It is commonly said that Israel is fighting a multi-front war. From altitude, the number of fronts is two: geopolitical and domestic. And the dangers to the country’s survival on the latter front may well be the more severe.
The geopolitical front is a brutal, high-stakes confrontation with Hamas, Iranian proxies, and a wider regional axis that rejects coexistence altogether. It is a war that often confounds international audiences and resists easy explanation. The second is a pitched political battle over Israel’s institutions, social contract, and ability to sustain both its democratic character and its national cohesion.
With elections approaching, the moment calls for a sober accounting of Benjamin Netanyahu’s performance on both fronts.
On the geopolitical stage, it is a mixed and confounding picture. Netanyahu’s indifference to the binational state that the West Bank occupation is creating, and his ignoring of warnings about the security threat before the October 7 massacre, are unforgivable. But the successes in the wars against Hezbollah and Iran are laudable.
On the domestic front, meanwhile, he is a disaster. The events of this past week alone illustrate a pattern of governance that increasingly places political survival above the long-term viability of the state. Two developments illustrate this well.
The first is the passage of a sweeping death penalty law – plainly aimed at West Bank Palestinians, and thus undemocratic and arguably racist. Advanced by Itamar Ben-Gvir’s ultranationalist party and passed by a 62-48 vote, it makes capital punishment the default response to “nationalistically motivated” murder. At a time when Jewish terrorism in the West Bank is on the rise, Arabs who are tried in the military courts now face a framework that Jews will not.
At a time when Israel’s international standing is deteriorating due to the brutality of the Gaza war, the foreign ministers of Germany, France, Italy, and Britain issued a direct warning that the measure risks undermining democratic commitments and carries a discriminatory character difficult to reconcile with those principles.
One might imagine that such concerns, voiced by close allies, with the EU amounting to Israel’s largest trading partner, would factor into the deliberations. One would imagine this in vain, as Israel took another step away from the Western democracies that have mostly abandoned the death penalty as inhumane and irreversible in cases of error.
Among security professionals, skepticism runs deep; the forms of violence Israel confronts often draw from ideologies that embrace “martyrdom” rather than fear it, rendering the logic of deterrence far less straightforward than proponents suggest. The possibility that such a policy could normalize reciprocal executions of Israeli captives introduces an additional layer of risk.
Yet the most important function of the law lies elsewhere, which is where things get really interesting. It seems destined for a collision with the Supreme Court, where challenges have already been filed, and where its structural features – expedited procedures, uneven application, weakened safeguards – place it on precarious legal ground. The Court will surely demand changes and may annul it.
That seems to be a key feature of the coalition’s calculations. Coalition politicians will howl in protest at the court’s soft-on-terror “activism” but will actually be delighted. No one but the most impractical of radicals wants the spectacle of mass executions, international protests, heightened violence, and the entire epic headache. The point is the court intervention itself.
In recent years, the coalition has repeatedly advanced measures that invite judicial intervention, thereby reinforcing a political narrative in which legal institutions are cast as obstacles to the popular will, where that alleged will is framed as anything the coalition pursues. Netanyahu is at war with the institutions that check the executive's power in his quest to remake Israel as an elected autocracy, like Turkey.
Indeed, few leaders have demonstrated Netanyahu’s ability to redirect public discourse toward the conflict with the Arabs and towards hatred of established institutions – both of which are useful to divert from various other outrages that might be needed for maintaining his patchwork coalition.
Large sums of money given to haredi institutions
Which brings us to the second outrage of the week – the 2026 state budget. It included vast new sums toward haredi institutions at a moment when the burdens of war fall across Israeli society with eye-popping unevenness.
Thus did the coalition, at the last minute, ram through an NIS 800 m. addition to haredi institutions, on top of a budget already bloated with billions for special coalition interests. The addition has since been blocked by the attorney-general as unlawful, with the outcome uncertain. It was so extreme that Governor of the Bank of Israel Amir Yaron, who is normally apolitical, took to the airwaves to bemoan that the new budget goes vastly too far in coddling “non-productive” sectors and interests, and warned of economic damage.
The special payments were necessary to compensate the haredim for the delay in passing the outrageous and unpopular planned formalization of draft exemptions for, essentially, all the sector’s youth – this, at a time when other Israelis find themselves serving hundreds of days of reserve service a year.
The tension here extends beyond fairness. It touches on the sustainability of the entire haredi model. The refusal to teach boys a core curriculum to make them employable, the dependence on welfare, the obsession with yeshiva study (funded generously by the state) all are, when combined with constant expansion due to impossibly high birthrates, pointing to collapse. With none of it will Netanyahu grapple, because he needs the haredi parties for his coalition.
These abysmal domestic choices stand in contrast to a geopolitical record that resists simple categorization. Israel’s posture toward Iran and its regional positioning have evolved in ways that may yield strategic advantages. There is, in this sense, evidence of tactical effectiveness.
At the same time, strategy demands the integration of military action with a credible political horizon. But any hope for a viable end state for the ongoing conflicts remains unrequited. Meanwhile, the impossible situation in the West Bank continues to be barely managed, as the government looks the other way when confronted with Jewish terrorism.
So the next election looms larger than any in memory. The coming months are likely to feature further attempts to undermine Israel’s gatekeepers, combined with efforts to game the elections: Netanyahu’s coalition will likely attempt to ban Arab parties, appoint loyalists to the Central Election Commission, and prepare challenges, in the courts and in the streets, in case of defeat.
There is a real danger facing Israel, therefore, and it is not only from Iran or even from Palestinian terrorists.
The writer is the former Cairo-based Middle East editor and London-based Europe/Africa editor of the Associated Press, the former chairman of the Foreign Press Association in Jerusalem, and the author of two books.
