Israel votes Tuesday in what amounts to a structural stress test for its governing institutions. Most polls show Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right and ultra-Orthodox coalition partners falling short of a parliamentary majority. But the opposition faces its own arithmetic problem: most opposition parties have ruled out forming a coalition with Arab parties, potentially leaving both blocs unable to govern. The result could be a hung parliament or a narrow, fragile government led by retired Lieutenant General Gadi Eisenkot. The deeper question is whether a change of government would produce a change of policy. The author argues yes, with qualifications. Netanyahu's nearly two decades in power — and especially the last four years governing with Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich — have distorted Israeli policy around one man's legal survival. Three corruption cases (fraud, breach of trust, bribery) created a prime minister willing to empower messianic ultranationalists in exchange for coalition loyalty. Every major policy decision has been filtered through the imperative of staying in office. The concrete policy differences are real but bounded. A post-Netanyahu government would likely halt the judicial overhaul that attacked separation of powers and the system of checks and balances. It would be more likely to cooperate with Trump's peace plan and the Board of Peace, potentially improving humanitarian conditions in Gaza and enabling some degree of Israeli withdrawal. Construction tenders for the E1 settlement project — already issued — could be suspended or cancelled. The Jewish Division of the Shin Bet, which monitors settler terrorism, would not face abolition. Appointments to senior civil service positions would be more likely to be merit-based. But the structural constraints remain severe. Eisenkot himself opposes Palestinian statehood and favours continued Israeli security control over Palestinian territory. The opposition's refusal to work with Arab parties — representatives of Israel's Palestinian citizens — is not a procedural quirk but a political ceiling that defines how far any government change can reach. The article's own framing concedes that the benchmark for improvement is "exceptionally low," citing as examples the current coalition's proposals to surround prisons with crocodiles and its passage of a death penalty law for Palestinians. The war in Gaza is the most consequential counterfactual. The author argues with "a high degree of confidence" that a different government would have conducted the war very differently, agreed to a ceasefire much earlier, facilitated hostage release, and spared many thousands of innocent Palestinian lives. This is the sharpest claim in the piece: not that a new government would be progressive, but that the current government's conduct has been uniquely destructive because of one man's legal predicament. The regional dimension matters. A new government could rely less exclusively on military force in Lebanon, Syria, and potentially Iran while remaining open to diplomatic avenues. It would also likely end the political theatre designed to appease an ultranationalist base — the performative cruelty that has become a governing style. Whether motivated by ideology, strategy, or desire to ease international tensions, the shift from performative extremism to conventional centre-right governance would itself alter Israel's regional and international posture. The piece's honest conclusion is that politics is the art of the possible, and that changing the political discourse and restoring normality to domestic debate could, in time, open the way to more transformative change — provided the international community remains actively engaged. This is not a prediction of transformation. It is an argument that the current trajectory, if continued, leads somewhere genuinely irreversible.
