Kushmaro: Stop Treating Israel's 2026 Vote as a Survival Struggle
A commentator argues repeated claims of fateful elections feed disputes over whether losing camps accept results.
By Elizabeth Morales ·
Israeli broadcaster Danny Kushmaro opens his nightly election segment by calling the October 27 vote the most fateful in Israel's history, a phrase repeated across the campaign as Israel's most important elections. Writing in The Jerusalem Post's Political Narrative column, he argues the label misleads.
Kushmaro's objection centers on what follows defeat. He writes that casting the contest between pro-Netanyahu and anti-Netanyahu blocs as existential makes a loss sound like something the country cannot survive, which can make accepting the outcome harder. He notes that since Naftali Bennett formed his government in 2021, Israel has struggled with whether the losing side will give the other side a chance to govern.
Kushmaro points to Benjamin Netanyahu's description of the Bennett coalition's formation as 'the greatest election fraud,' a comment about broken campaign promises rather than stolen ballots, which cast a government formed through the parliamentary process as fraudulent and illegitimate. He says the opposition then worked to bring the government down from the moment it took office, and that in recordings published in May 2022, Likud MK Miri Regev defended voting against measures benefiting soldiers and vulnerable groups because the overriding objective was to topple the coalition.
After Netanyahu won in 2022 and formed a hard-right government, Yair Lapid conceded and arranged an orderly handover, but opposition to the judicial overhaul brought masses into the streets. At a demonstration in Tel Aviv in April 2023, former Shin Bet director Yuval Diskin said that while the government had been elected legally, it was morally illegitimate because of its 'appalling composition and reprehensible actions.'
Kushmaro writes that he introduces the election segment nightly by calling them the most fateful in Israel's history, but cautions against assuming any vote is more consequential than those that came before. Israel's next election is set for Tuesday.
Source: The Jerusalem Post
