Written by The Israeli government is collapsing over a draft fight. The catastrophe it has built will outlast the man at the top.
Published on efiretemple.com • May 2026
Israel’s ruling coalition has called for an early election. The cause is not the war in Gaza, not the strikes on Beirut, not the famine, not the international isolation. It is a domestic fight over whether ultra-Orthodox men have to serve in the army. The vote to dissolve the Knesset is expected to pass next week. Israelis will likely go to the polls in late August, two months before the government’s mandated term ends in October.
If the polls hold, Benjamin Netanyahu will lose. The most likely successor is a joint ticket fronted by former prime ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid. The most extreme members of the current cabinet — Bezalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben-Gvir — will lose their portfolios. Western leaders will get a new Israeli face to shake hands with. There will be a diplomatic reset. There will be op-eds calling it a turning point.
It will not fix what is wrong.
The structural facts that drove the global collapse of support for Israel are not lodged in one person. They are lodged in Israeli policy, Israeli politics, and the Israeli public.
Settlement expansion was bipartisan Israeli policy long before Netanyahu’s current coalition. A record 54 new settlements were approved in 2025 — under Netanyahu, but in a country where every major party except the Arab parties has supported settlement growth in some form for decades. The infrastructure on the ground — the roads, the housing, the bureaucratic annexation — does not unbuild itself when a government changes.
Support for a two-state solution has collapsed across the Israeli political spectrum. The Council on Foreign Relations’ Steven Cook put it bluntly last year: the Palestinian state that the UK, France, and Canada recognized in September 2025 cannot come into existence, because Israeli society no longer wants it to. That is not a Netanyahu problem. That is the median Israeli voter.
The military doctrine will not change either. Bennett was the architect of “mowing the grass” — the periodic Gaza operations that defined the pre-2023 status quo. Lapid is a centrist who supported the war’s prosecution. Neither has proposed ending the military campaigns. They have proposed running them more competently.
And here is the part of the story most coverage misses. The fight that is bringing Netanyahu down — Haredi conscription — exists because the Israel Defense Forces has told the Knesset, on the record, that it cannot sustain its current operations without more soldiers. Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir said the burden on regular and reserve forces is unsustainable. He said recruiting the ultra-Orthodox is an “existential need” for the IDF. He said it in the context of continuing the campaigns that have killed more than 70,000 Palestinians and thousands of Lebanese.
Read that carefully. If the post-Netanyahu government succeeds where Netanyahu failed and drafts the Haredi, the result is not a peace dividend. It is a manpower dividend for the war machine. A more capable IDF, with broader Israeli public legitimacy behind it, run by leaders who are more politically palatable to Western capitals. The conduct continues with better packaging.
This is the equilibrium most likely to arrive. Netanyahu falls. The worst far-right ministers exit. Settlement approvals slow but do not stop. Ceasefire violations decrease but do not end. Humanitarian access improves at the margins. Global pressure eases because the most visible symptoms have eased. The Saudi normalization track reopens on terms more favorable to Israel — meaning the Palestinians get less, not more. Western governments declare a turning point and move on.
The 70,000 dead remain dead. Gaza remains physically destroyed. The West Bank remains under occupation. The legal record at the ICJ and the ICC remains in the file. The settlements approved in 2025 remain on the ground. None of it is undone by an Israeli election.
What would actually be enough is not in front of any voter in Israel right now. It would require recognition of Palestinian statehood by Israel itself, a freeze on settlements with dismantlement of outposts, accountability for war conduct through Israeli courts, reconstruction funded by Israel, and an end to the occupation framework. None of that is on the Bennett-Lapid platform. None of it is anywhere on Israel’s electoral map. The Israeli public moved sharply right after October 7 and has not moved back.
So when Western analysts call Netanyahu’s likely fall a turning point, the honest question is: a turning point toward what? Toward a government that is less embarrassing to Western leaders. Toward a smaller cohort of ministers using genocidal rhetoric in public. Toward strikes that get cleared with allies before being carried out instead of after. These are real changes. They are also cosmetic changes.
The international system has spent two years building the leverage required to force structural change in Israeli policy. The polling, the recognitions, the UN votes, the arms restrictions, the ICJ proceedings — all of it was real. The question that matters now is whether that pressure survives the moment when its most obvious target is gone. History suggests it will not. The political incentive to keep pressuring an Israeli government will be lowest precisely when a new one takes office.
Netanyahu’s fall is necessary. It is not sufficient. The catastrophe he managed will outlast the man who managed it, because the catastrophe was never only him.
That is the part of the story Israelis going to the polls in August cannot vote on. And the part the rest of the world should refuse to forget.