Friday, October 30, 2026
From Ian:
Herzog can secure his presidential legacy by bringing Netanyahu and Eisenkot together
Herzog can secure his presidential legacy by bringing Netanyahu and Eisenkot together
The politics of delegitimization and defamation, particularly the demonization of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by the Left, make the establishment of a broad Israeli government of repair an unlikely scenario.Jonathan Tobin: Netanyahu is a realist about Israel’s foes, not a fear-monger
Yet this is exactly what Israel needs now – the partnership in government of Netanyahu and one of his major rivals, say, the political parties led by Yashar head Gadi Eisenkot and/or Naftali Bennett – to together tackle Israel’s major challenges.
The question is: Who is going to disabuse both the Left and the Right of their belligerent, separatist, extremist dreams of establishing a one-sided government that relies on haredi (ultra-Orthodox) or Arab parties? Who is going to cajole Likud and Yashar and/or B’Yachad into a pseudo “unity” coalition government?
The answer, of course, should be the Israeli president. But I wonder whether President Isaac Herzog is up to the task.
Herzog comes from the Left (a former leader of the Labor Party), and he is already under pressure from his political home base to mandate and approve a narrow Eisenkot government based on an alliance with anti-Israel Islamists or anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox Jews; a government that defiantly excludes Netanyahu.
The camp’s overriding priority is to dethrone Netanyahu under any circumstances and at any cost. This camp expects Herzog to play along; nay, they demand that he brandish his bully pulpit to legitimize a government that embraces Mansour Abbas and Prof. Yousef Jabareen, or alternatively Yakov Asher and Yitzhak Goldknopf.
Such a government would handcuff the IDF in fighting Palestinian enemies and kill the hope of recapturing the Negev from Bedouin mafia gangs, and it would quash any plan for drafting haredim into the IDF. But so what? In the view of the hard Left, terminating Netanyahu is the higher goal that makes anything and everything kosher.
Herzog needs to repel the pressures and demands of the hard Left and wedge the mainstream parties, the two or three largest in Knesset, into a governing coalition, uneasy and fractious as it may be.
It is not enough for Herzog to say that he “will do everything in his power to avoid a repeat election scenario.” He must actively agitate for a broad Zionist government. He should aggressively intervene in the political process beyond the usual presidential consultative role following elections.
Herzog should declare that he will give the mandate to form a government first and foremost only to a political party leader that is up-front committed to seeking unity as his priority plan of action. And then he should reject any proto-government coalition brought to him that is not broad-based; that is, contingent on fractional Arab or haredi parties.
Herzog can and should go further in making a broad-based government possible by getting into the nitty-gritty of the issues that stand in the way, from Netanyahu’s future (rotation in the prime minister’s post, a timetable for retirement from politics, and a pardon) to good governance (formation of a national commission of investigation into the October 7 disaster, judicial reform, settlement policy, and haredi draft).
Don’t tell me that this isn’t the role of the Israeli president and that he has no powers for such interposition. Indeed, it is not the president’s classic role, and legally he has no such powers.
Moreover, Netanyahu is on firm ground in reminding Israeli voters that leaders and parties that campaign on pledges never to allow a Palestinian state or to accede to demands for concessions, including territorial withdrawals, often break their word.Canadian author warns Bondi lessons being forgotten
That’s exactly what happened with Yitzhak Rabin when he was elected prime minister in 1992 and reassured voters that he would not negotiate with the Palestine Liberation Organization and its terrorist leader Yasser Arafat, let alone empower them in the territories. But then, he did exactly that.
In 2003, Ariel Sharon was re-elected as prime minister by ridiculing his Labor Party opponent for proposing to withdraw from Gaza. Then Sharon, too, carried out the same policy himself in the summer of 2005 by pulling every Israeli soldier, settler and settlement out of Gaza, thus setting in motion the train of events that led to the creation of a Hamas terror state there and the tragedy of Oct. 7.
Moreover, as Haaretz consoled its left-wing readership over the summer, Eisenkot may have declared that he won’t accept a Palestinian state largely in order to curry favor with the voters. But in doing so, he was, the newspaper said, “running away from what everyone knows he believes.” That is probably true. The former general’s statements while he was chief of staff and those made by his advisers all point to acceptance of the Oslo mindset about the imperative of Israeli territorial withdrawals and the creation of a Palestinian state.
Under the circumstances, it’s far from unreasonable for Netanyahu to point this out and to speculate about whether a government led by Eisenkot would resist the inevitable pressure from foreign governments—possibly including the United States once President Donald Trump leaves office in January 2029—for a Palestinian state.
Nor is it fear-mongering to point out that a repetition of Sharon’s catastrophic blunder of withdrawing from Gaza in the far larger and more strategic Judea and Samaria would raise the likelihood of more Oct. 7-style attacks on Israel. Hamas, which would be certain to seize control of a state from its corrupt and feeble Fatah Party rivals who currently control the Palestinian Authority, has promised as much.
Nor is Netanyahu conjuring up imaginary threats when he speaks of the need to finish the process of eliminating Hamas in Gaza and defeating the Islamist regime in Tehran. Israelis know all too well that their enemies are not figments of their imagination on which an unscrupulous prime minister is preying.
And he isn’t making things up when he describes the radicalism of both the Arab parties that did so well in this week’s vote.
Halbfinger is correct that Ra’am has worked hard to sell itself to Jewish voters as a reasonable partner that can be trusted to be loyal to the state while standing up for the interests of Arab voters. Israelis may be proud to live in a country where the Arab minority enjoys equal rights under the law. But even if he served in the government led by Naftali Bennet and Yair Lapid in 2021 and 2022, many, if not most Israelis know that its leader Mansour Abbas’s Islamists beliefs make it impossible to truly accept the legitimacy and permanence of a Jewish state. What’s more, they also know the larger Joint List won’t even pretend to give up their dreams of Israel’s eradication. That’s true even if they are willing, for the moment, to prop up a minority government that would end Netanyahu’s career, due to the fact that he is the greatest foe of those who wish for Israel’s destruction.
Should Eisenkot rely on them to keep a minority government in power outside of the cabinet or ask them to join it outright, he would be giving them an effective veto over future military action to defend Israel against Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis. Some on the left may think that’s a good idea. But in rejecting such a scenario, Netanyahu would not be exploiting fears as much as pointing out to Israelis that Eisenkot would be doing what the overwhelming majority of Israelis, regardless of who they voted for on Oct. 27, oppose.
The specter of the genocidal intent of Hamas and Iran, for which the atrocities of Oct. 7 were just the trailer for what they want to do to all of Israel, is no boogeyman that Netanyahu pulls out of his bag of tricks to scare Israelis. It is a clear and present danger that must be addressed by any government of Israel, no matter who is at its head, if it is not to betray the trust of its people.
A still dangerous neighborhood
If Israelis understand—their victories in the post-Oct. 7 war and the survival of the Abraham Accords, notwithstanding the global surge of antisemitism—that they still live in a dangerous neighborhood, it’s not because they are fearful. It’s because they have been paying attention to events and are able to judge what happens when their leaders succumb to the temptation of earning the respect of the Times and liberal pundits, and seek to trade “land for peace.” In each case, such policies were not only a betrayal of campaign promises but also wound up doing nothing more than trading territory for terror that led to the loss of thousands of Israeli lives.
If Netanyahu retains a large amount of support, despite the understandable fatigue with a prime minister who has held power for so long and the impulse to make him the sole scapegoat for Oct. 7, it is because Israelis respect and value his realism. For all of his faults and mistakes, he is still the only major Israeli leader of his era who did not fall prey to the magical thinking that led to Oslo and the Gaza withdrawal, and its betrayed promises of gaining peace in exchange for a Palestinian state that the Palestinians don’t want. Pointing this out isn’t scare tactics. It’s realism.
The prime minister’s critics should consider whether their desire to ignore or downplay the real threats to Israel is something worse than speaking to the fears of Israelis: a deliberate attempt to disarm and weaken them in the face of very real genocidal threats.
Kinsella said governments and social media companies were the two entities most important in fighting the problem, and both had “dropped the ball”.
Of social media owners including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, he said: “You’ve got billionaires, in one case a trillionaire, who operate in this lawless, wild west environment where anything goes.
“We’re not asking them to donate a kidney. We’re asking them just to observe certain basic restraints, such as to promote truth and discourage hate and lies.”
He said governments should tell the companies: “You will do this, or there will be consequences … so far, there’s not really a government in the world that has done that.”
Kinsella was also critical of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and his Canadian counterpart Mark Carney for recognising a Palestinian state at the United Nations in September 2025. He said recognition had been predicated on elections, governance reform, changes to the school curriculum and an end to the Palestinian Authority’s “pay-for-slay” program.
“None of those things have happened, not one,” he said. “[The] Palestinian state, at least in the case of Gaza, is governed by a designated terrorist entity in this country and in my country.
“We have leadership that is weak and is either recklessly or wilfully blind to this virus of antisemitism and hatred that is spreading in our countries, and that in some cases has cost people their lives.”
Referring to the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, Kinsella said the Australian government had questions to answer over Bondi.
“Here, feet from where we are at the moment, you got 15 people [who] were slaughtered as a consequence of an ideology that was allowed to be taught without restraint in this country, and the people involved in that have to answer that. But so too does the government,” he said. “I’m hopeful that the commission of inquiry deals seriously with what it’s got, which is a serious problem.”
Kinsella also addressed a lunch for AIJAC supporters in Sydney on Monday. “The beast of antisemitism is out of its cage, and it is everywhere to be seen,” he told attendees.
Kinsella said he had fought antisemitism for decades as a lawyer, journalist and political adviser, facing threats against his life and at times requiring police protection. “I have never seen it as bad as it is now. Never,” he said.
He argued that antisemites across the political and ideological spectrum were driven by envy and resentment. “[They] envy your success in every endeavour. They envy the resilience and the strength of the Jewish people,” he said.
Kinsella said Israel was always going to prevail militarily, but a second war – “the information war, the propaganda war” – was under way. He said social media profiles began appearing across North America, Europe and the Middle East 18 months before October 7. He said they sat dormant until the day of the attack, then were used to spread denial of the atrocities.
Kinsella said most people in the West supported Israel and the Jewish community. But he warned that millions of young people on the right and the left “have fallen under the spell of Hamas and Iran and the Jew haters”.
“We cannot lose a generation. We cannot lose the future,” he said.
He said the campaign’s blueprint was devised 40 years ago, and traced its origins to the Soviet Union. “I believe we will win that war,” he said. “Because we must win that war.”
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