On the morning of August 18, shortly after 10 a.m., a moving truck stopped in front of our home in Kibbutz Nahal Oz, the closest Israeli community to the Gaza border. The driver and two assistants began unloading dozens of boxes containing our belongings—books, clothing, electronics, kitchen appliances.
Fifty minutes later, everything was off the truck, the boxes piled in the center of our living room. I gave the movers some cold water—it was ridiculously hot, as summer days in Israel tend to be—and they hurried out the door. My wife and I stood in front of the boxes, and we both took a deep breath. Almost three years after surviving the October 7 attack, we were back home.
Nahal Oz is a small community located less than a mile from the Israel-Gaza border. It’s a kibbutz—a collective village where even today, in the capitalist Israel of 2026, many elements of daily life are managed by the community. It has a successful dairy farm, eight chicken coops, and fields that stretch several miles to the north, south, and east of the kibbutz, where potatoes, cabbages, carrots, and corn are grown throughout the year.
To the west of the kibbutz is the border with Gaza, and beyond it are large mounds of rubble standing where the Shuja’iyya neighborhood of Gaza City used to be. Many of the Hamas terrorists who infiltrated Nahal Oz on October 7 came from there; Israel’s response was to completely empty and destroy the neighborhood, leaving scorched earth where thousands of families once had their homes. Today it is part of the approximately 60 percent of the Gaza Strip held by the Israeli military. Nobody lives there now.
Like most of the kibbutzim along the Israel-Gaza border, Nahal Oz has traditionally been a stronghold of the Israeli left; the Labor party and its allies won more than 90 percent of the local vote in past elections. Things have changed over the years, but not much: When Israelis last went to the polls, in 2022, the parties opposing Benjamin Netanyahu received 85 percent of the votes in the kibbutz’s polling station. A handful of residents volunteered prior to October 7 for Road to Recovery, an Israeli NGO helping Palestinians from Gaza receive medical treatment in Israeli hospitals.
On the eve of Hamas’s surprise attack, Nahal Oz was home to 450 people. Fifteen of our friends and neighbors were murdered; another eight were kidnapped. Everyone else was evacuated from the kibbutz under fire. Almost every home in the community was harmed; when I first came to visit ours, in November 2023, I counted 40 bullet marks inside and outside the house. On a later visit my wife, Miri, identified the impact of a grenade near our kitchen window.
[Graeme Wood: Israel can’t postpone its reckoning forever]
I told my family’s story in my book The Gates of Gaza, published a year after the attack. I wrote about the long hours we spent with our two young daughters in a dark room, with no food or electricity, while terrorists encircled our home and fired into the living room. The book also told of the rescue mission that my parents, both in their early 60s, took upon themselves to launch, driving from Tel Aviv down to the Gaza border, determined to save us and anyone else they met along the way.
I won’t recount the horror, fear, and heroism of that day here. But the memories have stayed with us, and for almost three years they have been central to an impossible dilemma for our family: whether to return to Nahal Oz.
In the war’s first two years, this was a purely theoretical question. Nahal Oz was located in a closed military zone, and no one could live there. Our community found a temporary home in a kibbutz near Haifa, in northern Israel, which generously agreed to host us. There, we waited for the war to end.
The dilemma became urgent in the spring of 2026, when we had to enroll our older daughter, Galia, in first grade. We wanted her to start this exciting chapter of her life with her friends back home in Nahal Oz. But could we ever sleep again in the house where we were almost murdered? Could we drive off to work every morning, leaving our younger daughter, Carmel, in Nahal Oz’s kindergarten? And could we truly live next to a devastated Gaza, which had become a giant refugee camp, half of it still under the control of Hamas, poorer and even more miserable than it had been before?
The only way to find out was to try. We began to visit the kibbutz on weekends, often spending a night or two in our home, which had by that point been fully renovated. The first time we stayed the night, we learned the limits of the cease-fire that had gone into effect the previous October: Around 2 a.m., we were awakened by an explosion as an Israeli military vehicle inside Gaza drove over a roadside bomb. A series of Israeli bombardments followed, shaking our walls. The girls slept through it all—perhaps they had gotten used to such noises during the Hezbollah and Iranian missile attacks we experienced in the north—but Miri and I got barely any sleep.
The next visits were better, and reminded us of what we love about Nahal Oz: the narrow, tree-shaded alleys; the colorful gardens surrounding the homes; the wide green fields we can see from our front porch. Most of all, we reconnected with the friends who survived October 7 alongside us, and who understand us in ways that others, no matter how close or beloved, never fully can.
Eventually, after months of agonized deliberation, we decided to move back and rebuild our life in the same place where it almost ended. Leaving Nahal Oz, we felt, would be an admission of defeat, and a victory for the terrorists who attacked our community and desecrated our home.
Before moving back, though, we agreed to unpack only some of our boxes, those holding what we’d need in the coming months. The rest are still sealed in our storage room. They will wait there until October 27, when Israel will hold the most consequential election in its history. If Israel’s liberal camp loses, we fear that there will be no future for us and our children here—not just in Nahal Oz, but anywhere in Israel.
My family is personally involved in this election: My father is running for the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, in the party of former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, which is part of the opposition bloc aiming to remove Netanyahu’s current government. But when I think of the stakes of this election, it’s not the older generation of my family that comes to mind; it’s the younger one—my two daughters. If my father isn’t elected to the Knesset but the Netanyahu government is replaced, everyone in our family will be just fine. The same won’t be true if he’s elected but Netanyahu retains power.
What makes this election so consequential? In a recent poll, 23 percent of Israelis said they or someone in their family would consider leaving the country if Netanyahu’s government is reelected. Although we have just moved back to our home, Miri and I are among that group. We struggle to imagine any kind of future here if this government stays in power.
People following this election from abroad may be confused. The issues that have dominated international coverage of Israel over the past three years—the war in Gaza, the war with Iran, violence in the West Bank—are less prominent in the country’s internal political debate. The ruling coalition and the leading opposition parties differ on these issues, to a degree, but the differences may seem small to Israel’s harshest critics.
[Franklin Foer: How Netanyahu lost America]
Although much of the world believes that Netanyahu dragged Donald Trump into a failed adventure in Iran, inside Israel, the prime minister faces equally fierce criticism for very different reasons. Israelis who want him gone point to his government’s staggering corruption and incompetence, which have caused a sharp deterioration in the institutions and services that Israelis rely on every day, including schools and hospitals and police stations and airports.
Israeli students’ scores on international reading and math tests have declined dramatically, and a recent study found that Israel’s schools are the second-most-overcrowded in the OECD. In 2025, the country recorded the highest number of murders in its history and the most deaths from car accidents in two decades. These things don’t make headlines abroad, and they aren’t as dramatic as the events unfolding in Iran and Gaza. But they shape our reality just as much as questions of war and peace, making life here, which isn’t easy to begin with, harder and harder to bear.
Last month, my brother, a physician, was promoted to a new position, and our family was invited to the ceremony. As his boss offered words of congratulation, my phone began vibrating. I glanced down and saw a series of push notifications from Israeli news sites warning of a “medical exodus”: A new Tel Aviv University study found that almost 1,400 doctors had left Israel over the past three years, an unprecedented number that endangers the country’s entire health-care system.
The doctors aren’t the only ones leaving. According to a recent study, nearly 270,000 Israelis left the country for at least three months between 2023 and 2025, far more than in any comparable period; many more are considering doing so. Those leaving are younger, better-educated, and higher-earning than the population as a whole.
My wife and I see this trend not just in academic studies, but also in our own social circle. We’ve never had so many friends and relatives leave the country. We joke that we now have someone to stay with in every corner of the world, from Australia to Canada to Thailand to Spain. But the joke has a dark side: Israel cannot afford to lose so many of its skilled and talented people. These workers form the backbone of its high-tech economy, and will be very hard to replace.
Each of these examples could be explained away on its own, but together they tell a story that is rarely heard outside Israel: of a state in decline, suffering under the weight of a corrupt, divisive, and dysfunctional government. For at least half of the country, this has been the defining story of Israel over the past four years, alongside October 7 and the war. The upcoming election is a referendum on whether it will also be the story of the years to come.
In December 2022, Netanyahu swore in his current government and gave Itamar Ben-Gvir, a convicted felon and far-right provocateur, control over the Israeli police. In January 2023, Justice Minister Yariv Levin unveiled a radical plan to shatter the independence of Israel’s judiciary. Then came October 7, which exposed a frightening degree of institutional dysfunction. The army was not the only institution that failed to show up for Israelis that day. There were no trains or buses to take soldiers to the front or to help reservists join their units. Children were evacuated from their homes in Israel’s northern and southern border regions, then were left without schools and kindergartens. Civil-society groups filled void after void, while the government was nowhere to be seen.
Israel’s then–state comptroller, Matanyahu Englman, who was handpicked for the job by Netanyahu, published a series of damning reports on the government’s incompetence after October 7. One detailed the collapse of Israel’s emergency medical services. Another faulted the government for the breakdown of the country’s welfare and mental-health services at the very moment they were needed most. Little seems to have changed since the reports’ publication: In 2025, Israel recorded the highest number of suicides among soldiers and reservists in 15 years.
I could go on. The police are short almost 2,000 officers and have lowered their hiring standards to fill the gap. The courts are so understaffed that earlier this year, a supreme-court justice warned that murder defendants were being released on house arrest because there weren’t enough judges to try them. Schools regularly combine classes for lack of teachers.
The latest example of this government’s dangerous dysfunction is the suspected terror attack carried out last week by an Omani co-pilot on a flight from Dubai to Israel. Reporting by several Israeli news outlets revealed frightening negligence within the Transportation Ministry, which is responsible for screening foreign pilots scheduled to land in Israel. Information about this pilot’s apparent support for Islamist terror attacks was easily discoverable, yet Israeli authorities did not perform even a rudimentary screening before he was assigned to fly almost 200 Israelis to Ben Gurion Airport. Just as acts of heroism by individual Israeli soldiers and civilians saved lives on October 7, the courageous response of the flight’s captain and several Israeli passengers prevented a massive disaster in the skies over Tel Aviv. But once again, the government failed miserably in its most basic duty.
The only thing this government has succeeded at doing is remaining in power. After October 7, it was widely assumed that new elections would be held within months. Instead, Netanyahu’s current government will become the first in decades to complete a full term. For us, as survivors of October 7 who lost too many friends that day, the government’s persistence in office is an insult added to the deepest injury.
Netanyahu’s coalition of political survivors consists of three elements: his own Likud party, the far-right parties of Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, and the ultra-Orthodox parties.
[Graeme Wood: A near disaster on Flydubai]
Likud was always going to remain loyal to Netanyahu, even after October 7. Within days, the party’s ministers and lawmakers had adopted the prime minister’s playbook, pinning the blame on the military, the intelligence services, the previous government of Naftali Bennett, the Biden administration, and just about anyone else they could think of, except the man who had led Israel for roughly 90 percent of the time since 2009. More difficult for Netanyahu was keeping the far right and the ultra-Orthodox on board. If either had truly walked away at any point after October 7, he would have lost his majority. Satisfying these partners became his overriding goal, and the key to his political survival.
Before October 7, both the far right and the ultra-Orthodox had enthusiastically backed the government’s assault on the judiciary, each for its own reasons. Far-right politicians view Israel’s supreme court as a bastion of liberalism that has secured equal rights for women and LGBTQ Israelis. They also suspect that the court would stand in their way if they ever tried to realize the settlement movement’s ultimate dream of annexing the West Bank without granting citizenship to the millions of Palestinians who live there.
The ultra-Orthodox, for their part, share the far right’s hostility toward the court’s liberal agenda, but they are motivated even more by fear. Their nightmare scenario is that the court will end an inequity that successive Israeli governments have failed to fix: Most Jewish citizens of Israel are required by law to serve in the military, while the ultra-Orthodox are almost entirely exempt.
This arrangement dates back to Israel’s founding, when David Ben-Gurion, the country’s first prime minister, exempted some 400 yeshiva students from service. Today, the ultra-Orthodox are the fastest-growing segment of Israeli society, yet among Jewish Israelis they are the least represented in both the military and the workforce. The situation continues because of the political power of the ultra-Orthodox parties, which are laser-focused on keeping their young men out of the army and securing state funding for a life of religious study in place of a modern education and a job. When Netanyahu formed the current coalition in late 2022, these parties saw it as their best chance to weaken the court and preempt a ruling that would send their men to the army.
The government’s plan to kneecap the judiciary ran into trouble even before October 7. It roused Israel’s liberal camp, which had narrowly lost the 2022 election, bringing out hundreds of thousands of protesters. After the Hamas attack, Netanyahu invited a centrist party led by two former army chiefs, Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot—now the man best positioned to replace him—to join an emergency war cabinet. Their main condition was a freeze on the controversial judicial legislation, and Netanyahu reluctantly agreed. The freeze was bad news for the ultra-Orthodox parties. As Israel expanded the war into Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran, the military said it needed an additional 10,000 soldiers, and the ultra-Orthodox population was the largest untapped pool of potential recruits. A court ruling ending their exemption suddenly looked like an imminent threat.
Netanyahu found himself trapped. The far right would support him only as long as the war in Gaza and Lebanon went on, in pursuit of his undefined goal of “total victory.” He kept them satisfied by prolonging the fighting while turning a blind eye to extremist settlers’ violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. But these two things, which kept his far-right partners content, also forced the military to stretch its forces further, deepening its need for soldiers, and with it, the pressure on the ultra-Orthodox.
In response, his coalition promoted a bill that was supposedly meant to settle the draft question once and for all. It never became law, and was probably never meant to. Instead, Netanyahu used the endless deliberations over the bill in the Knesset to buy time with the supreme court, arguing that the justices must hold off on imposing their own remedy because a legislative process was under way.
The second part of his strategy involved money. When the justices finally lost patience and ordered the state to cut benefits to ultra-Orthodox draft evaders, Netanyahu simply showered the ultra-Orthodox parties with taxpayer funds to offset the court’s sanctions. Billions of shekels that could have gone toward solving the country’s most urgent problems—overcrowded classrooms, failing mental-health services, congested roads—were diverted instead to the narrow sectarian priorities of his coalition partners.
This strategy was a disaster for the country, but it allowed the Netanyahu government to do the unthinkable and finish a full term, despite the massive failures of October 7. Now this same coalition is seeking four more years in office.
If Netanyahu secures another term in office, one immediate result could be an exodus of educated, highly skilled Israelis who are waiting to see how the election turns out. Dan Ben-David, an Israeli economist who studies the intersection of Israel’s economy and demographics, has found that more than 90 percent of the country’s income tax is paid by just 20 percent of Israelis, mainly educated professionals. Even a limited emigration wave could be devastating.
Beyond the friends and relatives who have already left, we can see such a wave starting to build. Dozens of families we know, from the kibbutz and the Gaza-border region, from our workplaces, from both sides of our family, are openly discussing leaving if things go wrong on October 27. Miri and I have had these conversations too, and they grew more and more detailed even as we planned our move back to Nahal Oz.
[Thomas Wright: The opening after Netanyahu]
Last year, our daughters, then only 5 and 3, began learning English from a private tutor. Miri, a clinical social worker, joined a WhatsApp group of Israeli social workers looking to move abroad or already living elsewhere. A thousand members compare how different countries treat diplomas and professional experience acquired in Israel. She is not the only member of the group who recently returned to a community that was attacked on October 7.
For a family moving back to a kibbutz on the border, in what many would consider a bold act of Zionist commitment, to simultaneously plan a possible future outside Israel might seem like an enormous contradiction. But it’s no more of a contradiction than that embodied by our many friends who have served hundreds of days in the reserves since October 7, fighting in Israel’s longest war, losing friends and risking their own lives, only to reach the same conclusion we have: If this government stays, they’re out.
Emigration, of course, is always easier to imagine than to execute, and there are many people in this land who would suffer if this government returns to power but who have nowhere to go. The rise of anti-Semitism in many Western democracies in recent years has also caused some Israelis who despise this government to see life in Israel, even under another Netanyahu coalition, as the least-bad option. Yet for many Israelis who do have options abroad, starting over somewhere else, with all of its difficulties, seems a better choice than four more years of Netanyahu’s corruption, Ben-Gvir and Smotrich’s extremism, and the ultra-Orthodox parties’ shameless plunder of public funds, all amid a regional “forever war” with no end in sight.
A win for Netanyahu’s coalition would be seen by the prime minister and his allies as a mandate to renew their assault on the judiciary and to move swiftly toward formal annexation of the West Bank. That, in turn, would intensify the global push for sanctions against Israeli settlements, and perhaps against Israel itself. Ben-Gvir has already said he will demand the defense portfolio if the coalition returns to power, a move that would make it difficult for Western and Arab militaries to keep cooperating as closely as they do today with Israel’s military.
For now, most Israeli polls suggest this doomsday scenario is unlikely: Netanyahu’s coalition has been projected to win 49 to 54 of the Knesset’s 120 seats, well short of the 61 needed to govern. Polls have underestimated him before, but he has never had to climb out of a hole this deep.
Still, a win for the anti-Netanyahu forces is not guaranteed. The opposition bloc consists of several parties, ranging from the far left to the moderate right. To remove Netanyahu, they will first have to win a majority on Election Day. But even if they do, their real challenge will be bridging the deep ideological gaps between them and turning that majority into a stable government.
Divisions among his opponents helped Netanyahu stay in power continuously from 2009 to 2021, and then allowed him to make a dramatic comeback in late 2022, after the short-lived “government of change” led by Bennett and Yair Lapid collapsed under its own contradictions.
Today, the anti-Netanyahu camp is made up of six parties. Two represent Israel’s Arab minority. Another proudly carries the banner of left-wing Zionism, and the remaining three, including Eisenkot’s party and Bennett’s, are competing for center-right voters who are tired of Netanyahu but still hold hawkish views on national security.
These parties are united by a sense that Netanyahu and his partners pose an urgent danger to the country. But they disagree on some of the most fundamental questions that Israel faces, including those about the future of Gaza and whether to pursue a Palestinian state. The left-wing parties support Palestinian statehood and welcome President Trump’s plan for a gradual Israeli withdrawal from Gaza; the center-right parties either reject the two-state solution completely or see resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an issue that should be deferred to the distant future.
If these parties manage to overcome their disagreements and form a government, their first priorities would be repairing the public institutions and services that have deteriorated under Netanyahu, and integrating the ultra-Orthodox into the military and the modern economy by ending their dependence on state welfare. These two goals enjoy consensus across the opposition, yet even they would be difficult to achieve. The ultra-Orthodox leadership could call its followers into the streets in a final effort to preserve their privileges, while Likud appointees across government ministries could stonewall and sabotage necessary reforms.
Beyond that, even larger challenges await, precisely on the issues that divide the opposition: rebuilding Gaza and dealing with the global push for Palestinian statehood. Replacing Netanyahu would probably help relieve some of the international pressure that Israel has been facing, but only temporarily. Sooner or later, the world will want answers about Gaza and the Palestinians’ future, even from a less toxic Israeli government.
If both the opposition and Netanyahu fail to form a government, two options remain. The first is some sort of unity government, which seems highly unlikely. The leaders of all of the opposition parties view Netanyahu as an illegitimate prime minister in light of his massive failures on October 7. Netanyahu, for his part, has sworn allegiance to his current ultra-Orthodox and far-right partners, saying that any discussion of a broader government must begin with the opposition parties accepting his current coalition as a single bloc. The second, and more likely, option is another election in the winter of 2027, just as in 2019–2020, when Netanyahu failed to win a majority but the opposition could not join forces to replace him.
[Jon Finer: The West Bank is sliding toward a crisis]
My biggest and mostly unspoken fear is that even if the opposition wins on October 27, it may already be too late to repair the damage this government has done. The corruption in the country’s institutions may run too deep. Many of the Israelis who have left may never come back. Momentum toward the one-state reality that the hundreds of new settlement outposts in the West Bank are intended to create may be irreversible. The destruction in Gaza could take a generation to clear, while Hamas entrenches itself and rebuilds its terrorist capabilities. And even on questions of religion and state, the ultra-Orthodox power brokers could simply wait out the next government and reverse its decisions once Likud returns to power.
When these dark thoughts come, I think of my great-grandparents, who came to this land a century ago, escaping a Europe that was shutting its doors to them. They brought almost nothing with them, but they had hope—enough of it to move here and take a bet that a Jewish state would be founded within their lifetime.
For our little family, in our home next to the Gaza border, with our boxes still waiting to be opened, this election comes down to the preservation of hope. It’s not much, but it’s also not nothing. Mostly, we hope that the election can be the beginning of something we still want to believe in: a better Israel.
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