On the afternoon of 11 July 1948, Lydda, the city located between Jaffa and Ramla at a vital junction of Palestine’s roads and railway lines, was weighed down by fear and refugees. Over several weeks, thousands of Palestinians had poured into the city from neighbouring villages emptied under the pressure of Zionist attacks. Homes filled with people uprooted from their own communities, while the narrow streets became crowded with families carrying whatever possessions they could manage and the immense weight of their grief. Above them, the city awaited its fate beneath a sky charged with bombardment and warnings.
Lydda entered that moment already encircled by the consequences of the preceding weeks. Jaffa and its surrounding villages had fallen, while the Lydda and Ramla region had been isolated from the rest of Palestinian society. This opened the way for Operation Dani, the Zionist plan to seize Lydda, Ramla and Latrun and secure the road between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
To the Zionist leadership, Lydda was a transportation hub, an airport, a railway station and a geographical key to controlling the heart of Palestine. To its residents and the refugees sheltering there, it was the last refuge before complete exposure.
“To the Zionist leadership, Lydda was a transportation hub, an airport, a railway station and a geographical key to controlling the heart of Palestine.”
When the attack began, an armoured force commanded by Moshe Dayan, who would later become Israel’s defence minister, launched a rapid raid through Lydda’s streets. Vehicles advanced through gunfire and dust as panic spread from one house to another. The city had no organised military protection, while supplies had been severed under the Zionist siege. In that deadly vacuum, a final, fragmented and surrounded resistance emerged, armed with little more than a limited supply of weapons and the determination of people who understood that they were fighting at the city’s last line of defence.
By 12 July, Lydda had effectively fallen. Zionist forces positioned themselves around the city centre, imposed a curfew and ordered men to gather inside the Grand Mosque, the Dahmash Mosque and local churches. Soldiers searched homes and threw grenades into some of them under the pretext that snipers were present.
Hundreds of Palestinians sought refuge inside the Dahmash Mosque, believing that the sanctity of the building might offer protection as the city collapsed around them. Instead, the mosque courtyard and its surroundings became the scene of one of the most painful episodes of the Palestinian Catastrophe.
Survivor testimonies described gunfire inside and around the mosque. Historical sources reported that dozens were killed there, after which the bodies of victims were burned in the city cemetery. Hundreds more were killed throughout Lydda’s streets and neighbourhoods.
At that moment, the order was issued that transformed the fall of Lydda and Ramla into one of the largest acts of ethnic cleansing during the 1948 Palestine war.
According to Israeli historian Benny Morris, Yigal Allon, commander of the Palmach forces and a leading figure in the left-wing Ahdut HaAvoda party, asked David Ben-Gurion what should be done with the populations of the two cities. Ben-Gurion, the leader of Labour Zionism and later the founder of the Israeli occupation state, responded with a decisive hand gesture: “Expel them.”
Yitzhak Rabin, then a young Haganah officer and operations director for Operation Dani, subsequently signed a military order stating: “The inhabitants of Lydda must be expelled quickly, without attention to age.”
Tens of thousands of Palestinians were forced out of Lydda, Ramla and the surrounding areas beneath the scorching July sun. They walked east towards Ramallah and the West Bank, carrying their children, a few belongings and the keys to homes they would never be permitted to return to.
At checkpoints along the route, money and jewellery were taken from those fleeing. Children, elderly people and women collapsed from thirst, exhaustion and heat. An Israeli military aircraft flew at low altitude above them, pressuring them to continue moving. The human column stretched along a punishing road that would become embedded in Palestinian memory as a march of death.
“Rabin’s journey from Lydda to Oslo offers an entry point into a deeper understanding of Israeli politics.”
Forty-five years later, in 1993, Rabin stood on the steps of the White House as Israel’s prime minister and extended his hand to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat before the world’s cameras.
The spectacle was presented as the birth of a new era. The left-wing leader who had signed the order to expel Lydda’s population was transformed into a “man of peace” within the Western imagination. He later received the Nobel Peace Prize alongside Arafat and Shimon Peres.
The Oslo process was wrapped in the language of peace, while the central Palestinian questions remained outside any final resolution: the refugees, Jerusalem, sovereignty, borders and the right of return.
The scene appeared to mark a transition from the bullet to the document. Yet the Palestinian remained trapped within the same equation: diminished land, deferred rights and sovereignty suspended at the discretion of the power that had uprooted the Palestinian people.
Rabin’s journey from Lydda to Oslo offers an entry point into a deeper understanding of Israeli politics.
The Zionist left, which presented itself to the world through the language of socialism and modernity, led the Palestinian Catastrophe, planned displacement operations, constructed the first mechanisms of control and imposed military rule on the Palestinians who remained within the borders of the newly established occupation state.
The Zionist right, which later inherited the project, continued along the same path, but with a more explicit language rooted in religion, nationalism, supremacy and claims of historical entitlement.
Israel’s hard-line right-wing parties opposed Rabin’s political initiatives. In 1995, he was ultimately assassinated by an Israeli Jew.
This history reveals why the recurring portrayal of Israel as divided between a moderate left and an extremist right is a misleading framework for understanding the Palestinian question.
The divisions within Israeli politics are real when it comes to governance, the economy, religion and the desired structure of the state. Yet those divisions narrow considerably when the subject is the Palestinians.
The right of return is rejected. Full Palestinian sovereignty is postponed or denied. Jerusalem is removed from any serious negotiation. Settlement expansion advances as a physical reality on the ground before it ever becomes an item for discussion.
“The divisions within Israeli politics are real when it comes to governance, the economy, religion and the structure of the state, but they narrow considerably when the subject is the Palestinians.”
Today, in the aftermath of the events of 7 October 2023 and the genocidal war that followed in Gaza, the Israeli occupation is entering another electoral moment.
It is being marketed as a confrontation between the right-wing camp of Benjamin Netanyahu, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, and an opposition presented to international audiences as more rational and moderate.
But the Palestinian question extends far beyond the names of the candidates or the composition of the next coalition.
From Lydda in 1948 to Gaza today, from Ben-Gurion to Netanyahu, and from Rabin to the current opposition leadership, a single thread runs through the structure of the Zionist project. It is sustained by a broad consensus that denies Palestinian rights. Its public faces change from one election to the next, but its foundations remain stronger than the ballot box.
While some await the election results as though they might open a fundamentally different chapter, Palestinian memory delivers a harsher and clearer conclusion: the faces change, but the wound that opened in Lydda remains exposed in Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem and the refugee camps to this day.
The Zionist Left: From Ben-Gurion to the Palestinian Catastrophe
On 7 July 1937, the British Royal Peel Commission, established by London following the Great Palestinian Revolt, recommended partitioning Palestine between Arabs and Jews.
The recommendation triggered a fierce debate within the Zionist movement. Some viewed the proposed Jewish state on part of Palestine as an opportunity that should be seized, while others preferred to wait for a moment in which greater territorial ambitions could be realised.
Less than three months later, on 5 October 1937, David Ben-Gurion, then chairman of the Jewish Agency’s executive committee and the most prominent leader of Labour Zionism, wrote to his son Amos, who was living in a collective settlement.
In that letter, Ben-Gurion expressed more clearly than many of his contemporaries how partition fitted into Zionist strategy.
He told his son that a Jewish state established on part of Palestine would represent a beginning rather than an end, and that every increase in power would help secure possession of the entire country.
The letter appeared on the surface to be a private family message. In reality, it clearly exposed the worldview of the man who would later lead the establishment of the Israeli occupation state.
For Ben-Gurion, accepting partition was one stage in a longer process, not a final settlement with the Palestinian people. Acquiring land generated power, power opened the way to acquiring more land, and the emerging state would be transformed from a limited entity into an instrument for completing the wider project.
“For Ben-Gurion, accepting partition was one stage in a longer process, not a final settlement with the Palestinian people.”
The letter provides an important starting point for dismantling one of the most deeply rooted images in Western discourse about Israel: the portrayal of the Zionist left as a moderate, rational and pragmatic current standing in opposition to a more extreme religious and nationalist right.
Labour Zionism, represented by Mapai, the Labour Party, the Histadrut trade union federation and the collective settlements, was presented as the movement that built the modern state, its institutions, its trade unions and its socialist model.
That image conceals the reality that the Zionist left led the settlement project, planned displacement, constructed the mechanisms of control and transformed the Palestinian Catastrophe from a military event into a permanent political and legal structure.
Mapai, and later its successor the Labour Party, was founded by Ben-Gurion in 1930 through the merger of several Zionist labour currents. It dominated Jewish society in Palestine before 1948 and remained the central political force in Israel until Likud’s rise to power in 1977.
Under Mapai’s leadership, Labour Zionism became an integrated network of political, economic and military institutions.
The Histadrut managed labour and significant parts of the economy. Collective settlements consolidated Zionist possession of the land. The Jewish National Fund acquired land and held it in the name of the Jewish people. Military organisations protected that expansion and converted it into an enforced reality whenever required.
Slogans such as “the conquest of land” and “the conquest of labour” stood at the centre of this project.
On the surface, these appeared to be slogans about construction, production and collective work. In practice, they meant the systematic replacement of Palestinians by Jewish settlers, the exclusion of Palestinian workers from employment and the creation of a separate Jewish economy detached from the Indigenous population.
The Histadrut, celebrated as a progressive labour federation, promoted a policy of exclusively Jewish labour. It pressured employers to remove Palestinian workers from Jewish workplaces and restricted organisation, protection and economic privileges to Jewish society.
Zionist socialism therefore acquired its own distinct meaning: equality within the settler community and exclusion for the Indigenous population outside it.
Within this framework, the idea of organised population transfer became part of the intellectual and political structure of the settlement project.
Palestinian historian and academic Nur Masalha documented the presence of this idea across the various Zionist currents, including the Labour movement that would later lead the state. He showed that plans for Palestinian displacement accompanied the Zionist project from its emergence and stood at the centre of Zionist doctrine itself.
By the late 1930s, Ben-Gurion was linking war to the opportunity to drive Palestinians from their land. Within this vision, the Palestinian population represented a demographic and political obstacle to the establishment of a Jewish state with a clear majority and stable control.
“Zionist socialism acquired its own distinct meaning: equality within the settler community and exclusion for the Indigenous population outside it.”
From the beginning of the 1940s, the Jewish Agency began developing more sophisticated instruments of knowledge and control.
Between 1940 and 1947, Zionist institutions compiled an extensive intelligence archive known as the Village Files. It contained detailed information on Palestinian villages, including maps, water sources, agricultural lands, livestock, family structures, local leadership, political relationships and the positions taken by residents during the Palestinian revolt of 1936 to 1939.
In the final updates before the 1948 war, the files included lists of wanted individuals, influential figures and participants in Palestinian national activity. This information was later used in searches, arrests and expulsions.
The Village Files reveal the extent of the planning that preceded the Palestinian Catastrophe.
Zionist forces entered Palestinian villages already knowing the names of local leaders, the size of landholdings, the locations of wells, the structure of families, the direction of roads and the communities’ points of vulnerability.
As the war advanced, archival knowledge became a military instrument. The assault on Palestinian villages was not an improvised act carried out amid the confusion of war. It had been preceded by years of surveillance, classification and assessment overseen by the institutions and civilian and military leaders of the Zionist left.
In March 1948, Plan Dalet was completed.
The plan included military operations through which Zionist forces displaced Palestinians during the Palestinian Catastrophe. It contained instructions for seizing Palestinian villages and urban centres, destroying some of them and expelling their residents from areas the Zionist leadership intended to incorporate into the emerging Jewish state.
As the plan was implemented, expulsion became an extensive policy. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were uprooted, hundreds of villages were destroyed and entire urban neighbourhoods were emptied of their inhabitants. The Palestinian refugee crisis emerged as one of the largest consequences of the 1948 war.
All of this was led by a political current known in the West as the left.
Ben-Gurion served first as chairman of the Jewish Agency and later as the first prime minister of the occupation government. Mapai was the central political force, while cadres from collective settlements and labour movements formed a substantial part of the military and political elite.
The Palestinian Catastrophe, with all its devastation, was the product of this Labour Zionist project. It spoke in the language of socialism and modernity while producing displacement, expulsion, land confiscation and the remaking of Palestinian geography.
After the declaration of the Israeli state, control shifted from military warfare to law and administration.
Ben-Gurion rejected the return of Palestinian refugees. Many villages were destroyed to prevent their inhabitants from returning. The Palestinian landscape within the new state was then reorganised through legislation and bureaucracy.
The Absentees’ Property Law of 1950 became one of the primary foundations of this transformation.
The law defined an “absentee” in exceptionally broad terms. It included refugees who had been expelled or had fled beyond the borders of Palestine. It also included Palestinians who remained within Israel’s borders but had left their villages during the war and moved to nearby towns.
This created the category of “present absentees”: citizens living inside the state and formally holding Israeli citizenship, yet legally classified as absent from their own property.
Through this mechanism, the lands of refugees and internally displaced Palestinians were transferred to the Custodian of Absentee Property. They then passed to government and quasi-government bodies before being incorporated into the Israeli land system.
“After the declaration of the Israeli state, control shifted from military warfare to law and administration.”
The Palestinians who remained inside the occupation state’s borders after 1948 entered another phase of subjugation.
From 1948 until 1966, they lived under strict military rule despite formally holding Israeli citizenship.
Researcher Shira Robinson described their condition as that of “citizen strangers”. They were citizens of a state that presented itself as liberal, yet in practice they were subjects of a colonial regime that simultaneously restricted their movement, employment and civil rights.
The Kafr Qasim massacre of 1956 exposed the unrestrained nature of this system.
Under Ben-Gurion’s government, immediately before the tripartite assault on Egypt, a curfew was imposed on villages in the border region extending from Umm al-Fahm in the north to Kafr Qasim in the south.
Workers and farmers returning from their fields were not informed that the curfew had been declared. Soldiers then opened fire on those who unknowingly violated it.
Forty-nine people were killed and dozens were seriously wounded. Some officers were later tried, but the senior political leadership remained beyond accountability.
“The structure of Israeli control over the Palestinians had been completed before Likud came to power.”
In this sense, the structure of Israeli control over the Palestinians had already been completed before Likud reached power.
The right inherited an army built by Ben-Gurion, confiscation laws drafted by left-wing governments, military rule administered by Mapai, agricultural settlements established by Labour movements and a separate Jewish economy consolidated by the Histadrut.
When Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, it was a Labour government that began settlement construction in the newly occupied territories. This was a natural continuation of a system already tested against Palestinians inside the 1948 borders.
The Zionist Right and the Doctrine of the Iron Wall
In 1923, Ze’ev Vladimir Jabotinsky, the leader of Revisionist Zionism and the ideological rival of Labour Zionism, established the clearest theoretical basis for the Zionist right in his famous essay, The Iron Wall.
The essay stripped the Zionist project of the reassuring language used by some of its leaders and of claims that attempted to present settlement as a path to prosperity.
Jabotinsky addressed the essence of the conflict directly. Every Indigenous people, he argued, resists colonisers for as long as it retains hope of preventing the colonisation of its homeland. The Palestinians, he understood, would be no exception.
Jabotinsky recognised that the Arabs of Palestine understood the true nature of the Zionist project and were defending their homeland as any people would when they saw their country being transformed into the national project of another population.
From this, he reached his central conclusion: Zionist settlement would not advance with the consent of the Indigenous population. It would advance under the protection of an independent force imposed against their will, behind an “iron wall” that they could not break.
“Jabotinsky argued that Zionist settlement would not advance with the consent of the Indigenous population, but under the protection of a force independent of their will, behind an iron wall they could not penetrate.”
This foundational position shows that the difference between the Zionist right and left concerned language and method more than ultimate objectives.
The Labour left developed its project through labour, land, trade unions, collective settlements, the modern state and gradual institutional construction.
The Revisionist right founded by Jabotinsky moved directly to the heart of the conflict. It recognised that the Palestinians would not voluntarily accept Zionism, that the Arab world would not surrender to it and that the project required a force capable of convincing Palestinians that resistance had no prospect of success.
The movement became known as Revisionist Zionism because it sought to push mainstream Zionism towards a broader and more uncompromising demand: Jewish sovereignty over the entirety of what Zionists considered the historical Land of Israel, secured through weapons, political power and international alliances.
Jabotinsky was not an isolated theorist on the margins of the Zionist movement. He founded the current that would later become the backbone of the Israeli right.
Betar emerged as a youth movement that mobilised generations around a hardened form of Jewish nationalism. Revisionist Zionism developed into a political force that rejected the gradualist approach of Labour Zionism. The Irgun then emerged as its military arm, translating this worldview into direct violence in Palestine.
While Labour Zionism promoted the image of the working Jew, the Revisionist right promoted the image of the fighting Jew, who seized, imposed and surrounded the Indigenous population through force.
The conflict between left and right within the Zionist movement was intense over leadership, method, social class, relations with Britain, religion and nationalism.
Yet Palestine, as both a land and the homeland of an Indigenous people, remained at the centre of the deeper consensus between them.
The left sought to build a Jewish majority through institutions, immigration, exclusively Jewish labour, land purchases and eventually war.
The right acknowledged earlier and more explicitly that the project would collide with the Palestinian people and that domination required overwhelming force capable of convincing Palestinians and the wider Arab world that defeating Zionism was impossible.
The first framed the struggle in the language of construction. The second openly described it from the beginning as a struggle for sovereignty.
“While Labour Zionism promoted the working Jew, the Revisionist right promoted the fighting Jew who seized, imposed and surrounded the Indigenous population through force.”
Menachem Begin emerged from this school as Jabotinsky’s effective political heir.
Begin came from the Betar movement and absorbed Revisionist Zionism in Eastern Europe. He arrived in Palestine during the 1940s and became commander of the Irgun.
His career reveals one of the central contradictions in the history of the Israeli occupation state. The man who led an armed organisation that carried out bombings and assassinations and participated in massacres against Palestinians later became prime minister and received the Nobel Peace Prize.
The Irgun embodied a worldview in which force created political reality, military operations delivered political messages and terror became an instrument for reshaping the human geography of Palestine.
The organisation bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946, killing dozens of British, Arab and Jewish victims.
It later joined Lehi in attacking the village of Deir Yassin on 9 April 1948, several weeks before the declaration of the Israeli state.
The village had entered into a non-aggression agreement with the Haganah, and its residents lived relatively far from the main lines of fighting. Nevertheless, within hours, Deir Yassin became the site of a massacre in which more than 100 Palestinians were killed, including women, children and elderly people.
The significance of Deir Yassin lay in its political and psychological impact as much as in the brutality of the massacre itself.
Begin understood the value of terror as a weapon in a war of displacement. In his memoirs, he described the spread of fear after the massacre and the flight of Palestinians from several areas because of what they had heard.
He treated the massacre as a military and psychological act that had served the Zionist project. Within the vocabulary of the Zionist right, the massacre became part of the management of war rather than a departure from it.
More importantly, Deir Yassin demonstrated the fluid boundaries between the formal Zionist establishment and groups portrayed as extremists.
The Haganah, which was associated with the Labour movement and the central Zionist establishment, provided forms of support or coordination for the operation within the wider battle for Jerusalem and its surroundings.
The armed right and the institutional left converged in a single act of terror and expulsion, despite the differences in their names and public rhetoric.
After the establishment of Israel, Begin founded the Herut movement.
The Irgun entered parliament in party form, carrying its armed legacy into the centre of Israeli politics as a source of political mobilisation and symbolic capital.
Herut’s rise alarmed prominent Jewish intellectuals, including Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt. Along with others, they warned in a well-known 1948 letter to The New York Times about the new party that had emerged from the Irgun.
Nevertheless, the political process continued to its logical conclusion. The movement once regarded in Israel’s early years as a fascist threat would, decades later, govern the state through Likud.
In 1977, Begin came to power in a transformation known within Israel as a political upheaval.
The long dominance of Mapai and the Labour Party ended. Likud rose as the representative of Revisionist Zionism, marginalised Jews from Middle Eastern and North African backgrounds, settlers, nationalists and broad sectors resentful of the Ashkenazi Labour elite’s control of the state.
The transformation was both social and political. Yet the right did not begin the policy of controlling Palestinians from the ground up.
It inherited a fully prepared state with an established army, confiscation laws, settlements and a security doctrine that viewed the Palestinian as a permanent threat.
What changed was that the right gave this structure a more explicit language based on historical entitlement, the biblical concept of the Land of Israel, opposition to withdrawal and settlement expansion as a national duty.
“The right inherited a fully prepared state with its army, confiscation laws, settlements and security doctrine that viewed the Palestinian as a permanent threat.”
Begin signed a peace agreement with Egypt, but retained Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.
Within the language of the Zionist right, the West Bank does not appear as occupied territory. It is referred to by the biblical names Judea and Samaria and treated as the heart of the movement’s religious and nationalist narrative.
Peace, from the right-wing perspective, therefore meant removing Arab states from the conflict, not genuinely recognising Palestinian rights to their own land.
Israel withdrew from Sinai because it stood outside the biblical centre of Zionist imagination. The West Bank and Jerusalem remained within the sphere of doctrine, identity and sovereignty.
Begin’s peace agreement with Egypt therefore separated the official Arab track from the Palestinian struggle and allowed the occupation to consolidate its control over Palestinians beneath a new political cover.
Yitzhak Shamir, who came from the more extreme Lehi organisation, later embodied another face of the Zionist right.
Shamir was less theatrical than Begin and more representative of a security-state mentality that regarded negotiations as a tool for gaining time.
During and after his leadership, settlement expansion became a permanent policy. The right learned that control did not require a formal declaration of annexation. It could be achieved through bypass roads, settlement councils, military bases, permit systems, territorial classifications and the fragmentation of Palestinian life.
Under Ariel Sharon, the right entered the era of the settler general.
Sharon was shaped by the army, military raids, massacres and wars, from Qibya to Lebanon, and from the sponsorship of settlements to the restructuring of Israeli control over Gaza.
He embodied the brutal pragmatism of a right wing that used force to alter realities and then reorganised the occupation whenever certain forms of control became too costly.
“Sharon embodied the brutal pragmatism of a right wing that used force to alter realities and then reorganised the occupation whenever certain forms of control became too costly.”
Under Netanyahu, the Israeli right reached its longest-lasting and most politically adaptable form.
Netanyahu combined Jabotinsky’s legacy with sophisticated media presentation for American audiences, the political use of security fears, market economics and nationalist populism.
He worked to disable the Palestinian national project and dismantle any political horizon that might lead to statehood or sovereignty.
He managed the conflict as a permanent condition that could be controlled, encouraged Palestinian division and promoted the idea that Israel could normalise relations with Arab governments without addressing Palestinian rights.
Yet Netanyahu often remained a politician who understood the cost of language.
He relied on the vocabulary of security, terrorism, deterrence, the Iranian threat, military superiority and regional partnerships.
The newer generation of the right, represented by Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, has discarded many of these masks.
When Smotrich said in 2023 that the Palestinian town of Huwara should be wiped out, he was translating the history of the iron wall into the language of contemporary religious settlement politics.
Jabotinsky had framed the issue as a cold colonial inevitability: the Indigenous population would resist, and the Zionist project needed sufficient force to break its hope.
Smotrich and Ben-Gvir add a biblical, populist and openly racist charge to that logic. The land, they insist, belongs exclusively to Jews, and the state should carry out what settlers once did outside formal legal structures.
“The right moved from being the political heir to Zionist violence to becoming the direct representative of settler violence within the institutions of government.”
This is the most significant transformation within the Israeli right.
It moved from being the political heir to Zionist violence to becoming the direct representative of settler violence inside the institutions of government.
During Begin’s era, the Irgun had to become a political party before it could enter the state.
During Netanyahu’s era, the followers of Meir Kahane required electoral alliances before they could enter government.
After 7 October 2023, the boundaries between the state, settlers, the army and religious movements became increasingly fluid.
The armed settler in the West Bank, the minister demanding more weapons and authority for him, the army protecting him and the government financing him all operate within a single system. Its purpose is to transform Palestinian existence into a condition subjected to continuous pressure, fragmentation and destruction.
Israel Is Searching for Someone to Manage the War
A few days after the Israeli parliament voted on a proposal to dissolve itself in early June, Netanyahu chose to address his supporters from a settlement in the occupied West Bank.
Speaking before an audience that understood the meaning of land within the Zionist political vocabulary, the Israeli prime minister spoke in the language of maps and control.
He declared that his army controlled more than 60 per cent of the Gaza Strip and that military instructions were aimed at increasing that figure to 70 per cent.
The coming Israeli election therefore appears to be an extension of the war through political means.
Netanyahu, surrounded by declining popularity, the anger of the families of Israelis killed in the war and fractures within his right-wing coalition, has attempted to transform military control into electoral capital.
He has turned the destruction of Gaza into evidence of strength and the continuation of war into a programme for political survival.
From this perspective, the Israeli election is a struggle over how the war should be managed, not whether it should be ended.
The contest within Israel concerns which leadership can best restore the army’s image, rebuild deterrence and persuade domestic and international audiences that control over the Palestinians can continue through more efficient and less costly methods.
“The Israeli election is a struggle over how the war should be managed, not whether it should be ended.”
Since 7 October, the Israeli occupation state has experienced a multilayered crisis of confidence.
The image of the political leadership has been damaged. The prestige of the military establishment has been shaken. The mythology of borders protected by technology, intelligence and walls has fractured.
As the war on Gaza expanded and tensions extended into Lebanon, Syria and Iran, Israel’s electoral debate became increasingly focused on managing danger while moving further away from its cause: occupation, siege, settlement expansion and the broader system of control imposed on the Palestinian people.
Israeli political discourse, among both Netanyahu and his opponents, therefore revolves around failure, management, accountability and preparedness.
The opposition attacks Netanyahu over the failures of 7 October, the continuation of the war and the damage done to Israel’s image among its allies. Yet it keeps the foundation of the Palestinian tragedy outside the centre of debate.
Each political camp differs in its proposed method for managing the “Palestinian issue”, while the underlying assumption remains unchanged: the Palestinian is a threat who must be broken, isolated or held under permanent control.
This belief became more entrenched after 7 October.
Israeli opinion polls showed growing opposition among Israeli Jews to the establishment of a Palestinian state, alongside a rising belief that withdrawal from the West Bank would turn it into another Gaza.
This language moved beyond the boundaries of the religious and nationalist right. It entered the centre of Israeli society, the remnants of the Zionist left and the discourse of former generals who present themselves as rational alternatives to Netanyahu.
In this context, rationality means managing the occupation with greater discipline, lowering its international cost and reorganising it militarily and politically. It does not mean dismantling it.
“The election becomes a test of which narrative can most convincingly address Israeli society after the shock.”
This helps explain the prominence of figures such as Naftali Bennett, Yair Lapid and Gadi Eisenkot as alternatives to Netanyahu.
Bennett is an explicit right-wing politician whose record is closely tied to settlement expansion and domination.
Lapid presents himself as a centrist leader capable of repairing relations with Western governments and reducing Israel’s internal divisions.
Eisenkot comes from the military establishment and carries the image of a general able to repair the damage caused by politicians.
The competition between them is centred on restoring the image of an effective state after the shock of 7 October.
The election therefore becomes a test of which narrative can most convincingly address Israeli society after the shock.
Netanyahu presents himself as the leader who fought on several fronts, expanded the areas under Israeli control and rebuilt deterrence.
His opponents present him as the leader who presided over the greatest security failure in Israel’s history, prolonged the war, deepened the country’s isolation and subordinated state institutions to his political survival.
Yet across most Israeli electoral discourse, the Palestinian remains a military target, a bargaining instrument, a security threat, a demographic burden and an adversary who must be prevented from transforming any territory into a base of resistance.
There is little fundamental difference between the supposedly extremist right and the supposedly rational left.
The Zionist left built the settlement project itself more than 80 years ago. The right inherited it and reformulated it in language that was more explicit, more aggressive and less restrained.
Netanyahu may eventually leave office. His coalition may collapse. A new prime minister may speak more carefully, manage relations with Western governments more effectively and reduce the political cost of occupation.
But the wars will continue for as long as the political system remains committed to denying Palestinian sovereignty, rejecting the right of return, expanding settlements, controlling Jerusalem and treating the Palestinian people as a permanent security problem rather than a people entitled to freedom and their own land.
The names may change. The governing coalitions may change. The rhetoric may become more polished or more openly violent.
The foundations of the project remain.
