Israel's Right has judged everyone else. Now it must judge itself - opinion

Between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Jews are supposed to conduct an accounting of the soul. The Israeli Right has become very good at conducting everyone else’s.

The generals failed. The Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) failed. The judges obstructed. The bureaucrats resisted. The media distorted. The Americans pressured. The Left divided the country. Some of those accusations contain truth, but they are no longer enough. At some point, a political movement that has governed Israel for much of the last generation cannot keep arriving at the scene of every failure as though it were merely a witness.

I write this from inside the national camp. I am not asking the Right to imitate the Left, apologize for Zionism, surrender Jewish power, or decide that everything we once believed was wrong. Quite the opposite. I am asking whether we remain serious enough to believe our own ideology. There is a profound difference between defending the Israeli Right from caricature and defending everything done in its name. We have increasingly forgotten it.

Ze’ev Jabotinsky understood Jewish power without worshiping power itself. He demanded Jewish statehood, military self-reliance and an unsentimental understanding of the hostility surrounding Zionism. He gave us the Iron Wall because he understood that Jewish national existence could not depend upon enemies voluntarily accepting it. But the modern Right often remembers only half of him. Jabotinsky was also an individualist who believed in civic equality and in a Jewish state strong enough to protect the dignity of the people living within it. The wall was never the civilization. It existed so that a civilization could be built behind it.

He had another word: Hadar. It meant more than dignity. It demanded discipline, self-command, restraint and conduct worthy of the national cause one claimed to represent. That idea is less convenient than the Iron Wall because it imposes obligations on us instead of our enemies. Hadar means strength does not require vulgarity, patriotism does not require performance, and loyalty to your camp can require telling your camp that it is wrong. Jewish pride is not measured by how effectively one humiliates another Jew on television.

We inherited Jabotinsky’s iron. We forgot too much of his Hadar.

Neither Jabotinsky nor Begin was a saint, and nostalgia is not political philosophy. That is not the point. Their relevance comes from the standards their own tradition leaves behind. An intellectual inheritance matters only if its heirs permit it to judge them. Today we quote the parts of Revisionism that flatter us and quietly retire the parts that impose obligations. We inherited nationalism without enough self-command, political strength without enough suspicion of power, and electoral victory without enough interest in what victory was supposed to accomplish.

The Israeli Right does not need to become less right-wing. It needs to remember that anger is not an ideology and outrage is not a governing program.

A serious national movement should be judged by what happens when the rally ends. Does the state work? Can police enforce its laws? Can citizens build homes, businesses and families without fighting their own government at every stage? Can criminal organizations be prevented from behaving like competing authorities inside Israeli communities? Can Israelis in the Negev and Galilee experience sovereignty as something more tangible than a flag above a government office? Can reservists repeatedly leave spouses, children and businesses to defend the country while the political system continues negotiating over whether national service is actually a national obligation?

These are not left-wing questions. They are questions about sovereignty. Sovereignty is not something a government announces. It is something citizens experience.

Yet somewhere along the way, parts of the Right began treating criticism itself as suspicious. If journalists uncover misconduct, we ask who leaked before asking whether it happened. If someone on our side behaves disgracefully, we immediately search for somebody worse on the other side, as though two disgraces combine mathematically into dignity. If an accusation comes from people who dislike us, we become tempted to believe that their motives settle its truth. We stopped asking whether something was good and increasingly began asking whose side it was on.

Which brings us to Netanyahu.

Any serious indictment of him has to reject the cartoon. Netanyahu is not an accidental prime minister, an unintelligent politician or a leader without extraordinary accomplishments. He helped transform Israel’s economy, understood the threat posed by Iran before much of the international community wanted to confront it, dramatically expanded Israel’s diplomatic reach and helped bring about the Abraham Accords. His political abilities are undeniable. Removing those achievements from his record would be propaganda.

So would removing October 7.

Achievement is not a carbon-offset program. A leader cannot accumulate enough successes in Washington, Abu Dhabi and Jerusalem to cancel catastrophe in Be’eri, Kfar Aza, and Nir Oz. If anything, Netanyahu’s genuine accomplishments make the question of responsibility more serious because his political proposition rested for years upon indispensability. He was Mr. Security. He understood Iran. He knew Hamas. He knew Washington. He knew the region. Millions of Israelis believed him, and they were not irrational to do so.

But indispensability is a contract.

A leader cannot spend years telling a country that only he can steer the ship and then, after it hits the rocks, discover that navigation belonged entirely to the officers below deck. The IDF failed on October 7. Military Intelligence failed. The Shin Bet failed. Commanders and intelligence officers failed. Those failures demand investigation and consequences. But the existence of failed subordinates does not abolish responsibility at the top. It is one of the reasons there is a top.

The accumulating warning record makes that question more urgent. There were warnings that Israel’s internal divisions were being interpreted by its enemies as weakness. There were years of evidence that the assumption of a containable Hamas deserved far greater scrutiny. Recent reporting has raised further questions about warnings shortly before October 7 and about discussions concerning action against Yahya Sinwar. Some of the newest claims are disputed, including an allegation that the United Arab Emirates warned Netanyahu personally of a coming Hamas operation. Those disputes are precisely why Israel needs serious independent examination rather than another round of partisan certainty.

No responsible critic needs to claim Netanyahu knew the precise hour or operational plan of October 7. He did not. But that is not how leadership works. Intelligence arrives in fragments, probabilities, competing assessments and warnings that sometimes prove wrong. Advisers disagree. Enemies deceive. Certainty usually arrives after it is useful. That uncertainty is not an argument against leadership. It is why leadership exists.

A prime minister is not employed merely to recognize danger after it becomes obvious enough for Wikipedia.

October 7 also exposed something larger than an intelligence failure. Israel had become addicted to management. Hamas would be managed. Hezbollah would be deterred. Haredi enlistment would be postponed. Organized crime would receive another plan. Housing would receive another announcement. Structural problems could be pushed into the next budget, the next election and the next coalition agreement. Problems that could not be solved became problems to be survived politically.

This is not conservatism. It is national procrastination.

A country can operate that way for a surprisingly long time. Then one morning every deferred decision arrives for collection. October 7 was also the bankruptcy of a governing instinct that confused temporary quiet with strategic achievement and the absence of catastrophe with proof that the system worked. Netanyahu did not invent every pathology in Israeli government, and replacing one prime minister will not cure them. He became the most successful political practitioner of a system that rewarded them.

And we helped.

That sentence matters because otherwise this becomes another comfortable article about a politician. We voted. We defended. We rationalized. We accepted politicians we would never hire to manage our own businesses because their opponents frightened us more. We demanded accountability from the other camp and called it persecution when it reached ours. We excused incompetence when acknowledging it might benefit people we disliked. We slowly transformed ideology into fandom.

Every time we answered failure with “yes, but the Left,” we lowered the cost of failure. Every time we treated electoral victory as proof of virtue, we lowered it again. Every time we demanded standards from opponents that we would not impose on allies, we taught politicians exactly what we were willing to buy.

Eventually they understood the market.

We were buying excuses, so they produced more.

This is where the argument returns to Zionism itself. For two thousand years, Jews could say somebody else controlled the army, the borders, the police and the machinery of government. Zionism ended that condition. There is no permanent somebody else anymore.

We are the somebody else.

That is the glory of sovereignty, and it is also its burden. Zionism did not promise that Jews would finally become innocent. It promised that Jews would finally become responsible. Jewish power can rescue, defend, build and create. It can also misjudge, neglect and fail. The opposite of helplessness is not purity. It is consequence.

That is why Yom Kippur offers the Israeli Right a better vocabulary than another campaign slogan. Teshuvah means more than repentance. It means return. The Israeli Right does not need conversion. It needs teshuvah. A return to nationalism without leader worship, strength with Hadar, individual liberty joined to civic obligation, and Jewish sovereignty joined to responsibility.

The Israeli Right does not need to apologize for Jewish power. I certainly will not. Jewish history contains too many graves dug in its absence. Israel must remain militarily powerful, unapologetically Zionist and capable of defending itself when allies hesitate and enemies miscalculate. But power is not self-justifying. Power without responsibility is not sovereignty. It is adolescence with an army.

Zionism returned the Jewish people to history. We demanded the pen and, against every probability, received it. But authorship came with a condition we sometimes prefer not to read: once you write history, you become responsible for the chapters you write badly.

That is the accounting this Yom Kippur requires from the Israeli Right. Not surrender. Not self-hatred. Not another spectacle in which everybody beats the chest of the person standing beside him. We spent generations demanding the opportunity to govern the Jewish state. We got it.

There is no somebody else anymore.

We wanted history back.

We got it.

Now we have to take responsibility for what we write next.