The ideological underpinnings of Israel’s political leadership and wide swaths of the population reflect limited interest in shifting from its occupation model. None of the major candidates have mentioned ending the genocide in Gaza. None have considered challenging how the state’s “never again” mantra can simultaneously exist alongside its open commitment to and support of genocide, including its flattening of Gaza, its killing of over 73,000 people, including more than 20,000 children, and its deliberate starvation of the people of the Strip to the point of famine.
The list goes on. None of the candidates dare address the daily torture and rape of Palestinians, many wrongfully detained, at the hands of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) or the Israel Prison Service. None of the candidates speak about the continued abduction of thousands of Palestinians, including doctors, journalists, the sick and the elderly, held in Israel’s torture chambers under a fictitious legal status, called the Unlawful Combatants Law, designed only to present a lazy depiction of the rule of law. No candidate has addressed the unrelenting and government-supported attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the OPT, who kill and maim to steal Palestinian land, including attacks on American citizens.
Instead, candidates speak about Israel’s “public relations problem,” never the brazen actions that cause the problem. In their telling, Israel’s global standing has fallen because it has not managed to sell the genocide more artfully. They, alongside a vast majority of the Israeli Knesset, instead throw hundreds of millions of dollars at propaganda campaigns, known in Hebrew as hasbara, to malignly influence publics abroad. The lack of self-reflection is telling.
The main opposition candidates include Yair Lapid, a former journalist turned politician who, though proclaiming to be “centrist,” has aligned with a former prime minister: far-right, pro-settler politician Naftali Bennett. Gadi Eisenkot, a former IDF chief of staff who developed the Dahia Doctrine, an Israeli military strategy designed in Lebanon in the 2000s to inflict maximum pain on civilian populations to force their capitulation in war and that has likely been applied in Gaza and Lebanon, has recently surged in the polls.
The names of the two main opposition parties and their slogans are, in fact, telling in that they build upon Netanyahu’s genocidal slogans. In October 2023, as Israel began its military campaign in Gaza, the slogan “Together We Will Succeed” was plastered across the country. It was never clear what “together” meant for Palestinians and the wider world opposed to genocide. Of course, success only meant “erasing Gaza” and any chance at a future Palestinian state. Using these same words, Lapid and Bennett have called their party “Together” while Eisenkot chose “Israel Will Succeed” as his slogan.