Kushmaro: 2026 Israeli Election Follows Pattern of Exaggerated Stakes

Political analyst Danny Kushmaro argues that the 2026 Israeli election is not historically unique, despite frequent claims by campaigners that it is the most fateful in the country’s history. He notes that the phrase "Israel’s most important elections" has become a standard refrain in recent political discourse.

Kushmaro warns against the habit of romanticizing the past or assuming the current ballot carries more weight than predecessors. He states that every election feels like the most important one to those involved, but such an assumption is unwise without historical perspective.

The analyst contends that labeling a vote as existential transforms standard political competition into a survival battle. When the contest between pro-Netanyahu and anti-Netanyahu blocs is framed as a fight for the nation's survival, defeat becomes harder to accept as a simple setback.

This framing risks making the losing side view the outcome as something the country cannot survive, rather than a result that can be corrected in the next cycle. Kushmaro identifies this as a core problem in Israeli politics, particularly since Naftali Bennett formed his government in 2021.

Since that time, the focus has shifted from who should govern to whether the losing side will allow the other side to take office. Before Bennett’s government was sworn in, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called its formation "the greatest election fraud," a description that cast a legitimately elected government as illegitimate.

The opposition subsequently worked to dismantle Bennett’s government, sometimes voting against legislation they supported to weaken the coalition’s slim majority. Likud MK Miri Regev defended this strategy in recordings published in May 2022, citing the overriding objective of toppling the coalition as the primary reason for opposing measures that benefited soldiers and vulnerable groups.

When Netanyahu won the 2022 election, the dynamic reversed. Yair Lapid conceded the vote and arranged an orderly handover, but the language of illegitimacy returned as opposition to the judicial overhaul sparked mass protests. In April 2023, former Shin Bet director Yuval Diskin told a crowd in Tel Aviv that the government was "morally illegitimate" due to its "appalling composition and reprehensible actions," despite being elected legally.