Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.
This is a guest essay by Bob Goldberg, who writes the newsletter, “The New Zionist Times.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
With Israel’s Arab-led parties winning a record 19 seats in the Knesset (Israeli parliament), the opposition is searching for a path to the 61 seats needed to oust Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Some commentators are now proposing that opposition leaders abandon explicit campaign promises and rely on the support of Arab-led factions, including anti-Zionist parties, to form a government.
Taking that step would abandon the bedrock of mamlachtiut (an Israeli political and social concept often translated as “statism,” “civic responsibility,” or “statesmanship”) and willingly establish something worse than Oslo Accords 3.0 from within.
In the Israeli political lexicon, few concepts have been hollowed out as thoroughly as mamlachtiut. Pundits reduce it to a sterile catchphrase about a shared democratic and national framework.
To David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister, it was the sovereign Jewish state’s supreme moral and political doctrine. In Ben-Gurion’s philosophy, the state was never an end in itself; it was the indispensable framework “within which the collective and historic will of a people unfolds and develops.” The two millennia of Jewish dispersion and statelessness were not merely an inconvenience, but a condition of existential vulnerability that could only be rectified through the restoration of independent Jewish sovereignty.
Ben-Gurion understood that the state was only a precondition, the foundational vessel of redemption. A continuous, conscious effort — mamlachtiut — transformed Zionism from a revolutionary, partisan-driven movement into the institutional framework of a sovereign Jewish nation-state that would provide the Jewish People with survival and protect the Jewish character of Israel.
This is not a brief for the current government. Judicial reform was handled poorly, to say the least. The State Comptroller documented a civilian apparatus so paralyzed after October 7th that it abandoned evacuees and reservists to volunteer networks while ministers bickered over patronage. It temporized on how to handle the “Hilltop Youth.” Above all, the coalition prioritized institutionalized draft evasion over the universal service an existential war demands.
However, Netanyahu’s impressive assault on Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran — and his projection of strength — has the support of the majority of Israelis. Commentators advocate a political configuration that would tear Israel apart. Indeed, they propose something far worse than the original Oslo Accords, a series of agreements signed by Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization in the 1990s that established mutual recognition, created the Palestinian Authority, and laid out a framework for Palestinian self-government and negotiations toward a permanent Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement.
Oslo was a catastrophic diplomatic gamble; the illusion that an external terrorist adversary could become a peaceful neighbor through paper guarantees and territorial concessions. The current advocacy project is an internal surrender. It proposes to outsource the security, the Jewish character, and the sovereign existence of the state to domestic parliamentary factions who would celebrate the obliteration of the Zionist enterprise.
It would invite into the inner sanctum of statecraft those who have cheered on Hamas killers as shuhada (martyrs) in the wake of atrocities where thousands of Jews were slaughtered, burned, and desecrated solely because they were Jews.
Israeli journalist Yossi Klein Halevi asked a simple question to Mansour Abbas, the leader of Ra’am (one of the Arab-led parties) — if he envisions Israel becoming Muslim one day. Abbas’ response: “Just as you envision the Holy Temple in Jerusalem being rebuilt where Al-Aqsa Mosque now stands, I also envision a different future. But for now, I am Israeli. Mine is a vision, just as yours is.”1
This is not an abstract dispute over civic inclusion. Ra’am and the Joint List (made up of other Arab-led parties) are problematic because of their position on the Jewish state, not because ethnicity or race or even the need to invest more in crime reduction in Arab communities. Rather, these parties use their power to overtly or tacitly aid Israel’s enemies.
Another devastating example is Osama Saadi, a leading lawmaker within Ta’al (one of the parties in the Joint List). Saadi calls Israel’s government genocidal. And he has stood in an Israeli courtroom as legal counsel representing the Palestinian Authority against the bereaved family of Ari Fuld, an American-Israeli murdered in Gush Etzion. In that litigation, Saadi served as the legal defender of Ramallah’s “pay-to-slay” syndicate, arguing in favor of the Palestinian Authority’s institutionalized disbursement of cash bounties to the families of convicted and slain terrorists.
For commentators to casually propose that an Israeli governing coalition should rely upon a parliamentary slate whose leadership actively defends the financing of Jewish murder is both politically grotesque and morally bankrupt. An administration dependent on lawyers defending terror subsidies cannot command the legitimacy to ask reservists to risk their lives while empowering the advocates of the perpetrators.
In Israel’s parliamentary democracy, the state budget is not a routine administrative vote; failure to pass it by the statutory deadline automatically dissolves the Knesset. Throughout their legislative history, Ta’al and Hadash (another party in the Joint List) have maintained an unbroken record of voting against the national budget, categorically objecting to funding for IDF procurement, ammunition replenishment, and the Iron Dome. Any coalition tethered to their votes would face an impossible dilemma every single cycle: Slash the nation’s core defense allocations to appease its kingmakers, or watch the government collapse.
The empirical record reveals systematic opposition to the foundational legal instruments of state security. Ta’al and Hadash voted unanimously against the comprehensive 2016 Counter-Terrorism Law. They voted vehemently against stripping Israeli citizenship or residency from convicted terrorists receiving “pay-to-slay” stipends from the Palestinian Authority. They do not view counter-terrorism through the lens of public safety; they view it through the lens of ideological resistance.
This design’s vulnerability was already proven in June 2022, when the Bennett-Lapid government shattered over the routine renewal of the Judea and Samaria Emergency Regulations. Ta’al and Hadash voted against the measure, gutting the legal framework governing counter-terrorism jurisdiction and military operations in the territories and dissolving the coalition within days.
If a government cannot survive routine administrative security regulations without falling apart, it cannot order a preemptive strike against Hezbollah, cannot conduct brigade-level sweeps in Jenin, and cannot authorize the replenishment of war reserves without signing its own death warrant.
A government that cannot pass a defense budget and cannot launch a military operation without collapsing becomes an executive paralyzed by design. To preserve its grip on power, such an administration would be forced to capitulate to the ideological demands of its patrons: suspending counter-terror operations, freezing security cordons, and surrendering strategic territory under the guise of diplomatic “progress.” Oslo Accords I and II ceded land to external enemies; Oslo 3.0 would dismantle Israel’s operational sovereignty from within to satisfy the Far-Left’s political arithmetic.
If commentators believe Israel stood at the precipice of civil war during the judicial reform disputes of 2023, they have vastly underestimated the volcano beneath their feet. Giving anti-Zionist and Hamas-adjacent parties power to determine the destiny of the Jewish state would irrevocably shatter the social contract. The reserve corps, the families bearing the sacrifice of war, and the vast Zionist majority would not accept the legitimacy of an executive that subordinates state survival to the veto of those aligned with its adversaries.
The geopolitical assumptions behind this scheme are equally anachronistic. Neither the White House nor the pragmatic Sunni monarchies respect an executive held hostage by domestic radicals who condemn the Abraham Accords and echo the rhetoric of the Iranian axis. A weak centrist minority government, addicted to international praise and terrified of internal collapse, would simply become a pliable instrument for multilateral pressure.
Whatever the results of this election, the fate of the Jewish state will not be determined by exhausted commentators eager to turn Israel into a post-national enclave — Sweden with shawarma.
The generation forged in the crucible of October 7th will decide it. Across the spectrum — secular, religious-Zionist, and an awakening ultra-Orthodox sector — this generation rejects the cynical arithmetic of the political class. They have buried their brothers, held the line at the gates of the south, charged into the northern hills, and discovered that their shared destiny dwarfs petty political divisions.
They demand a government that reinvigorates mamlachtiut not as a slogan, but as a living demand for shared national sacrifice to sustain sovereign survival. They refuse to accept an Israel frozen in the posture of perpetual apology, begging for international validation through endless, defensive “explaining.”
Instead, they demand hachra’ah: total victory in the global war on consciousness, which means projecting unyielding moral confidence that inspires the Jewish diaspora to see itself not as a detached spectator, but as a frontline soldier in the defense of its civilization.
This rising generation understands what the architects of Oslo 3.0 have forgotten: Israel’s survival depends on embracing, not discarding, the biblical mandate to be an exemplary, righteous, and virtuous people. It understands that Palestinianism must be eliminated or defeated for peace to prevail, and that the withering away of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran is more important than being loved by Brussels bureaucrats or Jews who support the likes of Zohran Mamdani.
They did not bleed so that their leaders might grovel before the defenders of terror in Jerusalem. They fought — alongside Druze and Arab Israeli brothers and sisters in arms — to secure an unapologetic, sovereign Jewish bastion. The generation of hachra’ah did not bleed in the dust only to watch politicians auction off the Jewish state for the narcotic of a coward’s peace.
“I Told You This Was Complicated.” Peter Himmelman’s Morning Musings.
Israel has had coalition gvts since 1948. After Lebanon. was realized a failure in middle 80s, Begin had integrity to resign
Netanyahu is a corrupt selfish man who put the nations security behind his list for power and efforts to stay out of jail. He is done. He will never have majority
I’m disgusted by some of these comments. Badmouthing Bibi instead of Arab parties aligned with Hamas!? Calling him “Satanyahu”!? Do these people not get it?? The enemy isn’t an Israeli war hero! It’s Arab parties who hate their own country (Israel)- the only place in the Middle East where they can have the quality of life they enjoy-and want to destroy it from within! Wake up people!