Israel is officially entering election season, and with it comes the perennial and inescapable excitement among some progressives in the United States who are eager to see Israeli voters send Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu packing.
That excitement, however, is an illusion. It is built on a belief, long clung to by American supporters of Israel, that Israel without Netanyahu would somehow become a liberal democracy that aligns more with their own values.
That illusion is based on a false view of Israeli policy in the decades before Netanyahu’s reign. It ignores the fact that the foundations of the current reality — the massive expansion of settlements, the entrenchment of the occupation and the repression of the Palestinian people — were a collective national project long before Netanyahu became their champion. Today, the cognitive dissonance that allows Americans to brush aside that same Israeli national consensus is reflected in the fantastical picture painted of Netanyahu’s would-be successors.
Take, for example, Naftali Bennett, the only Israeli politician who has managed to unseat Netanyahu in the past decade. In a blitz of Hebrew-language interviews in recent weeks, Bennett has laid out his political platform, looking to appeal to secular Israeli voters who seek political change. He vowed to legalize civil marriage and introduce public transportation on the Jewish sabbath — a strategy that may win a significant share of votes, but only represents a small slice of his worldview.
On the issues that have soured the American public against Israel — namely, its war on Gaza, which human rights organizations, genocide scholars and a U.N. Commission have called a genocide against Palestinians — Bennett doesn’t represent a change for the better. In fact, Bennett’s strategy is to outflank the current government from the right.
Unlike Netanyahu, who ultimately relented to international pressure and began letting food into Gaza in May 2025 to curb a famine of his own creation, Bennett stated that his future government “would not let hundreds of Hamas trucks to enter [Gaza] every day.” Like Netanyahu, Bennett has said that Gaza must remain under permanent Israeli control — even after the war. And although Bennett has been careful to claim that Israel does not target Palestinian civilians, he has regularly suggested that Palestinian civilians are legitimate targets, most recently asserting that 70% of Palestinians want to murder all Israelis. Even back in 2018, Bennett explicitly advocated shooting Palestinian children attending protests in Gaza, stating, “They are not children — they are terrorists.”
In Bennett’s telling, it is the personas of hard-right cabinet ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir — not the policies of the Israeli government — that have led to growing international pressure. He is betting that a new government, by being more careful in its choice of words and presentation, would improve Israel’s ties with the U.S. and European states, even as the country executes the exact same policies of displacement and violent domination. He is not offering liberal democracy; he is offering a more efficient, quieter version of the same repression and expansionism.
Bennett is just one example of a nascent coalition that includes figures like opposition leader Yair Lapid and former Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot. While they more closely align with the nostalgic view of a more liberal Israel, they are no liberals. Eisenkot was a central figure in Netanyahu’s original “war cabinet” formed in October 2023, which designed and authorized the campaign of mass killing and starvation for which Netanyahu was later indicted by the International Criminal Court.
When Eisenkot eventually quit the war cabinet, it was not because Israel had been carrying out heinous international crimes, but rather, as he put it, because “outside considerations and politics infiltrated into the discussions” on steps to “realize the war’s goals and improve Israel’s strategic position.” In essence, he left the government because Netanyahu refused to put forth a vision of how to reap the long-term geopolitical benefits resulting from those crimes.
These challengers also do not represent a break from Israel’s most harmful ideologies and the unacceptable political reality they have fostered over decades. Both Eisenkot and Lapid, together with Bennett, recently vowed to not allow Arab political parties into their government.
Netanyahu is not the problem
There is a tendency to place the blame for Israel’s plunging standing — in the U.S. and globally — on the shoulders of Benjamin Netanyahu. But Netanyahu did not put Israel on this road; he is in many ways the driver who unbuckled his seatbelt, turned off the headlights, and leaned on the accelerator. Removing Netanyahu doesn't turn the car around; it merely swaps him for a driver like Bennett, who keeps the GPS set to even further entrenching annexation and apartheid while driving marginally more carefully.
To understand why Israeli politicians have become more extreme, it’s valuable to look at how the new generation of extremists came to power. Electoral considerations were the main driver behind Netanyahu’s embrace of Ben Gvir and Smotrich. Netanyahu understood that Israeli society was becoming more extreme and wagered he could stay in power by inviting those individuals into the halls of power. This highlights a deeper structural issue: the extremism attributed in recent years to Netanyahu is not a deviation from the Israeli mainstream. It is the mainstream.
Even in the mass protests against the current Netanyahu’s attempted judicial overhaul in the months leading up to October 7, 2023, which much of the Western world viewed as a resurgence of liberalism in Israeli politics, opposition to the country’s treatment of Palestinians was notably absent, a trend which became even more pronounced with the start of the war on Gaza.
Herein lies the danger. There is no force more powerful in maintaining Israeli impunity — and the decades of injustices, human rights violations, and international crimes enabled by that impunity — than the economic, military, and diplomatic support of the United States. Ending that support is key to creating the types of international pressure that could, eventually, lead a critical mass of Israelis to recalculate and reassess their commitment to maintaining the status quo..
If that is indeed the goal, then there is a clear danger in placing one’s hopes on Netanyahu’s political demise. However convenient it may seem, it is impossible to place the responsibility for decades of abusive and illegal treatment of Palestinians on the shoulders of one man.
- Netanyahu’s ‘total victory’ rhetoric takes an extreme turn ›
- This Democratic insider wants to rewrite the party’s Israel playbook ›