Israelis heading to the polls have no shortage of reasons to want a new government. Each of us arrives at that conclusion by a different road.
If you are on the Left, you may want change because Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has given Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich a free hand in the West Bank to implement his “decisive plan.” Alongside massive settlement expansion, that plan has created the conditions for religiously and ideologically driven vigilante violence aimed at driving Palestinians off their land. Too often, that violence goes unchecked and unpunished.
If you served in this war, in uniform or in reserves, you may want change because it is untenable for such a large part of the Jewish population to carry no share of the security burden. Worse, members of that population often deride those who do.
You may be alarmed by the post-liberal agenda Justice Minister Yariv Levin has pursued, and still plans to pursue, to reshape our democratic institutions beyond the reach of any future correction.
You may even believe, from the Right, that Netanyahu has been too soft on Hamas. And every Israeli, whatever their politics, could be forgiven for asking how, after repeated promises of “total victory,” Hamas still controls large parts of Gaza, while fronts with Hezbollah, Iran, and in Syria remain open.
The role of responsibility in the election
But this election is about something deeper than any of these, deeper than the usual, or even the unusual, course of Israeli politics. It is about responsibility.
No government, and no prime minister, can abandon its responsibility to its citizens the way this government and coalition have. Netanyahu and his partners have never accepted that, as the government of the day, the failure of October 7 is theirs to own, first and foremost.
Worse, from October 8 onward, they have searched for someone else to blame: the army, the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency), the protesters, the legal system, the previous government. They have resisted every call for accountability, above all a state commission of inquiry – the very mechanism Israel built for moments like this.
For three years, every demand for accountability received the same answer: not now. You do not hold elections in the middle of a war. A commission of inquiry would have to wait. The people would have their say, we were assured, when the Knesset ran its full course.
Well, the Knesset has run its course. The postponement is over, and the debt has come due. There is no excuse left to hide behind and no later date to defer to. “Not now” has finally become now, and this is the moment we were promised.
The need for a change in leadership
We would not accept this behavior anywhere else. We would not accept it from a child, a friend, a colleague, or an employee. We would not accept it from the CEO of the smallest business. A manager whose company suffered its worst disaster on his watch, who refused any independent investigation and blamed everyone but himself, would not survive.
So why would we accept it from the leadership of the only country the Jewish people can call their own? This is a country surrounded by enemies, whose government’s first duty is to protect its citizens. It must protect them from exactly the kind of barbarism that Hamas terrorists inflicted, unopposed for hours, in Be’eri, Kfar Aza, Nir Oz, Ofakim, and dozens of other communities and bases across the South.
If Netanyahu remains prime minister after this election, we will have declared as a society that collective responsibility means nothing, and that in Israel the buck stops nowhere.
Gadi Eisenkot, Naftali Bennett, and Avigdor Liberman deserve the chance to form a government and show that “taking responsibility” is more than a phrase.
That is partly because we need new leadership and a new direction. It is partly because after so many years of one man in power, the health of our democracy is under real strain. But above all, it is because any other outcome would be an insult to the most basic idea in democratic life: that those we elect are answerable for what happens on their watch.
The writer is a founding partner of Goldrock Capital and the founder of The Institute for Jewish and Zionist Research.