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Israel’s next election is formally a contest over who should govern, but the article argues that it is really a decision about whether the country can change course after years of war, political polarisation and growing international isolation. Binyamin Netanyahu offers voters continued military strength. His opponents promise repair. Neither side, however, has fully confronted the hardest choices that Israel faces.

Strength without an endgame

Netanyahu begins his campaign from a paradoxical position. Israel remains militarily and financially powerful, yet it has not achieved the decisive victories he promised. Hamas and Hizbullah are battered but entrenched, Iran’s nuclear and missile programmes survive, and Israeli forces remain stretched across Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and the occupied West Bank. The wars launched after the attacks of October 7th 2023 have produced uneasy ceasefires rather than durable settlements.

The diplomatic cost has also been steep. Israel’s conduct in Gaza has damaged its standing abroad, regional partners avoid public association with it and American support has weakened. The coming election, the first since October 7th, will therefore ask voters to judge more than Netanyahu’s record. They must choose between a nationalist-religious coalition that treats permanent mobilisation as security and an opposition that says the wars must end but hesitates to explain how.

That caution reflects a country that has shifted to the right. Opposition leaders criticise endless deployments, exhausted reservists and the failure to deliver “total victory”, yet they rarely discuss the policies that sustain the conflict: open-ended security zones, settlement expansion and the absence of a political settlement with the Palestinians. They fear being portrayed as weak. Even if they win, they would inherit the same problems immediately.

Polls give Netanyahu’s opponents a narrow parliamentary majority, but their coalition would stretch from nationalist right-wing parties to the Arab parties they often refuse to work with. They agree that Netanyahu should go; they do not agree on the future of the West Bank, the terms for ending the wars or the role of Palestinian statehood. Removing one leader would be easier than constructing a governing programme.

A domestic bargain under strain

The election also exposes a deeper conflict over who serves the state and who benefits from it. Netanyahu’s most reliable allies are the ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, parties. Around 90,000 religious students are exempt from military service even as the army approaches a third year of war. Government funding supports schools that teach little maths or other secular subjects, while roughly half of Haredi men do not work.

This arrangement is becoming harder to sustain. The Haredim already make up about 14% of Israel’s population and are its fastest-growing community. Nearly half of the children who started school in the latest year attended either ultra-Orthodox institutions or neglected Israeli-Arab schools. Without much better education and labour-force participation, a growing share of the population may be unable to support the tax base, armed forces and advanced economy on which the country depends.

Israel’s technology sector illustrates the risk. It employs more than a tenth of the workforce but relies on a core of fewer than 300,000 researchers, doctors and academics. That small, highly mobile group develops much of the country’s civilian wealth and defence technology. Prolonged war, political upheaval and international isolation make emigration more attractive while weak schools fail to prepare enough replacements.

An opposition government would probably draft more Haredi men, reduce subsidies for schools that reject a common curriculum and try to bring ultra-Orthodox and Arab pupils into a stronger national education system. It would also seek to restore checks and balances, rebuild a demoralised civil service and repair relations abroad. Such reforms would reach far beyond the familiar question of whether Netanyahu remains prime minister.

Winning would be the beginning

Israel’s economy has repeatedly proved resilient, including after the financial crisis, the pandemic and recent wars. That record gives Netanyahu’s supporters confidence that the country’s technology base and strategic value will overcome its current difficulties. The article is less sanguine. An economy dependent on a narrow professional elite cannot take brain drain, weak education and diplomatic isolation for granted indefinitely.

Netanyahu has described his ideal Israel as both Athens and “super-Sparta”: democratic and intellectually dynamic, but also militarily self-reliant. The article notes the warning embedded in the comparison. A democracy can decay, and a militarised society can exhaust itself.

His opponents appear to understand that a change of direction is necessary, but they have not yet levelled with voters. Israel cannot destroy every enemy, occupy indefinite security zones or avoid a just settlement with the Palestinians forever. Nor can it preserve national cohesion while leaving military service, education and economic participation so unevenly shared. If the opposition wins, the election will not resolve those tensions. It will merely give Israel another chance to face them.