Dear Messrs. Benjamin Netanyahu, Gadi Eisenkot, Naftali Bennett, and Avigdor Liberman,
Please explain: what substantive issue clashes prevent you from making history and governing together?
The ideological differences between you are as misty as the “difference between Tweedledum and Tweedledee,” as they said about America’s 1912 presidential nominees.
United, you can fulfill your respective promises to create a Zionist government, solving Israel’s most pressing problems, while ditching extremists and healing the Jewish people worldwide.
The math is simple. A majority of Israel’s electorate elected you. Twenty-seven plus 21 plus 12 plus 7 yields a dominant 67 seats out of the Knesset’s 120.
You, Mr. Netanyahu, oppose a Palestinian state, call Israel “the nation-state of the Jewish people,” while demanding a “forceful... proactive” security policy and a free economy.
You, Mr. Eisenkot, will govern with anyone who recognizes Israel as a Jewish, democratic, liberal, and egalitarian state, embraces the Declaration of Independence, recognizes Hamas as a terrorist organization that cannot rule Gaza, and endorses national service for all.
Following David Ben-Gurion
Be Zionists! Tell left-wingers you’re following David Ben-Gurion, who justified the “half a loaf” 1947 partition compromise, while teaching his son, Amos: “Political matters should not be a question of emotions. The only thing that should be taken into account is what we want and what is best for us, what will lead to the objective, and which are the policies that will make us succeed and which will make us fail.”
Tell right-wingers you’re honoring Ben-Gurion’s rival Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who said: “In an ideal state, compromise between majority and minority should be a permanent rule.”
It’s mind-blowing. Compromises are usually difficult, gut-wrenching, heart-wrenching, costly. Your golden path forward is effortless, painless, heartwarming, cheap – and transformational.
Launch a unity government, first designating Israel’s top vote-getter, Netanyahu, prime minister.
You change coalitionists failed to beat him one-on-one. Your arguments overreached. The “conceptzia,” the misconceptions, that caused October 7 blinded Netanyahu – and most everyone else, including Eisenkot and the Americans. Similarly, telling Israelis he mishandled this war, when Israel triumphed under Netanyahu’s leadership, is like telling Americans to trust Iran’s evil regime.
And, once again, foreigners’ demented assaults on him and Israel backfired, boosting Bibi.
A plurality rejected this obsessive demonization of Netanyahu, while a majority demand a change. Netanyahu rotating with Eisenkot as prime minister, then Lieberman as Defense Minister, and Bennett as Education Minister, reflects this election’s mixed message.
Govern by what unites us. You all want:
• Israel’s enemies vanquished: in Iran, Lebanon, Gaza, Yemen, along with Judea and Samaria.
• Law and order everywhere: crushing crime in the territories, the Arab sector, and from North to South.
• Renewed public diplomacy: selling Israel’s right-to-left government as a model for every democracy.
• National service for all: rooting out draft evaders, from secular to religious, while enlisting Israeli Arabs to serve their communities.
Implement Bennett’s 8-8-8 proposal, building haredi yeshivot on every border, offering eight hours of sleep, eight hours of Torah learning, and eight hours of fulfilling the Torah’s mitzvah of guarding our Holy Land.
• A functional government that addresses high living costs; housing shortages; the health-care crisis; the overly partisan, intrusive judiciary; contempt for the law; and deteriorating educational standards.
Regarding one of the needed negotiations’ stickiest points, appoint an investigative commission of respected nonpartisan experts to learn from October 7’s systemic failures. Have them collect data, hold hearings, then suspend their deliberations and conclusions during the two years Netanyahu leads.
As Israel’s first president, Chaim Weizmann, taught, “A dunam here, a dunam there, a goat here, a goat there.” Step-by-consensus-seeking-step, you can govern – and repair Israel – together.
As the anti-Bibistas lick their wounds during Netanyahu’s two years, the coalition agreement should demand constructive leadership from each coalition member.
Every minister, left and right, should vow to stop demonizing and caricaturing fellow Israelis, while broadcasting Israel’s best face to the world.
Fire right-wing ministers who vilify “the Arabs” – although left-wingers clumping all “the Arabs” together, not distinguishing between Ra’am’s more pragmatic pols and the Joint List’s anti-Zionist zealots, are also bigots.
Similarly, any minister interviewed on international media who boorishly courts the crowd at home rather than trying to woo viewers abroad should be sacked after one warning.
Most of my friends, left to right, agree: if you four can’t figure out this obvious move, shame on you. Normal people would respond to game theory teaching maximizing outcomes, or Jewish values celebrating “shalom bayit” – peaceful households. Sigh! Your spectacular dysfunction requires an intervention from family therapists – not our heroic president.
Psychologists repair fractured families by emphasizing “shared meaning” and intertwined needs.
The best-selling shrink John Gottman warns that the couples most likely to divorce fall into the ever-deepening rabbit hole of mutual contempt. Three of you and your supporters scorn Netanyahu obsessively, while you, Netanyahu, and your minions reciprocate equally venomously.
Therapists would ask: “How has your anger been running your prospective governing ‘family,’ and how can we reclaim our ‘home’ from it?”
Tap into your 154 years of collective public service. Anyone doubting this imperative to unite should remember Zionism’s dazzling “night of 11 points.” Eighty years ago, October 5-6, 1946, different youth movements – socialist, pragmatic, religious – founded 11 settlements in the western Negev, overnight. These heroics secured the future state’s borders, while telegraphing Zionism’s determination to triumph.
Some of those settlements now symbolize a unity forged in blood and endured barbarism, not just sweat and shared idealism: Be’eri, Nirim, Urim.
Don’t disappoint us – or them. We can’t afford failure.
The writer is a distinguished scholar of North American history at McGill University and a senior research fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute. He is the author of nine books on presidential history and nine on modern Zionism, including To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream, as well as his latest ebook, The Essential Guide to the US-Israel Partnership: the 250th Anniversary Edition.