I live on the same street in north Tel Aviv as Gali Baharav-Miara, Israel’s attorney general. Occasionally I see her walking through the neighborhood, a bodyguard following 20 feet behind. Her home is guarded around the clock. To the government and its supporters, she is an unelected official obstructing the elected right’s ability to govern. To liberal Israelis, she is one of the last institutional barriers between democracy and unchecked political power.
The national argument plays itself out beneath my window. On Saturday nights, right-wing protesters gather outside her home, shouting, honking their horns, and demanding her dismissal. I’ve seen Mordechai David here, a right-wing activist who has become notorious for confronting prominent government opponents while filming them on his phone. On Friday afternoons, Baharav-Miara’s supporters take their place, wearing Gali, Guardian of Israel T-shirts and holding signs urging her to stay strong. Then everyone goes home. The street becomes quiet. The cafés open in the morning and we drink our coffee.
Israelis have been predicting the end of Israel for as long as I can remember. In my liberal, secular circles, almost every election has been described as the decisive one, the last opportunity to save the country. If Menachem Begin wins, Israel is finished. If Ariel Sharon wins, Israel is finished. If Benjamin Netanyahu returns—again—Israel is finished. Friends announce that this time they really will leave. Yet when the results arrive, and despair descends, the following morning most wake up, drink their coffee, and go to work. After voting on Tuesday, that’s what millions did on Wednesday.
[Graeme Wood: Israeli election results hazy, try again]
All of this is partly because Israelis are dramatic people, and Jewish history has given us good reason to be alert to impending disaster. It is also because leaving is harder than declaring an intention to leave. People have parents, children, jobs, homes, friends, and a language in which they know how to quarrel and make jokes. Besides, even extreme political change doesn’t immediately alter the texture of everyday life. As another election fades into history, school drop-off remains the same, as does the taste of that first cup of coffee.
After the Yom Kippur War of 1973—the first war in which Israel seemed vulnerable and its victory uncertain—a wave of Israelis emigrated, shaken by the discovery that the Jewish state could not guarantee their safety. Ever since, departure has been both a real phenomenon and a national threat, uttered whenever the country disappoints us. We are forever leaving, and forever still here.
The liberal panic about Begin in 1977 was not invented. He came from a political tradition that the Labor establishment had treated as dangerous and illegitimate, and his victory ended three decades of rule by the elites who had founded the state. Many secular Ashkenazi Israelis felt as if their country had been seized by strangers: nationalists, religious Jews, and Mizrahi voters whose families had come from Morocco, Iraq, and elsewhere in the Arab world. For decades, the Labor establishment had treated these immigrants as cultural inferiors, housing them first in impoverished transit camps and later in remote development towns, far from the country’s centers of power. Begin treated them not as backward newcomers requiring instruction, but as fellow Jews entitled to dignity and influence. Along the way, Begin changed Israel profoundly, not always for the better. He accelerated the West Bank settlements and helped push inflation into triple digits. Even worse, he led Israel into the disastrous 1982 Lebanon War, which drove the Palestine Liberation Organization from Beirut but left Israel trapped in a bloody and protracted occupation.
Yet Begin also respected the democratic transfer of power that brought him to office. He also did not attempt to neutralize every institution capable of restraining him. Most important, in 1979 this lifelong nationalist signed a peace treaty with Egypt, agreeing to return the entire Sinai Peninsula; the withdrawal was completed three years later. In short, Begin recognized that holding power did not mean that every ideological dream had to be realized, or that compromise was treason. As Begin is often quoted as saying, the difficulties of peace are better than the agonies of war.
Two decades after Begin, Sharon frightened the Israeli left for even more concrete reasons. He was a leading architect of the settlement project, and a ruthless army officer as far back as the 1950s. As Begin’s defense minister, Sharon was also found indirectly responsible for failing to prevent the Sabra and Shatila massacre, when a Lebanese Christian militia supported by Israel killed at least 1,300 people in Beirut.
When Sharon was elected prime minister in 2001, many liberals again spoke as if the state had reached its final chapter. I captured that reflex in my novel Don’t You Want Me. At a dinner party in a New York apartment in the early 2000s, Israelis argue about whether to return home. One declares that if Sharon is elected, it will be the end of Israel, and he will not go back. It was the kind of sentence Israelis said so often that it barely required invention.
Sharon did not become a man of peace. Yet in 2005 he evacuated every Israeli settlement from Gaza, sending soldiers to remove settlers from their homes. The wisdom of the disengagement, the manner in which it was carried out, and its longer-term consequences all remain fiercely disputed, particularly after October 7. But the political fact is extraordinary from today’s perspective: The great patron of the settlers concluded that the state’s interests required a limit to their plans, a limit Sharon himself imposed.
The point is not that Begin and Sharon were liberals in disguise. They were not. Nor were the warnings about them foolish. Each helped move Israel further from the country its old liberal elite imagined it to be—a secular, social-democratic, and egalitarian Jewish state, embodied by the kibbutz and the citizen army and governed by the institutions that Labor had built. But both men operated within a political world in which power encountered boundaries. Institutions mattered. The opposition was an opponent, not an internal enemy. Territory could be relinquished, and reality could defeat ideology.
This is what makes the right today different. Its most influential forces regard restraint itself as illegitimate. Courts, legal advisers, journalists, demonstrators, bereaved families, and even parts of the security establishment are described not as checks on the government but as a “deep state” preventing the “authentic” people from ruling. The phrases are imported, but the resentment is homegrown: an old belief that Labor’s heirs continue to control Israel’s institutions long after losing power. It is hardly surprising, then, that even before the count was complete, Likud claimed that the election had been “stolen” by the Arab parties, whose projected representation surged from 10 seats to a record 19, and demanded an investigation into alleged fraud.
The settler movement, which I wrote about in The Hilltop as a subculture both absurd and dangerous, is no longer pushing at the margins of Israeli politics. Its worldview sits inside the government, while settler violence against Palestinians has become routine. Only last week, masked settlers attacking Palestinians during the olive harvest seriously injured Heidi Levine, a photojournalist for The Washington Post. Meanwhile, far-right ministers openly advocate for the mass removal of Palestinians from Gaza under the euphemism of “voluntary emigration.” What was once regarded as extremist fantasy has become both daily practice and government policy.
That worldview can promise land, revenge, and Jewish supremacy—but no destination. It offers no plausible picture of life with the Palestinians except permanent domination, recurring violence, and eventual expulsion. It presents eternal war not as a failure of politics but almost as a religious condition. As Netanyahu reportedly told fellow Knesset members in 2015, Israel would “forever live by the sword.”
The irony, of course, is that Netanyahu’s government presided over the deadliest day in Israel’s history. On October 7, the security system in which citizens had placed almost-mystical faith collapsed. The war that followed inflicted a catastrophe on Gaza, killed and displaced enormous numbers of our Palestinian neighbors, and left Israel more isolated and morally damaged than ever.
Six months ago, during the conflict with Iran, a missile struck the street where my ex-wife lives, damaging our apartment. In Israel, the phrase existential threat is used so frequently that it can begin to sound theatrical, until the explosion occurs outside a home in which your family lives. Yet if the volcano does erupt here, we count the dead, inspect the damage, argue about responsibility—then make another cup of coffee.
The coffee is not evidence that nothing happened. It is, rather, how we live with what did. This is why I hesitate before repeating the familiar claim that this week’s vote was Israel’s last. Since Tuesday night, I have again heard friends threaten that now they will leave. But countries rarely end on election night. Ballots are counted and coalitions are negotiated, and voters, this week like any other week, wake up late and complain about the result.
[View: Flying across the world to vote]
Yet for too long, Israelis have confused survival with continuity. And whatever happens in the Knesset over the next few days and weeks, the country’s continued existence does not mean it remains the same country. Rather, its transformation will come step by step: another loyalist appointed, another illegal outpost recognized, another Palestinian farmer dispossessed, another generation of reservists called to fight a war without end. Elections may endure, but they risk offering diminishing choices. The flag will still fly, the cafés will still be full, yet what does that matter when the country beneath becomes more authoritarian, more violent, more isolated?
There is therefore a broader question underpinning this election for Israelis: not only where Jews can live, but where they want to live. I began writing my forthcoming novel, The Gavronski Brothers, after October 7 because I wanted to escape the present. It is a comic adventure about five Jewish siblings—my ancestors—fleeing Lithuania at the end of the 19th century to escape conscription into the tsar’s army. I thought that by going back 130 years I could avoid Israeli current affairs. Instead, I found the same questions waiting for me. Where can Jews be safe? Where can they be accepted? What must they surrender to belong?
Those questions are adopting a cruel new shape. Rising anti-Semitism makes parts of the diaspora feel less secure. But an ever more religious, nationalist, and authoritarian Israel is becoming a place that many liberal Jews may be able to inhabit physically, but no longer wish to inhabit politically or morally, especially if living there also means accepting the constant threat of war. To be clear: I will not leave. At 57, I am too old to begin again elsewhere, and this is my language, my landscape, my home. But I do not expect my two teenage daughters to build their futures here—and I cannot honestly tell them that they should.
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