Netanyahu’s Fall Would Not Solve Israel’s Dilemma, and Eisenkot’s Rise Would Not Solve It Either

Whenever Israeli politics is shaken by an election or a domestic crisis, the same hope resurfaces in Western capitals: perhaps the problem is Benjamin Netanyahu himself, and perhaps his departure could clear the way for a revival of the peace process. Today, with Netanyahu’s camp weakened and former IDF chief Gadi Eisenkot emerging as a potential prime minister, that assumption has returned with renewed force. Yet it rests on a growing misunderstanding of how profoundly Israel has changed over the last two decades. Eisenkot is undoubtedly not Netanyahu. The two men differ in temperament, political style, rhetoric and their approach to governing institutions. But the Israel that produced Netanyahu is largely the same Israel that may now hand power to Eisenkot. The real question is no longer who occupies the prime minister’s office. It is the nature of the state, society and security establishment that define the political limits within which any Israeli leader must operate.

Israel’s crisis has become larger than any individual, including Netanyahu himself. For years, many Western observers treated Netanyahu as the principal obstacle to a settlement with the Palestinians. The argument was understandable. His expansion of settlements, his alliances with religious nationalists, and his preference for managing the conflict rather than resolving it made him an easy symbol of diplomatic paralysis. But that interpretation overlooked a deeper reality: Netanyahu did not single-handedly move Israel to the right. In many respects, he became the most successful political expression of a transformation that was already underway.

The forces that reshaped Israeli politics long predated the current Gaza war. The collapse of the Oslo process, the Second Intifada, the withdrawal from Gaza and years of recurring violence steadily eroded public confidence in the assumptions that defined the 1990s. Over time, the belief that territorial compromise could produce lasting peace gave way to a growing conviction that security depended on deterrence, military superiority and risk management rather than historic reconciliation.

To understand contemporary Israel, one must begin there. When Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat signed the Oslo Accords in 1993, many Israelis believed their country was entering a new era. Significant sections of Israel’s political and security elite came to view accommodation with the Palestinians not merely as possible, but as essential for preserving Israel’s future as a Jewish and democratic state. The assassination of Rabin in 1995 was therefore more than a political murder. It exposed the existence of a powerful ideological current that saw territorial concessions as a threat not only to national security but also to Jewish identity itself.

Then came the Second Intifada in 2000, a far more consequential turning point. Within Israel, the uprising was not widely interpreted as a consequence of failed negotiations. Instead, many Israelis viewed it as evidence that Palestinian leaders had rejected compromise despite unprecedented diplomatic efforts. With every suicide bombing in Israeli cities, public confidence in the peace process weakened. Scepticism gradually moved from the margins of Israeli politics to its centre.

The 7th October attacks in 2023 deepened that transformation. The attacks represented a catastrophic intelligence and security failure. Yet politically, they did not produce a renewed search for diplomatic accommodation. Quite the opposite. For many Israelis, 7th October reinforced the belief that existential threats remained real and that military preparedness, rather than political agreements, remained the ultimate guarantor of survival.

This is the paradox often missed by outside observers. 7 October weakened Netanyahu personally. It did not necessarily weaken the security assumptions that had underpinned much of his worldview. Indeed, some of those assumptions emerged stronger.

Netanyahu’s long political dominance cannot be understood without appreciating the psychological impact of both the Second Intifada and 7 October on Israeli society. He built his political identity around a simple proposition: that the Middle East rewards strength, not optimism, and that survival belongs to those capable of imposing deterrence rather than pursuing grand bargains. Whether one agrees with that view or not, it resonated with a growing segment of the Israeli electorate for more than two decades. That is why Netanyahu’s longevity was never simply a product of political manipulation or personal ambition. His message succeeded because it found a receptive audience. The Israeli right ceased to be merely a political faction and increasingly became the political expression of broader social and strategic anxieties.

For that reason, investing excessive hope in Netanyahu’s departure amounts to searching for a simple answer to a far more complex problem. Even the leaders of Israel’s anti-Netanyahu camp offer no fundamentally different vision of the conflict. Eisenkot himself, often portrayed abroad as a pragmatic centrist, does not represent a return to the Oslo era. The issues dominating his political coalition concern democratic governance, institutional reform, accountability for the failures surrounding 7th October and the future of Israel’s constitutional order far more than they concern the relaunching of negotiations with the Palestinians.

That distinction matters. The central debate within Israel today is no longer about how to achieve peace. It is increasingly about the character of the Israeli state itself. The struggle between Netanyahu and his rivals is first and foremost a struggle over institutions, the judiciary, democratic norms and the distribution of political power. It is not the peace-versus-war divide that defined much of Israeli politics during the 1990s. On several core strategic questions, many of Netanyahu’s opponents remain closer to him than outside observers often realise. Their disagreements are significant, but they are frequently disagreements over methods rather than objectives.

Palestinians understand this reality perhaps better than anyone. A Palestinian negotiator does not confront a single politician. He confronts an entrenched political and security system. He confronts a state whose strategic culture increasingly views military superiority as the foundation of national survival and conflict management as a more realistic objective than conflict resolution.

Replacing Netanyahu with Eisenkot may change the tone of Israeli politics. It may improve relations with Washington and European capitals. It may restore some public confidence in state institutions. But none of those outcomes automatically amounts to a new political vision for resolving the Palestinian question. One of the defining lessons of recent decades is that Israel has moved from debating how to resolve the conflict to debating how best to manage it. That is a profound shift, and it cannot be reversed simply by replacing one prime minister with another. The question facing policymakers in Washington and Europe is therefore not whether Netanyahu will leave the political stage. It is whether Israel itself is prepared to re-examine the strategic assumptions that brought him to power and sustained him there for so long.

History is rarely as simple as the narratives political systems prefer. If Netanyahu ultimately exits the scene, it will close the chapter of a remarkable and deeply polarising political career. But it will not necessarily close the chapter that made his rise possible in the first place. The world may eventually discover that the deeper issue was never the man who occupied the prime minister’s office. It was the transformation of Israeli society itself. And if that proves true, then Gadi Eisenkot’s ascent will not mark the beginning of a solution. It will merely represent the next chapter of the same unresolved dilemma.

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Karam Nama is British-Iraqi journalist and author

Source: Middle East Monitor