Any question about the future of the Middle East, incorporating a safe Israel and a reasonable future for the Palestinians, must be rid of one false hidden assumption: that Israel’s future will be determined primarily by the outcomes of war, diplomacy, and regional power alignments. I would suggest the opposite. The decisive factor remains what it has always been, namely the character of Israel’s leadership first, and a change of Palestinian leadership second. Without a future Yitzhak Rabin and a future transformed Yasser Arafat (or hopefully a younger and better leadership in Ramallah), the Middle East is bound to remain unstable.
Hence my insistence, with a hat tip to 19th century German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, on the crucial role of domestic politics. If Israel loses its democracy, no regional pact would save us. The leaders of the smaller parties in the current ruling coalition, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, believe we can be saved by God and nationalism; I and Israelis of my mindset will not take part in that sort of arrangement.
As I write these lines, US President Donald Trump has reached a ceasefire with Iran. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insists that his war against Hezbollah in Lebanon will continue. Israelis, even those who still adamantly trust Netanyahu’s leadership, are confused by the alleged victory. Across the country, dozens of residential, commercial, and public buildings lie in ruins. Dozens of civilians have been killed by Iranian and Hezbollah missiles. The country’s sense of security and self-reliance is shattered. Israel’s standing and moral reputation in the world have rarely been lower. In Iran the Ayatollahs remain in power, in Lebanon Hezbollah is far from defeated, and on Gaza’s streets Hamas still brandishes its weapons with glee.
The possible reopening of the Strait of Hormuz reminds us of the old Hassidic tale: The poor man, his overcrowded shack, the rabbi’s sage advice to bring in a goat, and the family’s immense relief when the goat is finally removed. Hormuz is the goat. The world may sigh in relief, but the sober question remains: What the hell have we gained?
The answer depends less on military accounting than on political consequence. For even if Trump and Netanyahu succeed in selling this episode to the world and to their own electoral bases as a strategic success, the deeper question is what kind of Israel emerges from it.
To put it simply: If Netanyahu wins the coming legislative elections, currently scheduled for October, Israeli liberal democrats will become either silent inner exiles, pitiful “Mitläufer,” active dissidents, or political exiles. This is not a rhetorical flourish. It is a realistic mapping of available civic positions in a state whose democratic infrastructure is being steadily hollowed out. As in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary and as in Trump’s United States, the reversibility of this process is scarily uncertain.
The term Mitläufer, with its German historical resonance, is not used lightly. It describes those who go along—not out of conviction, but out of resignation, fear, or the quiet desire to remain within the circle of normal life. In another context, one might have chosen softer language. In the present Israeli context, clarity is required.
As for becoming dissidents, a position that only exist in authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, I and other activists are already tasting the tip of such an experience. Pro-democracy and anti-war demonstrators are being beaten up by police and wrongly detained. Netanyahu’s “poison machine” on social media is attracting lowlife trolls attacking “leftie traitors.” My own recent experience was ridiculous to the point of hilarity—someone posted that I am spying for Hezbollah—had it not been quoted, within two hours, by hundreds of Telegram pages and dubious news websites, reaching hundreds of thousands of views. “I would have laughed,” the old Yiddish saying goes, “but this idiot is mine.”
A Diminished Israel
For what is at stake is not merely a change of government, but a transformation of regime ethos.
There is a persistent temptation, especially among external observers, to separate Israel’s geopolitical role from its internal character. The idea of a “New Middle East” invites precisely such a separation: a stronger Israel, a reconfigured regional order, new alliances, perhaps even a reassertion of deterrence. These are not trivial developments. But they are secondary.
An Israel that emerges as a regional power while shedding its liberal-democratic core will not be a stronger Israel. It will be a diminished Israel, on the course toward lowered standards in everything from technology to public culture, from military prowess to civic cohesion. The constant brain drain, as young and well-educated Israeli emigrés continue to flock abroad, will leave Netanyahu’s boastful accomplishments false and hollow.
One can already see the outlines of this transformation. The alliance between Netanyahu’s political survivalism and the ideological agenda of Smotrich and Ben-Gvir is not accidental. It is structural. It brings into the center of power a worldview that regards liberal constraints —judicial oversight, minority rights, the autonomy of professional institutions—not as essential components of democracy, but as obstacles to “total sovereignty,” an authoritarian regime buttressed by messianic hallucinations of grandeur.
In such a system, the language of democracy remains, but its substance erodes. Elections may continue, but the conditions under which they are held, including free and vocal media channels, judicial independence, administrative neutrality, are altered. Civil society may persist for a while, but increasingly under pressure. The middle class, long the carrier of Israel’s civic ethos, begins to disengage or depart.
This is not speculation. It is a process already underway.
Hence the question is not whether Israel will be stronger or weaker in the Middle East, or whether the Middle East itself can stabilize while containing Israel. The question is whether Israel will remain recognizably itself.
The Illusion of Victory
It is worth recalling that my country’s distinctiveness never rested solely on its military capacity. It rested on a precarious but real synthesis: Jewish self-determination combined with democratic commitment. This synthesis was never pure. It was always contested, often compromised. But it generated a society that was, in crucial respects, open, pluralistic, and self-critical. It generated a civil coexistence of Israeli Jews and Arabs (where the latter can see themselves as Israeli-Palestinians), ready in principle to reach out to any moderate Palestinian leadership willing to negotiate a territorial compromise.
To dismantle that synthesis is not to normalize Israel within its region. It is to abandon the very conditions that made its existence meaningful, not only to its citizens but also to its allies, its once-numerous friends, and to most members of the Jewish world.
And here we must return to the illusion of victory.
Wars have a peculiar capacity to suspend internal critique. They create a moral economy in which the enemy is demonized wholesale, peace-seeking appears disloyal, and unity becomes an end in itself. Yet history suggests that the aftermath of war is precisely when internal choices become decisive.
If Netanyahu translates military ambiguity into political capital—for example, if he calls early elections in July or September and wins them—then the current trajectory will not merely continue; it will accelerate. The judiciary will be irretrievably weakened and politicized. The free newspapers and television channels will face closure or hostile takeovers. The balance between religion and state will shift decisively. The language of rights will yield further to the language of identity and power.
Judaism itself is currently being betrayed, smeared, and deviously reinvented on the mountains of the West Bank. There is no true Judaism left in the self-righteous settlers-turned-terrorists who are attacking, killing, burning, and chasing away entire Palestinian communities. There is no grain of Jewish morality left in their sanctimonious rabbis and political representatives. And, if I may add as the child of a humanist-Zionist family, the core Zionism of Theodor Herzl, Chaim Weizmann, and David Ben Gurion is nonexistent on the Judean and Samarian hilltops. Zionism was about a pragmatic road to a democratic state for the Jews in a globally recognized part of their ancestral land, with full civil rights to minorities and a secular-liberal identity. A well respected member of the family of nations. The Ben-Gvirite so-called Zionism is a diabolical undermining of this world view.
Witness the tremendous damage this government has caused both Gaza and Israel. In the aftermath of the October 7 calamity, it took a justified and warrented casus belli and turned it into the worst, most ugly, and unjust war in our history. On the way, it has squandered every iota of well-deserved sympathy for the Hamas massacre victims in almost every corner of the world. Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar and Hassan Nasrallah were villains who earned their assassinations, but Netanyahu’s Israel could have eliminated them with the world’s blessing rather than its scorn and hatred.
This is a tragic outcome for millions of liberal Israelis. And, unknown to them, tragedy also awaits Netanyahu’s remaining supporters, alongside the ruthless ultranationalists and the hapless, self-absorbed ultra-Orthodox communities. Cutting out the liberals and the seculars will sink the unique little ship that has carried us all so far.
Israel’s Future Will Be Decided at the Ballot Box
It is therefore essential to insist, even now, on the primacy of internal politics. Not as a theoretical principle, but as a practical imperative. Despite the better demographic prospects of Israel’s anti-democrats, we may still just about manage a winning coalition of moderate centrists, led by Yair Lapid and Gadi Eizenkot, most likely with the nationalist but reasonable Naphtali Bennet. Very hopefully also with the Democrats’ Yair Golan. Ideally with the Arab parties, if they manage to join forces and keep up the moderate stance that has already sent one of them into a good but temporary coalition in 2022.
The future of Israel will not be decided in Tehran or Washington or Riyadh. It will be decided in Jerusalem, in Tel Aviv, in Haifa, in Be’er Sheva, in Acre and Nazareth. In the still-free public sphere, and ultimately at the ballot box.
The external arena may shape the conditions. It does not determine the outcome.
One might ask: Is this not a moment for restraint, for postponing internal disagreements until external threats subside?
The answer is that such a postponement has already been tried and it has failed. The erosion of democratic norms did not begin with the current war. It preceded it, perhaps beginning in the heady aftermath of June 1967, when the very first Jewish settlers in the West Bank decided that God had won the war for us rather than our own courage and determination. The same process, reemerging after Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination in 1995, enabled Netanyahu to strangle the peace process and begin empowering Hamas in his bid to weaken the Palestinian Authority. Why give away part of our biblical land if Palestinian extremism can be encouraged, eventually dooming the Palestinians to ethnic cleansing by a religiously militant Israel and a faux-Jewish reliance on the Coming of the Messiah?
There remains, however, another possibility.
It is possible that the very confusion surrounding the still inconclusive outcome of the US-Israeli war against Iran, the visible costs, and the unresolved threats will produce not consolidation but reconsideration. That Israelis, including those who have supported Netanyahu, will begin to ask whether the price is evidently too high.
Moments of national reflection and realignment are rare, and they are fragile. They require leadership, but also civic courage. They require a willingness to distinguish between loyalty to the state and loyalty to a particular government.
Above all, they require clarity.
Clarity about what is being defended—not only in military terms, but in civic and moral terms. Clarity about what is being risked. And clarity about what kind of country Israel is meant to be. The early Zionism spoke unblinkingly of “a light unto the nations.” For me, a democratic turnaround, renewed respect for our Palestinian fellow-citizens, a re-humanized attitude toward the West Bank and Gaza and a reopened horizon for a two-state solution will be quite enough.
A New Middle East May Be Emerging
The Hassidic parable reminds us that relief is not the same as success. Removing the goat restores breathing space. It does not transform the underlying conditions. The shack remains overcrowded.
A potential reopening of Hormuz may ease economic and strategic pressure. It does not resolve the fundamental dilemmas facing Israel, Palestine, and many Middle Eastern countries. Nor does it address the internal transformation that is already underway.
A New Middle East may indeed be emerging. But the more urgent question is whether a new Israel is emerging with it—and whether that Israel will remain democratic. If it does not, then no external victory, however defined, will compensate for the loss.
The primacy of domestic politics, in our particular case, is not a matter of Bismarckian political maneuvers or Netanyahu-style demagogic manipulations.
It is about values, both Jewish and democratic. As long as Israel still remains my beloved homeland and worthy of my civic efforts, the lesson is clear: Only a steady democracy based on civil equality and humanism can survive its own victories.
Fania Oz-Salzberger is an Israeli author and historian.
