Oded Balaban

Oded Balaban — University of Haifa — balaban@research.haifa.ac.il

On November 1, 2026, the day after the Israeli parliamentary elections, Gideon Levy, the veteran columnist of the daily Haaretz, known for his opposition to the occupation and for his frontal criticism of the right, published the column “Go Explain to a Foreign Observer What Is Happening in Israel. Nothing Here Makes Sense Anymore” (לכו תסבירו למשקיף זר מה קורה בישראל. שום דבר פה כבר לא הגיוני). Written as a dialogue with a “foreign observer” incapable of understanding what is going on in the country, the visitor asks and Levy confirms three things:

1. The clear majority that came out of the ballot boxes (67 of the 120 seats of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, where 61 is enough to govern) can form a government, but does not want to.

2. Benjamin Netanyahu was presented as “the most existential danger to the state,” and Levy adds, “true, but the Arab parties are even more so.”

3. The Arab vote “is thrown in the trash, and that is that,” so that Israel has not 120 members of Knesset but only 101, the rest being “disqualified votes.”

The column closes with a shrug: “This is Israel, you fool.” The intended effect is bewilderment. Nothing makes sense, everything is absurd, and there is nothing to take hold of.

Read closely, the piece does not describe the absurd; it manufactures it, through the same operation as his column on the war against Iran (“Support for the War Is Support for Netanyahu,” Haaretz, March 22, 2026). There he argued that to admire the war amounts to admiring its author, and that the opposition leaders who praised the offensive, Ehud Barak, Gadi Eisenkot, Yair Lapid, Yair Golan, and Naftali Bennett, “can no longer be an opposition to Netanyahu,” from which he concluded, in his own words, that “if they support the war, we have no opposition.” This is a fallacy of abstraction. It takes a partial aspect, tactical support for a military operation, and raises it to a total political identification, erasing the differences. What he did there with support for the war, he does here and now with common sense.

The procedure has three parts, and each one suffers from a flaw of its own: the universal generalization without proof, the literal reading of political speech taken at face value alone, and the fatalistic conclusion he draws from both.

First, the generalization. The 2026 column asks, “And who is for more war?” His answer: “Everyone, absolutely everyone. Always, absolutely always.” The claim is false, and what is decisive is that Levy knows it, because he himself had refuted it two years earlier. In February 2024 he wrote that Israel’s “cruelest and most futile war does not meet a single voice of opposition in the Knesset, not even after more than four months and almost thirty thousand Palestinian dead, except the voice of the Arab members of Knesset” (the translations from the Hebrew are mine, here and below). Hence the dilemma: either in 2024 there was an opposition, that of those members, and then the “everyone, always” of 2026 is false; or there was none, and then that praise of 2024 was superfluous. The two things cannot be true at the same time.

There is also a contradiction internal to the 2026 column itself. In order to set up the absurd, Levy begins by erasing the Arab members of Knesset: if “everyone, always” wants war, those voices do not count. A few lines later, however, he needs them, because he is indignant, and rightly so, that the Arab vote “is thrown in the trash.” He suppresses the Arabs when they serve him to prove that there is no opposition, and claims them when they serve him to prove the scandal. The same voice cannot be nonexistent in one paragraph and indispensable in the next. In this, Levy employs the very method of Netanyahu himself: he flatters the Arabs when the flattery serves him and treats them as an alien element when it pays.

The generalization has a second face. Levy writes that “almost the entire center-left is against a government with the Arabs, exactly like the right.” That “exactly like” is the heart of the trick, because it puts two different things into the same bag: the refusal on principle of the right, which will not make a pact with the Arab parties under any condition, and the reluctance of a part of the opposition, which neither covers everyone nor is a matter of principle, but is negotiable. To equate the unequal is precisely what Bibism, the camp that sustains Netanyahu, needs people to believe: if left and right are the same, there is nothing left to choose.

Second, the word taken literally. Levy reads campaign sentences as if they were perpetual law. That a leader said during the election that he would not form a government with the Arabs is not an immovable fact, because a coalition is built by negotiating and by going back on one’s words, and that going back is the very craft of politics, not a betrayal of the voter. To take the slogan at face value is to confuse what is promised in a campaign with what is done in government. Machiavelli had already formulated this: “a prudent ruler cannot keep his word, nor should he, when such fidelity would damage him, and when the reasons that made him promise are no longer relevant” (Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, ch. 18). What Machiavelli describes as the nature of the political promise, Levy overlooks: he reads a campaign declaration as a commitment that cannot be revised, and from there infers that the door is shut.

The same literal reading reappears, aggravated, in another word. Levy fuses two formulas that are not equivalent: “not governing with the Arabs” and “a Zionist government.” Not everyone said the first; several spoke of a “Zionist government,” a term never before heard in a campaign. And when Gadi Eisenkot, former chief of the general staff of the army and today a leader of the opposition, specifies that he wants it “Zionist and mamlachti” (mamlachti: statist, of the common sphere, what stands above the faction), he is saying something of the order of “Jewish and democratic”: not only Jewish. The word, so qualified, does not leave the Arabs out; it includes them in what is common. To read “Zionist government” as “government without Arabs” is the reading with which the right shuts the door; that Levy adopts it, and presents it as a fact of nature, is to do the right’s work for it.

The third part gives meaning to the first two. From a real hypocrisy, which he describes rightly, Levy draws a conclusion that does not follow, a non sequitur: that it makes no difference who governs, that there is no alternative, that Netanyahu is irreplaceable. That the leaders are hypocrites, and that much is rotten, implies none of that. Between the diagnosis, “they are hypocrites,” and the moral, “then there is nothing to be done,” there is a leap. His hostility to Netanyahu is genuine, and that makes the effect of his texts all the more paradoxical: that conclusion is not circumstantial but the thesis he has been building, column after column, over the years.

In August 2020, in the Haaretz column “When They Only Want Not-Bibi” (כשרוצים רק לא ביבי), he formulated this mechanism with the utmost clarity: “The right owes a great deal to the protest of the left: it enables it, whitewashes its sins, strengthens its rule, and grants it a legitimacy it never had. That is what happens when a protest movement concentrates solely on the fate of a single man (only not Bibi).” Whoever defines himself by “only not Netanyahu,” he wrote, turns his real adversary, the right, into his twin brother, and ends up perpetuating its rule. The diagnosis is exact; what is striking is that Levy became the most constant practitioner of what he denounced.

In April 2022, in “Will the Government Fall? Not the End of the World” (הממשלה תיפול? לא סוף העולם, Haaretz), he held that the next prime minister would be Netanyahu or Lapid, adding that “nothing will succeed in convincing me that the second possibility is preferable.” More than that: if the polls were confirmed, “then justice demands his return.” The claim that “justice demands the return of Netanyahu” comes from Levy himself, not from a spokesman for Likud (Netanyahu’s party). The protest against him struck him as “shrill and hollow,” with no proposal “except the no.”

In February 2024 the headline said it all: “The Past Week Proved It: There Is No Substitute for Netanyahu” (השבוע האחרון הוכיח: אין תחליף לנתניהו, Haaretz). And in the text: “Benjamin Netanyahu truly has no substitute, no real alternative, no true opposition.” The closing line: “True, everything is rotten. But the thought that with another government everything would change at once is an illusion.”

In December 2023, in “And If It Were Not for Netanyahu, Would the October 7 Failure Not Have Happened?” (ואלמלא נתניהו, לא היה המחדל של 7 באוקטובר?, Haaretz), he repeats the same pattern. That failure (the Hamas attack that took Israel by surprise on October 7, 2023) is the backdrop of the entire Israeli political discussion. Levy maintains that no Israeli leader would have acted in a substantially different way toward Gaza, and that this is why “Israel will carry on as before” even if Netanyahu withdraws. In that same column, however, he praises the “efforts worthy of praise” of Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak, Ehud Olmert, and Ariel Sharon to seek a solution, even a partial one. If there were praiseworthy efforts, not all leaders are alike; if all are alike, the praise is superfluous. The contradiction is the cost of a thesis that needs to maintain, at one and the same time, that Netanyahu is guilty of everything and that replacing him would change nothing.

It is worth asking where this cynicism comes from. It answers to a single axis: for Levy, the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is the only measure, and set against its end, any Israeli political alternative looks identical to him, dissolving all the differences into one undifferentiated mass. What he observes exists, and the hypocrisies he denounces are real; the error lies in the logical leap he makes, from “they are hypocrites” to “therefore there is nothing to be done.” The true serves him as a justification for the false.

And the false is the alleged impossibility. The 67 mandates that Levy concedes can indeed govern. The Arab parties, which represent the Arab citizens of Israel (almost a fifth of the population) and which have almost always been kept out of the coalitions, are willing to collaborate, whether inside the government, supporting it from outside, or both at once. Levy himself supplies the figure that proves it: 101 and not 120, because the other 19 (the Arab votes) are discarded. To count them in is not an arithmetical fantasy: it is the only step still pending. Levy states it as a scandal and abandons it as an insuperable fatality. In him this is by now a method.

Here the two exits that his article on the war prefigured reappear. One is to reinforce the Arab parties as the only authentic opposition, delegitimizing the whole of the Jewish opposition. The other, graver, is demobilization: to instill in the opposition’s electorate the impression that there is no one to support and that it all comes to the same thing. Both operate, whether he wishes it or not, in favor of the one who already holds power (by default). And both carry the same cost: to waste this chance, now that the Arab parties show a willingness to take part, would be to lose an opportunity that does not come again.

Levy asked us to explain Israel to a foreign observer. What truly cannot be explained is not that the Arab vote is thrown in the trash, but that the columnist who laments it most has devoted years to proving, with all his talent, that it could not have been otherwise.