Israel is moving. Not its borders, which it keeps trying to move, but its ground. The country that enters the October 27 election is not the country that voted in November 2022. Three years of war have done what no opposition could do: they have shaken the identity the state wore for 15 years. That identity had three parts. A permanent war. A permanent prime minister. And a story about itself as the start-up nation, the small clever state that turned siege into software. All three are cracking at once, and the cracking is fast.
The man and the war are the same thing
Benjamin Netanyahu built a political method on one idea: the enemy is everywhere, and only he stands between it and you. In 2015 the enemy was Arab citizens "coming out in droves” to vote. In 2026 the Likud billboards say that Khamenei, Erdogan, Naim Qassem and the mayor of New York all "want Netanyahu to lose.” The circle of enemies has widened to include a Muslim American who won an election.
This is not a strategy. It is a habit that has outlived its purpose. The war it feeds has produced no decisive result in Gaza, a new front in Lebanon that was closed by a framework agreement Israel did not want to sign, Turkey asking Interpol to act on an arrest warrant against the prime minister, and eight Arab and Muslim states condemning the E1 settlement plan in one voice. Netanyahu’s answer is more of the same: no Palestinian state "controlled by Iran,” and a Makkah defence pact between Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan that Israel did not want and cannot stop.
The voters have noticed. The Kan poll of August 23 gives the coalition 51 seats and the bloc led by Gadi Eisenkot 57. Likud is no longer the largest party. That has not happened in a generation.
The right is eating itself
The most telling fight of this campaign is not between Netanyahu and Eisenkot. It is between Amit Segal, the most influential right-wing journalist in the country, and Itamar Ben-Gvir, the minister who runs the police. Segal wrote that Ben-Gvir is a danger. Ben-Gvir answered with a long letter of wounded pride: he had distributed 300,000 guns, demolished thousands of Bedouin homes, filled the prisons, and still the religious-Zionist elite looks down on him as "a repentant, an Easterner.” He is right about one thing. The campaign against him is the opening move of a unity government without him. The right that governed with him for three years now wants to deny it ever did.
Meanwhile 252 Arab citizens were murdered last year under Ben-Gvir’s police, the highest number ever recorded, and this year is running higher. Twelve percent of those cases are solved. The minister who counts guns and demolitions as achievements does not count these bodies at all.
The mosaic is rearranging
The deeper movement is in the Jewish mosaic itself. Eisenkot is the son of Moroccan immigrants from a working-class home. If he wins, he will be the first prime minister of Mizrahi origin. For 50 years the Mizrahim, 40 percent of Israeli Jews, gave Likud its base because Likud gave them respect and the Ashkenazi left gave them contempt. Ben-Gvir’s letter is that same grievance turned into a weapon and pointed at Arabs. Now a Mizrahi general from the centre is bidding for the same voters with a different offer: competence instead of frenzy. Whether the offer works will decide the election.
Above and below this, the other tectonic plates are shifting. The Haredim, who Netanyahu shielded from the draft, are losing the country’s patience while their sons stay in yeshiva and other sons are buried. The Arab minority, a fifth of the population, has its women entering the workforce faster than any group in Israel — faster than Haredi men are leaving it. A quarter of the country’s doctors and half its pharmacists are Arab. This is the real Israel of 2026, and no party is describing it.
The start-up state is being buried
The economy that gave Israel its confidence is now a war economy. Real wages fell in 2025. High-tech workers earn three times what other Israelis earn, and the gap keeps growing, while two percent of Arab men and one percent of Arab women work in the sector at all. Emigration set records in 2024 and the migration balance stayed negative in 2025. The judicial overhaul that Yariv Levin and Simcha Rothman began, with the Kohelet Forum’s money behind it, is still grinding through the courts — judges froze his latest law on police investigations only days ago. The people who built the start-up nation are the same people who filled the streets against that overhaul, and many of them have left. A state cannot be Sparta and Silicon Valley at the same time. Netanyahu chose Sparta.
The fixed point
And then there is the number nobody will say. 12 seats. That is what the revived Joint List and Ra’am together are polling. Eisenkot’s bloc is four seats short of a majority without them. Every commentator counts those seats. No candidate will name them. When Mansour Abbas, the most accommodating Arab politician in the country’s history, said that a Palestinian state exists and should be recognized, Eisenkot answered within hours: no Palestinian state, "not in a government we form.” Within a day Abbas withdrew the condition. He asked for nothing and was refused anyway.
This is the asymmetry that defines the moment. A minister may propose emptying Gaza of its people and remain a coalition option. A citizen may propose a Palestinian state and become a security question. More than 400 Arab citizens have been arrested for social media posts since October 7. No Jewish minister has been arrested for anything he said.
Losing by excess
Israel is not losing on the battlefield. It is losing by excess. Excess of bravado, which turned every neighbour into an enemy and every ally into a critic. Excess of blood, which no longer buys deterrence, only isolation. Excess of messianic frenzy, which put the Temple Mount and the hilltops above the state. And a total absence of policy: no plan for Gaza, no plan for the West Bank, no plan for the Haredim, no plan for the fifth of citizens who keep the hospitals running.
The tectonic movement is real. The landscape is changing. But a changed landscape is not yet a new map. Eisenkot promises to remove Netanyahu, not the identity Netanyahu built. He wants a "Zionist majority,” a minority government if necessary, and no Palestinian state. If that is the alternative, Israel will bury the man and keep the war. The question of October 27 is not who wins. It is whether anyone on the ballot has noticed that the ground has moved.
- Jamil K Mroue is Lebanese writer and previous editor of Al Hayat newspaper in London and The Daily Star in Beirut.