Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s greatest political asset is no longer Benjamin Netanyahu. It is the opposition. For years, his rivals have mistaken national exhaustion with Netanyahu for public faith in them. They have changed leaders, renamed parties, assembled coalitions, and returned each time to the same message: I am not Netanyahu. That may be a protest slogan. It is not a governing philosophy, and it is nowhere near enough for the Israel that now exists.
This is not an argument for absolving Netanyahu. October 7 happened on his watch, and the conception that Hamas could be contained, deterred, and managed collapsed in blood. The military and intelligence establishment failed to understand Hamas, interpret the signs it possessed, and defend Israeli communities when the attack began.
No published inquiry has established that Netanyahu received a precise operational warning and simply ignored it. But political responsibility is larger than a document placed on a prime minister’s desk. Netanyahu presided over the doctrine that failed, and he must answer for it.
Accountability, however, is not amnesia. David Ben-Gurion declared the state. But the powerful, technological, globally consequential country the opposition now asks to inherit is, in no small part, Netanyahu’s modern Israel.
Israel is no longer a struggling young nation begging to enter the room.
It is a regional military power, a global technology center, an OECD economy, and a country that built open partnerships with Arab governments once considered unreachable. Netanyahu did not build that Israel alone. No leader could. Yet his economic reforms, strategic focus, campaign against Iran, and the Abraham Accords helped shape the Israel that his rivals now claim they can lead.
Replacing Netanyahu, therefore, requires more than persuading Israelis that they are tired of him. A successor must preserve what he helped build, repair what failed under him, and govern at a higher level.
Israel requires a leader who can maneuver locally and internationally
Winning votes inside Israel is only part of the job. Weapons, trade, diplomatic protection, normalization, and the IDF’s freedom of action are influenced beyond Israel’s borders. A prime minister must understand Washington, Arab capitals, global markets, hostile media, and people who do not think like Israelis. Israel is not searching for a competent mayor with a national title. It requires a statesman.
The founding generation understood this. Israel placed figures such as Golda Meir and Abba Eban before the world because they could translate Jewish sovereignty into the language of the people Israel needed to persuade.
Meir’s American upbringing and Eban’s Cambridge education were not ornaments. They were diplomatic weapons. They understood that an Israeli leader abroad never represents only himself. Every sentence, gesture, photograph, and interview tells the world whether the Jewish state is prepared, disciplined, and in command.
That is why Naftali Bennett’s ill-fitting suit at COP26 was not entirely trivial. Bad tailoring does not disqualify a prime minister. But when the suit becomes the story, the representative has failed to understand the stage. Israeli culture prizes informality and bluntness. The international arena can read the same qualities as provincialism. Stagecraft cannot replace statecraft, but for Israel, it is part of statecraft.
International fluency means nothing without strategic clarity. Too many politicians still repeat “two-state solution” as though the phrase survived October 7 untouched. It did not. A June 2026 INSS survey found that only 25% of Israelis supported a two-state solution.
I do not believe a broad Jewish Israeli coalition capable of replacing Netanyahu can be led by someone who still treats Palestinian statehood as the inevitable destination of Israeli policy. Such a candidate is telling the public that October 7 changed the body count but not the conception.
My position is unambiguous. I do not support the establishment of a Palestinian state, and I do not believe it is realistic under present or foreseeable conditions. Palestinians should not be denied dignity, prosperity, civil government, or a future. But sovereignty is not a humanitarian program. It carries armies, borders, treaties, weapons, international standing, and the ability to invite hostile powers into strategically dominant territory.
Israel removed every Jewish community and its permanent military presence from Gaza in 2005. Hamas turned the territory into a terror fortress and ultimately launched the deadliest attack in Israel’s history. Repeating that experiment from land overlooking Jerusalem, the coastal plain, and Ben-Gurion Airport is national recklessness dressed in diplomatic language.
The claimed Palestinian right of return makes the old formula even more dishonest. The world proposes a Palestinian state beside Israel while preserving a Palestinian national claim inside Israel. That is not two states for two peoples. It is one Palestinian state immediately, followed by a permanent campaign to dismantle the Jewish state demographically. There can be no peace until mass return into sovereign Israel is rejected permanently and the fantasy of reversing Jewish sovereignty is defeated.
Why the two-state notion is dead
A credible alternative government must therefore move beyond the two-state paradigm, not merely beyond Netanyahu.
Palestinians can exercise extensive civil self-government, build local institutions, expand economic opportunity, and administer their communities. Arab governments can assume greater responsibility for investment, education, development, and deradicalization.
Israel must retain overriding security freedom and prevent another sovereign military platform from rising beside its capital, airport, and population centers. Policy must begin with the world that exists, not the world foreign ministries keep pretending exists.
The Abraham Accords showed what realism can accomplish. The governments that normalized with Israel have not all abandoned support for Palestinian statehood. But the accords destroyed the Palestinian veto over Israel’s regional acceptance.
Arab governments proved that they could pursue security, technology, commerce, and strategic cooperation with Israel without waiting for Ramallah’s permission.
Any alternative government worthy of the name should deepen that achievement, not drag Israel backward into formulas buried beneath the ruins of October 7.
This is the standard that Netanyahu’s challengers have not met. They must offer a security doctrine, an economic program, international fluency, cultural confidence, and the stature to represent a powerful Jewish state before allies and enemies alike.
They must correct Netanyahu’s failures without erasing his achievements.
Rejecting Netanyahu is not the same as understanding Israel, and replacing a prime minister is not the same as being qualified to lead the country he leaves behind.
Israelis deserve a contest between governing visions, not a choice between one man and a vacuum. Netanyahu will be replaced when someone proves capable of carrying Israel’s power at home and before the world, while protecting what he built and repairing what he broke. Until then, “not Netanyahu” is not the opposition’s strategy. It is Netanyahu’s insurance policy.
The writer is the founder and CEO of The Israel Innovation Fund, a regular Jerusalem Post opinion writer, and the author of the forthcoming book What Is Zionism? Why Never Again Is Not Enough.