On Sunday, July 19 – two days after Israel’s 25th Knesset completed its statutory term and exactly 100 days before the October 27 election – Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir joined settlers and lawmakers marching toward the Gaza perimeter.
The demonstrators demanded the reestablishment of three settlements evacuated during Israel’s 2005 disengagement: Nisanit, Dugit, and Elei Sinai. Ben Gvir posted a video from the fence line with a caption requiring no interpretation: “Gaza is ours.” Smotrich warned that a victory by “the left” could undo what he called “the entire Zionist and national settlement revolution that we have brought about during this term.”
Smotrich had previously claimed that plans for three settlements in northern Gaza were complete and required only Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s approval. Defense Minister Israel Katz has separately proposed establishing three “Nahal” military outposts, historically a first step toward civilian settlement. Netanyahu has not approved either proposal.
The march was organized by Nachala, the hardline settler movement led by Daniella Weiss. Addressing the crowd, Weiss dispensed with euphemism: “There will be no more Arabs in Gaza. Period.”
The historical milestone that week was not the Knesset’s dissolution itself. It was the absence of an early dissolution. According to the Israel Democracy Institute, the October vote will be Israel’s first election since 1988 to follow the completion of a full Knesset term, after 13 consecutive early elections.
Netanyahu’s government is also the first since 1973 to remain in office throughout an entire parliamentary term. That achievement is especially striking in a country that held five elections between 2019 and 2022. From 1996 through 2022, Israel held elections every 2.4 years on average. Including the full interval before the 2026 vote raises that average to approximately 2.5 years.
Israel has no prime-ministerial term limits, and Netanyahu is already its longest-serving leader. Yet even he has rarely completed a full term.
A full term, but what has it built?
Six days before the Gaza march, on July 13, the Knesset passed a Basic Law declaring Torah study a “foundational value” of the Jewish people and the State of Israel. The measure passed 63-52 after 10 hours of opposition filibustering.
According to the Israel Democracy Institute’s legal analysis, Torah study is now the only value explicitly declared in one of Israel’s Basic Laws, giving it a unique quasi-constitutional status. This elevates it above military service, democratic participation, and every other expression of national belonging within Israel’s constitutional framework.
The final text did not formally equate Torah study with military service, as that provision was removed before passage. Nevertheless, legal experts warned that the law could provide constitutional support for future attempts to preserve broad military exemptions and state benefits for ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students. In other words, the purpose was not theological but tactical: to construct a legislative shield for the blanket military exemption ultra-Orthodox men have enjoyed for decades.
Netanyahu was absent from the vote. Gadi Eisenkot, his leading rival, opened his response with one word – “Coward” – before calling the law “another stain, one that won’t be erased.”
The Torah law was part of a wider legislative bargain. The following day, the Knesset voted 58-54 to suspend the arrest and prosecution of Haredi draft evaders. The High Court froze that measure within a day, pending judicial review.
During its final marathon sessions, the coalition also weakened the binding force of the attorney general’s legal opinions and transferred considerable broadcasting authority to a new regulator dominated by government appointees. It also kept mandatory service for male conscripts at 32 months instead of allowing it to fall to 30.
The contradiction was stark. The same parliament that sought to protect tens of thousands of Haredi men from conscription enforcement also extended the service of those who do enlist, while secular Israelis, most Jewish women, and Druze men remain bound by compulsory-service requirements.
These events are not merely aberrations of the Netanyahu era. They are its architecture. They also reveal its governing method: settlements advanced as facts on the ground, constitutional rules reshaped for coalition survival, and national obligations distributed according to political leverage.
And the question that the October 27 election should force Israelis to confront, but almost certainly will not, is whether replacing the architect changes anything at all when the blueprints remain intact. So far, the campaign has largely avoided that question.
Preserving the consensus
The campaign, as it is shaping up, is being fought almost entirely on the terrain of personality. A Channel 12 poll published on July 20 projected 24 seats for Eisenkot’s centrist Yashar party and 23 for Likud. It also gave Eisenkot a 43%-37% advantage over Netanyahu when respondents were asked who was more suitable to serve as prime minister. A July 23 Times of Israel poll placed Yashar even higher at 25 seats, four ahead of Likud.
Naftali Bennett has returned to the arena at the head of Together, his joint list with Yair Lapid. Avigdor Liberman, the secular right-wing leader, declared when the election date was confirmed: “On October 27, we will win. We will replace the government.”
The anti-Netanyahu camp is energized, but calling it unified would be misleading. Its parties agree that Netanyahu must leave. They remain divided over coalition partners, the role of Arab parties, and several central policy questions. In the latest Channel 12 poll, neither the coalition nor the Zionist opposition reached the 61 seats needed to govern without support from Arab parties.
Eisenkot supports an official state commission of inquiry into October 7, greater judicial independence, and universal military or national service. He has publicly maintained that he will not join a coalition with any party that rejects service requirements for all Israeli citizens, including Haredim and Arab citizens. Those differences are real. They could materially affect Israel’s institutions and social contract.
But if you listen carefully to what the opposition is actually proposing, it is committed to almost nothing that would alter the structural conditions that produced the catastrophe of the past three years. The rhetoric is about competence, not direction; accountability for October 7, not the occupation that preceded it; who failed to protect Israelis, not who is responsible for the permanent subjugation of Palestinians; replacing the man, not the machine.
The continuity becomes much clearer when the question turns to Palestinians and regional security. Eisenkot is not a diplomatic alternative to Netanyahu in the conventional sense. He has called demands for Palestinian statehood “irrelevant” and defended the “Dahiyeh doctrine” of overwhelming, self-described “disproportionate” military force. A Reuters profile concluded that an Eisenkot victory might produce little softening of Israel’s hawkish regional policy.
Bennett has also long opposed Palestinian statehood. Although the Democrats and Israel’s Arab parties offer clearer political alternatives, neither currently leads the contest for the premiership.
This is what Netanyahuism looks like without Netanyahu: the same security-centered consensus that treats Palestinian political existence as a threat to be managed rather than a right to be negotiated. It is the same settlement enterprise that has colonized the West Bank so thoroughly that the two-state solution now survives only as a diplomatic euphemism with no territorial basis.
It is also the same unequal distribution of sacrifice, in which Haredi men study Torah while secular reservists serve their third or fourth rotation in Gaza. Arab public opinion, both domestically and regionally, is still treated as irrelevant background noise rather than a strategic variable shaping whether Israel can sustain its diplomatic gains.
And it is the same instinct, visible in every major Israeli political party except the Arab Joint List, to define national security exclusively in military terms. As though the greatest threat to Israel’s future were Hamas tunnels rather than the slow, irreversible erosion of international legitimacy produced by three years of televised destruction.
The Haredi draft crisis is not a sideshow; it is a mirror. Shas and United Torah Judaism currently hold 18 Knesset seats, and their coalition leverage has allowed them to preserve mass non-enlistment despite military personnel shortages and a unanimous 2024 High Court ruling that the government lacked a legal basis for continuing the blanket exemption.
A state that treats military sacrifice as the highest expression of citizenship while distributing that obligation according to political convenience – exempting the ultra-Orthodox because their votes are needed to form governments and conscripting others because they lack the leverage to refuse – already has a fractured social contract. A future government may change the policy, but repairing a fracture that runs through the foundation will require far more than replacing the prime minister.
Eisenkot, to his credit, has been more vocal on this issue than any other opposition figure, calling the Torah study law “a stain that won’t be erased.” But even Eisenkot has not proposed dismantling the exemption system entirely – because doing so would mean confronting Shas and United Torah Judaism, and confronting them would mean losing the coalition arithmetic that any future government, left or right, will need to govern.
The system Netanyahu leaves behind
And then there is Gaza itself – the territory that Israel has spent nearly three years destroying and that its far-right ministers now openly plan to recolonize. The march to the fence on July 19 was not a fringe provocation; it included cabinet members, coalition lawmakers, and the organizational infrastructure of a settler movement that has spent decades building facts on the ground that no subsequent government has ever reversed.
Smotrich’s completed settlement plans sit on Netanyahu’s desk, but they will sit on the next prime minister’s desk too, because the constituency that demands them – nationalist, religious, ideologically committed, electorally indispensable – does not disappear when Netanyahu does. Ben Gvir may lose his ministry. The settlers will not lose their settlements.
The international community, already approaching exhaustion with Israel’s diplomatic intransigence, is watching the October election with a hope that borders on fantasy: that a new Israeli leader will restart negotiations, rejoin the international consensus, and reverse the trajectory of the last three years.
The international community will be tempted to treat any new Israeli leader as a diplomatic reset. But the evidence suggests something far less comforting – that Israel’s political system has internalized the logic of permanent war, permanent occupation, and permanent exemption from accountability so deeply that it no longer requires a particular leader to sustain it.
Netanyahu did not create this consensus; he exploited it, sharpened it, empowered its most radical representatives, drove it to its most extreme expression, and pushed it toward de facto annexation. But it existed before him, and it will survive him, because it is not the product of one man’s corruption or one coalition’s extremism but of a political culture that has spent 78 years defining security as the absence of Palestinian agency and peace as the indefinite maintenance of military supremacy.
Israel may well vote Netanyahu out on October 27. It may install a former military chief who speaks in the language of duty rather than demagoguery, who lost his son and two nephews in the war he now promises to end differently, who represents a Moroccan/Mizrahi working class that has never been trusted with the premiership. All of this would matter – for tone, for competence, for the restoration of institutional norms that Netanyahu has spent a decade corroding.
But style must not be confused with strategy. The settlements will remain. The occupation will remain. The Haredi exemption will remain. The 65% of Gaza under military control will remain. And the fundamental question that no Israeli politician of any party is willing to answer – what happens to the Palestinians and their political future? – will remain exactly where it has always been: unasked, unanswered, and increasingly unanswerable.
Netanyahuism does not need Netanyahu. Defeating it will require more than defeating him. That is the problem.