People often say that all elections are decisive and crucial. But the upcoming elections in Israel will indeed be decisive and crucial. There will be a referendum on the identity of the State of Israel: on whether it remains a Jewish state or what the progressive left calls “a state of all its citizens,” a de facto non-Jewish state.
This existential debate is not new. It has defined the core fault lines of Israeli society for the past 78 years.
To understand this, we must look back to the origins of Zionism. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, mostly secular, young Zionists sought to leave the shtetl and traditional Judaism behind. Upon arriving in the Land of Israel, they aimed to create a new Jewish identity—handsome, muscular, proud and secular. While a religious Zionist movement emerged, the secular faction remained dominant.
In the pre-state Jewish community, the secular Zionist mainstream leaned toward socialism, while the right-wing faction supported Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s Revisionist movement. These tensions culminated during World War II with the “Saison,” when the leftist Haganah hunted down their own brothers in the Irgun and Lehi, then handed them over to the British.
Tellingly, the 1948 drafting of the Declaration of Independence sparked a fierce battle over whether to mention God.
Israeli founding father and first prime minister David Ben-Gurion allowed the inclusion of the ambiguous phrase tzur Yisrael (“rock of Israel”). Secularists saw this as a reference to national strength, the religious to God. Yet religious Zionist leader Rabbi Yehuda Leib Maimon had the last word, quietly handwriting the acronym for b’ezrat hashem (“with God’s help”) next to his signature.
During Israel’s early years, despite the ruling left-wing’s confidence, deep political tensions remained. This friction erupted in June 1948 during the Altalena affair, when the newly formed Israel Defense Forces, commanded by Yitzhak Rabin, fired on an Irgun arms ship with Zionist leader Menachem Begin on board. Once the state was established, the left maintained its hegemony by securing control over various centers of power.
This domination began to collapse after the Six-Day War in June 1967, when Israel liberated Judea and Samaria, returning to its biblical land. But the left didn’t want it. From that time forward, they called these areas the “occupied territories” or the “West Bank.”
The breaking point came after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, which shattered public confidence in the old guard. This led to a political earthquake. In 1977, the Likud party came to power for the first time. It was the end of an era.
Driven by a deep sense of statesmanship and determined to avoid a social rift, Begin, then the Israeli prime minister, left the previous regime’s officials in their powerful positions. He protected the old guard to preserve stability, inadvertently allowing the defeated hegemony to entrench its control.
The left-wing Labor Party’s 1992 election victory deepened the divide as Shimon Peres orchestrated the disastrous Oslo Accords. He brought in terrorist Yasser Arafat from Tunisia, and handed Judea and Samaria, and the Gaza Strip, over to Sunni Arabs. This aimed to legitimize a fabricated Palestinian nationality (Arafat was born and raised in Cairo) and correct what the left saw as the “historical mistake” of 1967.
However, the left’s vision of a non-Jewish state faltered in 1996, leading to a significant shift.
A young, charismatic, and eloquent politician emerged—one who, on the surface, looked exactly like Israel’s leftists. He came from secular, elite circles, served in the Sayeret Matkal special forces unit and had lived in America. This man, Benjamin Netanyahu, won the 1996 election, defeating Peres. The left hated him with an unforgiving passion because of his goal of preventing a Palestinian state. But Netanyahu understood a fundamental truth: As long as Jews live in Judea and Samaria, Israel remains a Jewish state.
The left never forgave him. But by then, the damage was already done. Most of Gaza and major biblical and strategic hubs in Judea and Samaria, like Shechem and Ramallah, were handed over to terrorist factions, laying the groundwork for what would ultimately become the main cause of the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
The upcoming elections are an existential battle over the fundamental character of the state.
In the mid-2010s, realizing they couldn’t defeat Netanyahu at the ballot box, the left used the legal system to fabricate an indictment based on unprecedented legal theories to prosecute the prime minister. They claimed he traded regulatory favors for positive media coverage on a mainstream news site that had, in fact, relentlessly smeared him.
This lawfare plunged Israel into five elections in four years. Despite never being proven guilty, the trial was weaponized to boycott Netanyahu and paralyze the country. It even led to a fragile “change” government in 2021, uniting Naftali Bennett with Yair Lapid and an Arab party, shattering all of Bennett’s campaign promises. However, the alliance collapsed, and Netanyahu returned to power in late 2022.
For the first time in Israeli history, the newly elected “fully right-wing” government sought to pass reforms that would address the 1990s “judicial revolution,” which established a juristocracy.
The left, realizing they stood to lose their last redoubt in the form of the Supreme Court, declared war on the government. Limiting the institution’s power and transforming it into a balanced court that reflects Israeli society would destroy the left’s chance to turn Israel into a non-Jewish state.
The streets burned. The epicenter was Kaplan Street in Tel Aviv, where a radical faction called the “Kaplanistim” emerged. To enforce their political agenda, they slaughtered Israel’s most sacred cows. For the first time, they openly threatened to dismantle the IDF from within, as elite forces and combat pilots declared a political strike.
“By September, you will not have an army,” one protest leader repeatedly warned Netanyahu. Hamas, watching from Gaza, listened closely. This internal rot and weakened deterrence laid the groundwork for the horrors of Oct. 7.
Israel’s societal divide has reached a boiling point with the upcoming elections. Leftist candidates openly campaign on stripping Israel of its Jewish character, aiming to eradicate Judaism from the public square. They oppose constructing Jewish ritual baths (mikvahs), bully Chabad volunteers, seek to ban religious services from public spaces, demand full commerce on Shabbat, and wage legal wars to force bread on IDF bases and hospitals during Passover. They are now honest enough to say that they don’t want a Jewish state.
The military, police, judiciary and mainstream media are conducting a “Saison-style” witch hunt against Jewish residents in Judea and Samaria. They focus solely on nearly nonexistent “settler violence,” ignoring the reality on the ground and Arab terrorism.
The IDF claims that it has a severe manpower shortage and insists on the immediate conscription of the Haredim. However, due to the disbanding of several reserve brigades in recent years, the IDF has a potential reservoir of around 120,000 reserve soldiers willing to return to service. Despite this, the IDF prefers to recruit the Haredim, not out of operational necessity, but to secularize them.
The left knows that demography is against them and that most Israelis are traditional, deeply connected to their heritage, religious or Haredi. It recognizes that the upcoming elections are perhaps their last chance to maintain control over Israel and take irreversible steps to secure their ongoing rule and ensure Israel becomes a non-Jewish state.
The masks have been completely removed. The upcoming elections will not be a routine political contest. They are an existential battle over the fundamental character of the state. They present voters with a stark choice between those who believe that Israel must remain a proud, authentic Jewish state and an elite minority determined to dissolve Israel’s ancient identity into a secular republic.
A Jewish state or a non-Jewish state: that is what the upcoming elections are about.
