A Netanyahu loss in Israel’s looming election won’t slow the hatred

In six weeks, Israelis will go to the polls to elect a new government. They will be doing so for the first time since the Hamas pogrom of Oct. 7, 2023, brutally transformed the political landscape for both Israelis and the increasingly beleaguered Jewish communities outside the Jewish state.

The lives, security and communal fortunes of Diaspora Jews have never been so closely bound up with events in Israel and the wider region as they are right now. As I wrote last week, any Israeli decision to resume war against Hamas in Gaza over its refusal to disarm will likely ignite an even more intense wave of antisemitism on a global scale. That will be the case whether that decision is taken by current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or, should he lose the ballot, by his successor.

For Israelis, there are myriad painful issues, as well as critical social and political cleavages, that will inform how they vote. We shouldn’t forget (though it feels like ancient history now) that on the eve of Oct. 7, Israelis had been looking mainly inward, finding themselves bitterly divided over Netanyahu’s judicial reform program. The issue remains alive, while the burning question of whether and how to pull Haredim who evade military service into the Israeli Defense Forces will be a key determinant of votes.

But for pro-Israel Diaspora Jews, many of whom regard Netanyahu negatively (among American Jews, 56% according to a Pew survey in July), or who respect him and his achievements but feel it’s time for change, the anxieties surrounding the election are more basic: Can Israel survive? And can we?

I don’t think I’m unearthing any great truth when I say that the replacement of Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition by a centrist Zionist government will make little difference to how Israel is perceived by its adversaries. Israel is not vilified solely because of Netanyahu, just as America was not vilified during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars solely because of George W. Bush.

At most, Netanyahu, like President George W. Bush before him, became a powerful symbol of that hatred, not the source of it. From the International Criminal Court in The Hague to the keffiyeh mob in Manhattan, those who fling the accusation of “war criminal” in his direction would have done the same had Naftali Bennett, Yair Lapid or Gadi Eisenkot led the Israeli response to the Hamas atrocities. Their hatred runs far deeper.

The Bush era saw a massive revival of ideological anti-Americanism around the world, which ebbed during President Barack Obama’s two terms in office, and then surged again when Donald Trump won his first term in 2016. This pattern suggests that changing leaders can produce slight, temporary improvements to international public perception. Nevertheless, the fundamental discourse of America as a greedy, resource-devouring, global hegemon that was so important to the anti-war movement during the 2000s has remained intact.

So will it be for a new Israeli prime minister. If Netanyahu is replaced, his successor may well find that diplomacy will be less strained—until, of course, the next crisis hits. But for the pro-Hamas movement, whose noxious beliefs have poisoned everything from media coverage of the conflict to municipal elections in Europe and North America, it will be business as usual from the off.

No antisemitic thug is going to refrain from throwing a Molotov cocktail at a synagogue because Netanyahu is no longer prime minister. The same logic applies to the crazy-eyed, blue-haired pundits on social media and the podcast world, and—at a time when The New York Times carries outlandish allegations about the IDF using dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners—even the more refined souls in the legacy media. Indeed, Netanyahu’s potential successors would be advised to start mentally preparing themselves now to take on the role of “Global-Villain-in-Chief.”

When the demonstrators start burning images of Bennett or Eisenkot, instead of Netanyahu, or representing them in puppet form at their protests with grotesquely antisemitic imagery, their real target will remain Israel itself. When journalists tell their audiences that Netanyahu’s successor is not much different from the current prime minister as far as the Palestinians are concerned, that will be presented as a consequence of Jerusalem’s supposed “apartheid” policies, rather than the selection of any particular leader.

Israel’s elections, then, are of critical importance to Israelis—and Jews, in general—because the result will determine who leads Israel in the coming years during a period when the threat from Iran and its proxies, including Hamas, remains live, while Jew-hatred shows no sign of abating.

But for Israel’s detractors, who runs the country makes no difference. They want to see it gone from the map.

No state in the world faces as much rhetorical opposition to its existence as Israel does. Just last week, Khawaja Asif, Pakistan’s foreign minister, described Israel as a “threat to the entire Muslim world” before denouncing it as an “illegitimate state” whose origins lay in the British government’s Balfour Declaration of 1917.

For the history buffs among us, this was more than a little amusing given that Pakistan—a corrupt, poverty-ridden failed state—was itself a British imperial creation that went on to commit a real genocide when East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, tried to separate in 1971.

But we are long past the time when scoring points is of any use. When it comes to Israel especially, there is a marked tendency to believe what you want to believe, rather than what happens to be true.

As Diaspora Jews observe Israeli Jews vote in October, they should bear Asif’s words in mind. Nearly 80 years after the creation of the modern-day Jewish state, the foreign minister of a U.N. member state—one, to boot, that possesses nuclear weapons and touts itself as a U.S. ally—can publicly wish for its destruction with no material consequences.

In such an environment, elections aren’t fundamentally about taxation bands or increasing school choice. They are about the best methods of securing the very survival of the country and the nation.

For Israel in 2026, that means peace through strength, and strength before peace.