In previous posts, I already laid out my ambivalent position toward Benjamin Netanyahu. On the positive side, I think his achievements during the war have been astonishing. He broke through and shattered—or at least significantly pushed back—the ring of fire that threatened to strangle the State of Israel. Yes, he did not decisively defeat the enemy on any of the fronts, and there has been no total victory. But the security situation on every single front is incomparably better than it was before October 7. We have Hamas by the throat because we control more than half of Gaza, including all its borders, and are preventing reconstruction until demilitarization takes place. We managed to incorporate the demilitarization of Hamas into a binding UN Security Council resolution. Does anyone here still remember the Hamas rockets that threatened central Israel—not to mention Sderot and the Gaza border communities—whenever Hamas felt like it? Or the incendiary balloons? The Hezbollah tiger, with its 150,000 missiles threatening to flatten buildings in central Israel, has been reduced to a whimpering cat following the pager operation, the assassination of Nasrallah, and everything else. Its frontline villages in southern Lebanon lie in ruins, as do tunnel fortresses such as Ali al-Taher, into which it invested decades and millions of dollars. The Iranian regime has not fallen, but it has suffered significant blows, including to its nuclear program, which was approaching weaponization. In particular, Benjamin Netanyahu deserves credit for refusing to yield to the insane hostage campaign. Instead of handing Hamas a strategic victory in exchange for the release of all the hostages, he severed Hamas's limbs and nevertheless secured the release of every last one of them, except those who were unfortunately murdered by Hamas during the war. For all this, he deserves tremendous credit. But we paid an extraordinarily heavy price for this war in international legitimacy and international relations. Some of that was unavoidable. The Western world, and especially the mainstream of the media and the international legal establishment, simply cannot comprehend the requirements of high-intensity urban warfare, given their extraordinary humanitarian turn since the late 1970s. In other words, because we procrastinated for so long in dealing with Hamas's monstrous military infrastructure embedded within Gaza's civilian population, we would have paid a heavy international price regardless. But Netanyahu—and especially Smotrich, Katz, and Ben-Gvir—made this crisis considerably worse, and entirely unnecessarily. Not marginally worse, but substantially worse. The vengeful and murderous statements, the pointless boasting about expulsion, conquest, and settlement that never actually happened, the photogenic abuse of prisoners, and the gratuitous talk about "voluntary migration," which likewise never materialized—all these turned against Israel actors who had supported it until very late in the war. In other words, losing their support was not inevitable. Under Netanyahu, Israel did not merely insist on showing the world that it was destroying Gaza because it had no choice. It also made a point of showing how much it enjoyed doing so. We had to carry out the military mission. We could have dispensed with the visible pleasure. To this we must add the unrestrained assault on the military justice system, which prevented us from punishing war crimes swiftly and effectively. Some will argue that everything was inevitable. They will have to explain, for example, why Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who supported us until spring 2025, stopped doing so the moment the insane decision was made to halt aid to Gaza—a decision we ultimately reversed anyway, because we neither wanted nor were prepared to cause starvation. Netanyahu did not distance himself from all this loudly enough or frequently enough, and sometimes not at all. Nor was this merely about preserving his coalition. Smotrich, and even Ben-Gvir, had nowhere else to go, and one of the centrist parties could have been brought into the coalition instead. Netanyahu failed to distance himself, in my opinion, because he wants the votes of these far-right parties. And that—unlike the accusations falsely leveled against him over the hostages and the continuation of the war—is a case in which political considerations really did take precedence over the national interest. And even if we regard the damage done during the Gaza war as water under the bridge, the same pattern is continuing in the West Bank. There is nothing easier for us to prevent, and nothing that causes us more damage even among the staunchly pro-Israel right in Europe and the United States, than the violence of extremist, anarchistic settlers in the West Bank. Israel Katz and Netanyahu bear direct responsibility for this failure because they abolished administrative detention, the most effective tool for dealing with terrorism of this kind. With inexplicable incompetence, Netanyahu is now explaining how we will switch to cryptocurrencies in the face of international economic sanctions—as if we did not have a high-tech industry that depends on legitimate financial transactions, as if such a move would not bring about economic collapse, and as if we possessed Russia's enormous oil and gas reserves or North Korea's Chinese backing. Combined American-European sanctions, particularly against the banking system, would finish Israel off. And especially the settlements in Judea and Samaria. Unnecessary adventures such as construction in E1 are precisely the sort of trigger for such sanctions, which are becoming an increasingly serious, potentially existential threat. Thus, while confronting the ring of fire was the principal security challenge of the previous term, the main challenge of the next term will be international legitimacy. Netanyahu is simply incapable of meeting that challenge. He is internationally toxic. Even the countries that currently support Israel do so not because of Netanyahu, but because of the advantages Israel has to offer. I am extremely angry with Eisenkot over his defeatism during the war—and yes, I use that word deliberately. But in the arena of international legitimacy, he would be much better for Israel than Benjamin Netanyahu. And that, as I have said, is what I believe will be the most important challenge in the years ahead. To this we must add other existential challenges on which Netanyahu has failed disgracefully. First, the struggle against rampant crime in Arab society, under the watch of the contemptible Ben-Gvir, whom Netanyahu appointed, with unbelievable negligence and cynicism, to the sensitive position of Minister of National Security. Second, a foolish and extreme judicial reform that divided the country to the brink of civil war at a time of enormous security challenges. It would have been perfectly possible to pass a more moderate reform, which would admittedly have provoked fury on the opinion pages of Haaretz, among academic legal scholars, and at the Israel Democracy Institute—but not much beyond that. And there is more. Netanyahu appoints complete nonentities such as Miri Regev and Dudi Amsalem to increasingly sensitive positions, and they in turn appoint carbon copies of themselves—political cronies of the sort familiar from the Third World—to other critical posts. A high-tech nation cannot survive when it is run by utter fools. This problem cannot be addressed as long as Likud remains in power. It needs to spend four years in opposition. Finally, there is the ultra-Orthodox challenge. The army is short of combat soldiers and is stretched too thin across too many fronts. The manpower crisis cannot be resolved without bringing an idle, parasitic community—whose politicians make no secret of its idleness and parasitism (remember Eliakim Stark, the new caricature? From now on, all of Israel will work for Belz)—into both military service and the workforce. This will require ending subsidies and special privileges. I do not know whether another government will do this. But there is absolutely no chance that a Netanyahu government, whose alliance with the ultra-Orthodox parties is part of its political DNA, will address this existential problem. For all these reasons, I believe Netanyahu must go, and that means voting for the Change Bloc. Not because it is perfect—far from it. Not because I have no anger toward it over its disgraceful conduct during the war and its shameful insistence that "we were defeated," when the exact opposite is true—far from it. But politics is about choosing between available alternatives, and the urgent need to remove the current coalition from power obliges us to vote for the alternative. Lieberman and Yair Golan were never options for me. The former is a volatile, bombastic populist (although he was an excellent finance minister), while the latter is far too far to the left for my taste. That leaves Eisenkot and Bennett, and I hesitated between them. Ultimately, I decided to vote for Bennett. I liked his performance as prime minister, and I greatly appreciate his appetite for reform and change, his energy, the talented former directors he has recruited for his electoral list (and in my view, good management is precisely what the country urgently needs), and his pragmatism. If the Change Bloc wins, Eisenkot will presumably become prime minister, but I want Bennett to hold as senior a position as possible. And Lapid? He is a bitter pill I will have to swallow—but in politics, you have to swallow bitter pills. That's life. I believe that a strong Bennett in the government would preserve Netanyahu's achievements in foreign and security policy, without (most of) the defects of the current government. And do not try to threaten me with the prospect of a partnership with Ra'am. As you know, I enthusiastically support it, certainly with Segalovich in the picture, provided that Ra'am agrees to Eisenkot's conditions: a declaration that Hamas is a terrorist organization that must be eliminated and disarmed (even while emphasizing the need to care for Gaza's residents), support for Israel's Declaration of Independence, and a commitment to national service for all citizens. * Second best option for me: unity government without the Haredi parties and Ben Gvir. That's all for now. I have no intention of getting into point-by-point arguments over every single issue, but I would be happy to answer questions genuinely intended to clarify my position.