On the morning of October 7, 2023, the Israeli state failed twice. It was caught off guard — the founding promise of the Jewish state, never again undefended, broken in a single dawn. And then, for weeks, it was simply absent. Civil society ran the rescue: volunteers organised evacuations, equipped reservists, housed the displaced, identified the dead. Ministers who ventured into public were met not with grief shared but with fury unconcealed. The government could not even perform sympathy. That double failure — of protection and of presence — is the wound at the origin of everything that followed.
What followed was not strategy. It was compensation. A government that had failed as defender set out to overperform as avenger, rechanneling society’s outrage at it into outrage through it — outward, onto Gaza, then Lebanon, then Syria, with the prime minister and his ministers as active inciters rather than restrainers.
The scale of devastation exceeded any security logic; it exceeded even the old Revisionist doctrine of the Iron Wall, which Jabotinsky conceived as pedagogy — force applied until the neighbor concedes your permanence, then negotiation. This was something else: the concentrated tragedy of centuries of pogroms, inverted and discharged upon others. Call it the reverse pogrom syndrome — a society formed by the memory of collective victimhood enacting collective ruin and cheering it on. That cheering is on the universal record now, alongside the record of the acts themselves: warrants from the International Criminal Court against the prime minister and his former defense minister, a UN commission’s finding of genocide, proceedings at the ICJ, recognition of Palestinian statehood by London and Paris, and the steady inversion of American opinion polls. Netanyahu coined the “ring of fire” to rally his public against encircling enemies; what closed around Israel is a wider ring — of rejection and damnation, forged by Israel’s own conduct. The afflicted man whose house was attacked turned and burned the neighbourhood, and the neighborhood has rendered its verdict: this is a danger, not a security-seeker.
Now Israel votes, in October — a month that will forever carry the weight of the failure. And here is the disquieting finding of the campaign so far: the ring of damnation is on the ballot only as a competence question, never as a moral one. The election’s declared central issue is the state commission of inquiry into October 7 — the accountability instrument Netanyahu has spent three years evading, lately by legislating a politically appointed substitute whose passage he purchased from the Haredi parties with draft exemptions. Three-quarters of Israelis want him gone; more than 90% believe Iran came out ahead of the last war. Yet listen to the opposition’s indictment of the isolation: Lapid warns that Israel’s foreign relations will be “wiped out”; Eisenkot — the bereaved general now running neck-and-neck with Likud — protests that Netanyahu drove Washington to negotiate with Iran alone and finds it “inconceivable” that Israel needs American approval to strike in Lebanon. These are grievances of squandered assets and lost sovereignty, from men who backed the wars that produced the damnation.
The contest, as Palestinian analysts have observed, is not between two projects but within one — a dispute over the management of the siege, not its cause. Netanyahu, for his part, has stopped disputing the isolation and enshrined it: his “Super-Sparta” is the garrison state as destination, permanent mobilisation as national identity, the world’s condemnation recast as proof of righteousness.
Whoever wins inherits the harder question, the one no party is asking aloud: how does a society step back from the reverse pogrom? Not diplomatically — a change of prime minister will be accepted at face value by fatigued chancelleries and by Gulf capitals eager to resume normalisation. That transaction is cheap, and it is a trap.
The monumental task is different: to give the region evidence of a new phase — evidence weighty enough that the victims, whose tragedy is now registered in the world’s courts and archives, are not left to harbour historical revenge as their inheritance, as Jewish memory itself harboured the pogroms. Peace that does not reckon with what was done will merely schedule the next eruption; the decades-long simmer that October 7 brought to violent boil will simmer on.
Two temptations must be named, because both are already visible. The first is the manufacture of the next bogeyman. With Iran decapitated and half-broken, the machinery of perpetual mobilisation is turning toward Türkiye and Erdogan as the successor threat. This is pressure-cooker politics: it does not release the accumulated force in the region; it seals the lid tighter — and the pressure is already registering. The second temptation is restoration nostalgia — the belief, common to most of Netanyahu’s challengers, that returning to pre-October “conflict management” constitutes an answer. October 7 was conflict management’s verdict.
There exists, and has existed for a quarter-century, a pressure-release valve of an entirely different order: the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002 — full normalisation with the entire Arab and Islamic world, including a settlement of relations that would encompass even a post-theocratic Iran’s reintegration, in exchange for a sovereign Palestinian state and an agreed resolution of the refugee question. It remains on the table, unwithdrawn through four wars. Israeli society has never been asked by its leaders to look at it squarely; it must be made aware that the choice is not between Sparta and surrender, but between the standing regional offer and endless war. Ending the Palestinian hemorrhage is not a concession to the ring of rejection — it is the sole path out of it.
That is what this ballot decides, whatever its stated question. The arithmetic itself carries the message: the Jewish opposition cannot reach a majority without the ten seats of the Arab parties — the very citizens half the political map refuses to count. An electorate, not a court, will determine whether Israel’s next leaders are shepherds of peace or gladiators in an arena where the contest ends only when one side perishes. Societies do not often get to see the precipice before the fall. Israel’s, this October, will be looking straight at it.
- The Lebanese writer is former editor of Al-Hayat in London and The Daily Star in Beirut.