Netanyahu’s challengers are selling the same poison

One would think that after October 7 and the Gaza war that followed, the leaders from the main opposition parties would have drawn the obvious conclusion. Eighty years of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have not made Israel safer. It has made Israel strategically weaker, lonelier, and more reviled than at any moment in its history. Yet the two men most likely to replace Benjamin Netanyahu-former IDF Chief Gadi Eisenkot and, less likely, Naftali Bennett-have already announced what they will not do, nor even imply: take any significant measure to mitigate this endemically self-consuming conflict toward a permanent solution.

Eisenkot, whose new Yashar party now leads or ties Likud in the polls, put it plainly: "I have never spoken about a Palestinian state." He supports settlement building in the West Bank, albeit has acknowledged settler violence against Palestinians as "terrorism."

Naftali Bennett went further. He would refuse Palestinian statehood even if it cost Israel normalization with Saudi Arabia. "I will not allow a Palestinian state to be established, and I will not hand over territory. Period."

That is the alternative. Not a new chapter, but the same chapter, read by different men in a calmer voice. Israeli leaders remain tragically misguided.

I have said this for decades, and I will say it again: the Israeli public was sold a falsehood, that a Palestinian state poses an existential threat to Israel. The opposite is true. It is the denial of Palestinian statehood that is destroying Israel from within. The misfortune is not that Netanyahu peddled this lie; it is that his challengers now recite it.

They should know better. Eisenkot has spent a lifetime in Israel's security establishment. He understands the arithmetic between the river and the sea. He knows that permanent military domination over five million stateless Palestinians has failed miserably, culminating with Hamas' attack and Israel's genocidal retaliatory war, and still offers no alternative. And Bennett is categorically against Palestinian statehood and eyes the greater Israel delusion, which will usher in nothing but repeated disasters that will destroy what's left of Israel's moral standing, if not its very existence as we know it.

Leaders are supposed to change a national mindset when that mindset is leading a nation off a cliff. Instead, these men are cementing it. Every time they repeat the old narrative for votes, they deepen the conflict they claim to want to manage.

Israeli strategy rests on a fantasy: that Palestinians will eventually tire, submit, and abandon their claim to a state. This is dead wrong. The Palestinians are not going anywhere and will remain ever more resolute. Aspirants to the premiership must examine that assumption honestly. What could persuade a people to accept permanent subjugation? Nothing.

They have endured occupation for nearly sixty years. They will endure another sixty if they must. No force exists-not Israel's army, not the Arab states, not the international community-that can extract a surrender of their national identity.

The Palestinians believe statehood is a right, not a wish. On that, history and law are with them. And time is on their side, not Israel's. The diplomatic cost Israel has sustained in the wake of the Gaza war has risen to 157 of the 193 UN member states now recognizing the State of Palestine-including Britain, France, Canada, and Australia. For decades, successive Israeli governments wanted to bury the two-state solution. Instead, they globalized it.

Then there is America, Israel's indispensable military, economic, and political supporter. For the first time in a quarter century of Gallup polling, more Americans sympathize with the Palestinians than with the Israelis-41 percent to 36 percent, a reversal from a 13-point Israeli lead a year earlier-among Democrats, 65 percent side with the Palestinians; 17 percent with Israel.

That is not a bad news cycle. That is the erosion of the foundation on which Israel's security has rested in particular since 1967. Jews abroad feel it most painfully. A state created to be their refuge has become, for many, a source of shame and exposure.