsehood, that a Palestinian state poses an existential threat to Israel. The opposite is true. It is the denial of Palestinian statehood that is destroying Israel from within. The misfortune is not that Netanyahu peddled this lie; it is that his challengers now recite it.

They should know better. Eisenkot has spent a lifetime in Israel’s security establishment. He understands the arithmetic between the river and the sea. He knows that permanent military domination over five million stateless Palestinians has failed miserably, culminating with Hamas’ attack and Israel’s genocidal retaliatory war, and still offers no alternative. And Bennett is categorically against Palestinian statehood and eyes the greater Israel delusion, which will usher in nothing but repeated disasters that will destroy what’s left of Israel’s moral standing, if not its very existence as we know it.

Leaders are supposed to change a national mindset when that mindset is leading a nation off a cliff. Instead, these men are cementing it. Every time they repeat the old narrative for votes, they deepen the conflict they claim to want to manage.

Israeli strategy rests on a fantasy: that Palestinians will eventually tire, submit, and abandon their claim to a state. This is dead wrong. The Palestinians are not going anywhere and will remain ever more resolute. Aspirants to the premiership must examine that assumption honestly. What could persuade a people to accept permanent subjugation? Nothing.

They have endured occupation for nearly sixty years. They will endure another sixty if they must. No force exists—not Israel’s army, not the Arab states, not the international community—that can extract a surrender of their national identity.

The Palestinians believe statehood is a right, not a wish. On that, history and law are with them. And time is on their side, not Israel’s. The diplomatic cost Israel has sustained in the wake of the Gaza war has risen to 157 of the 193 UN member states now recognizing the State of Palestine—including Britain, France, Canada, and Australia. For decades, successive Israeli governments wanted to bury the two-state solution. Instead, they globalized it.

Then there is America, Israel’s indispensable military, economic, and political supporter. For the first time in a quarter century of Gallup polling, more Americans sympathize with the Palestinians than with the Israelis—41 percent to 36 percent, a reversal from a 13-point Israeli lead a year earlier—among Democrats, 65 percent side with the Palestinians; 17 percent with Israel.

That is not a bad news cycle. That is the erosion of the foundation on which Israel’s security has rested in particular since 1967. Jews abroad feel it most painfully. A state created to be their refuge has become, for many, a source of shame and exposure.

Iran’s hostility has hardened. Turkey has turned venomous. The peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan are fraying. The Abraham Accords have lost their momentum and their moral cover. Israel is now widely described as a pariah state, and increasingly as an apartheid one. The label is not propaganda, but a description of a state beyond the pale.

Another irony: Israel calls itself the Middle East’s only democracy, yet both Eisenkot and Bennett rule out inviting Palestinian parties into a coalition. Their disdain extends beyond the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza to the Palestinian citizens of Israel—20 percent of the population.

Once again, more than two million Israeli Palestinians will have no voice in their own government. If Israel denies the rights of Palestinians within its own borders, will it ever accept the rights of those living outside them, which are viewed as a mortal threat? To deny Palestinians their right to a state is to forfeit the moral ground on which Israel’s own claim to statehood rests.

What would it take? Two things must happen. Neither is easy, but both are necessary.

First, Washington must stop talking and start acting. Successive administrations have endorsed two states while funding the machinery that makes two states impossible. Words without leverage are complicity.

American public opinion has already moved. Politics will follow, though slowly. If Republicans lose the House in the midterms, and if a Democratic president takes office in 2029, which is more than likely, the opening for a genuine policy shift—recognition of Palestinian statehood, and real pressure on Israel to accept it—becomes real for the first time in a generation.

Second, and more important: the change must come from Israelis themselves. No foreign power can rewrite a nation’s self-understanding. Only Israelis can do that.

There remains a serious constituency inside Israel that knows the truth—that Palestinian statehood is not a threat to Israel but the only path to its survival as a Jewish and democratic state. That constituency must stop whispering.

It must be organized with courage. It must speak publicly, relentlessly, and without apology. It must tell the Israeli public what its leaders will not: that the danger is not a Palestinian state. The danger is the endless occupation that is hollowing Israel out.

This will be slow, thankless, tedious work. It may take a decade, but there is no alternative.

I hold no illusions that the next government will pursue two states. But it may be less brutal, less contemptuous, and less openly annexationist. It is not the opening of a door, but the cracking open of a window. Cracks are where dialogue begins.

The question before Israelis is not which politician to elect. It is whether anyone among them has the courage to tell their own people the truth.

Eighty years of blood has settled nothing. Another eighty will settle nothing. Israel’s enemies did not bring it to this pass. Its own leaders did—and now its challengers are prescribing the same poison, only with a different color.