Campaign season moves into the courtroom

Benjamin Netanyahu claims the former head of the Shin Bet hid vital warnings on the eve of October seventh to protect himself. Ronen Bar claims the prime minister was explicitly warned and is now fabricating accusations to evade responsibility. With a national election weeks away, that fight over wartime intelligence is heading to court as a defamation lawsuit.

I'm Maya.

And I'm Amos. This is another episode of Sixty One, a Daily Lion production, where we ask what kind of country Israel is supposed to be, one week at a time.

We start with the looming defamation suit against the prime minister. Last month, reports surfaced that the United Arab Emirates had warned Israel of an impending attack before the war. The prime minister's office aggressively denied that claim. But now the fight over who knew what has moved to the courts. On Monday, former Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar announced he intends to file a defamation lawsuit against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The suit follows Netanyahu's public accusations that Bar withheld information about the October seventh, two thousand and twenty-three, Hamas assault.

That accusation is the core of the prime minister's defense. He and his political allies argue that the security establishment actively concealed the imminent danger. Netanyahu asserts that Bar held multiple consultations with military leaders regarding clear warning signs on the night before the massacre. And that he deliberately chose not to update the prime minister. He claims Bar failed to alert civilian emergency squads, opting only to dispatch a limited tactical team. For the prime minister's defenders, if security officials had simply awakened Netanyahu in time, the outcome would've been entirely different. The view on the right is that the security chiefs dared to freeze the prime minister out of the intelligence picture on the very eve of the disaster. So in this view, the reporting that claims the political echelon ignored warnings is just a partisan campaign designed to swing the upcoming election. Netanyahu describes it as a false media effort meant to shift Bar's own failures onto the political leadership. The Israeli columnist Amit Segal notes the contradiction in these attacks. He points out that the government's accused of ignoring warnings and acting with too little force before the war, while simultaneously being condemned for acting with too much force afterward.

But for the former Shin Bet director, the issue is exactly what the prime minister ignored before the war. He says Netanyahu was repeatedly alerted to the looming disaster and is now fabricating claims to save himself. Bar states that he explicitly warned Netanyahu of a disaster, and that the prime minister ignored him. In his planned legal proceedings, Bar intends to summon members of Netanyahu's office who he says have assisted in this manipulative campaign. According to Al-Monitor, Bar argues that after refusing for three years to admit his responsibility, the prime minister's now trying to deflect blame by leveling accusations at the very people who warned him at the time. And the case goes further. It argues that Netanyahu's spent years stalling an independent state commission of inquiry while using state tools to evade a political reckoning. He's avoided establishing any objective inquiry commission for three years following the disaster. Those in the center argue that instead of confronting the truth of his failure, the prime minister's spent those three years running from his responsibility. They say he's deploying surrogates to sow division and incite hostility among the public.

All of that dodging is exactly what this lawsuit is meant to stop. The impending legal battle guarantees that the classified briefings and official schedules from those final hours will be scrutinized under oath. The fight over the warnings has moved out of the political arena and into the courts. And that's where the records of that night will finally be laid bare.

Far from the courtroom, the news out of the region this week began in the sky, aboard Fly Dubai Flight F Z ten seventy-three heading to Tel Aviv. But what started as a terrifying near-miss in the air immediately became the center of the country's political fight on the ground. An election's just weeks away. And the government and the opposition are drawing entirely different lessons from the averted disaster.

The government's lesson is exactly that. For them and their supporters, the thwarted attack is a pure demonstration of Israeli exceptionalism and civilian bravery. Five passengers spearheaded the intervention to enter the cockpit and stop the co-pilot. And in this view, that isn't a coincidence. It's the result of a society built on military service and self-reliance. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu leaned into this immediately. He told American television audiences that travelers everywhere should make sure an Israeli's sitting next to them. The passengers themselves echoed this. One of the men who beat and immobilized the attacker told the prime minister that Israelis are a people of lions. For this camp, the incident proves that the public's survival instincts remain the country's ultimate insurance policy.

Relying on those instincts means the actual insurance policy failed. The opposition and those in the center draw a much darker conclusion. They argue that the near-miss is the direct result of severe institutional neglect. The C E O of the Movement for Freedom of Information argues that the Transportation Ministry's security division is explicitly mandated to conduct the security assessment of foreign flights arriving in Israel. Yet it failed completely. The ministry's described as collapsing from the inside. Data shows that six hundred and seventy-seven ministry employees ended their employment between early twenty twenty-three and the end of November twenty twenty-five. While only three hundred and thirty-three were hired. The operational breakdown's so deep that the security division didn't pull crew data from the database for approximately two years. In this reading, the vacuum created by a depleted ministry allowed a hostile co-pilot to be cleared for a flight to Tel Aviv in the first place. Because the state failed at its basic vetting duties, this camp views the coalition's embrace of the passengers as a cynical deflection. Opposition figures emphasize that while the citizens on board demonstrated immense courage, the leadership's exploiting that bravery to score cheap political points ahead of the election. They argue that the prime minister's rushing to take credit for a rescue that only became necessary because his own government's oversight mechanisms broke down entirely. For the opposition, celebrating the passengers' resourcefulness is entirely justified. But using it as a shield to dodge accountability for a broken aviation security apparatus is an insult to the public that was left to defend itself.

That accountability's now the whole fight. The immediate shock of the mid-air struggle has passed. And the diverted aircraft's manifest is back in Israel. The aviation authority now has to reconstruct its basic screening protocols. And the fight over who left the airspace vulnerable heads straight to the ballot box.

While the political fallout landed at the airport, between Monday and Tuesday night, up to one hundred extremist settlers attacked the West Bank village of Jalud. The mob targeted a Palestinian family returning to their home under a High Court authorization. And the resulting clashes injured the Israeli border police officers sent to escort the residents.

Those officers getting hurt by Israeli citizens is exactly why defense and security veterans see this unchecked violence as a severe national security threat. It actively harms military readiness. Amit Aviram is a former deputy head of the National Security Council. He argues that rampant settler rioting forces the army to divert vital manpower away from active combat fronts during a multi-arena war. He points out that the military recently had to allocate an entire additional division headquarters to the area. They did it just to handle the operational strain of policing these incidents. That pulls resources from where they're desperately needed. And the case from these veterans is that this escalation isn't an accident. It's a crisis driven by a deliberate expansion on the ground. The argument points to the establishment of many dozens of agricultural farms in Area C. They say that guarantees continuous friction over grazing land and territory. They also warn of an evolving pattern. Violent raids on Palestinian villages involving dozens of participants. Beyond the immediate tactical burden, the defense camp warns that the government's failure to curb extremist violence accelerates Israel's international isolation. They argue that the lack of serious state enforcement invites severe diplomatic consequences. It triggers foreign sanctions against Israeli individuals and organizations. To illustrate how rapidly that diplomatic exposure is widening, the camp points to a United Kingdom official. That official noted that the British government now holds the authority to sanction anywhere from two to two thousand Israeli businesses over the issue.

The political leadership hears about those sanctions and still treats the violence there as a policing matter. Not a strategic crisis. In this camp's view, the clashes are carried out by isolated juvenile delinquents. So standard verbal condemnations from the prime minister and defense minister are a sufficient response.

Those verbal condemnations don't change the reality for the soldiers on the ground. With the minister refusing to authorize administrative detentions for Jewish suspects, the military remains stretched across its borders. They're managing both active combat and the daily friction surrounding the agricultural outposts.

Inside the domestic campaign arena, the two thousand and twenty-six Knesset election is approaching. Women make up half the population. Yet not a single competing party's headed by a woman. They do occupy about half the realistic seats on several candidate lists. That translates to between twenty-eight and thirty-two women in realistic spots overall. When five heads of the opposition parties met on a recent Saturday night, the photograph showed five men. In a year when partners have been called to serve hundreds of reserve days, this is where Israeli political history stands after nearly eight decades.

For feminist advocates looking at structural exclusion, that basic headcount of female candidates is a shallow metric. It hides how parties actively push women out. Doctor Noa Balf, a researcher of gender in the Middle East, points out that out of thirty-eight parties running, only one maintains a gender quota. The result's that Israel ranks ninety-fifth out of a hundred and eighty-one countries in female representation in parliament. The deeper damage is the erasure of legislative experience. Seventy female candidates who featured in campaign materials were left out of realistic spots. And nearly a quarter of them had just served in the outgoing twenty-fifth Knesset. Of the women who did secure realistic slots, only twelve are returning lawmakers. The argument's that leaders across both the coalition and the opposition are preserving a system. That system keeps women away from actual government power. In the outgoing Knesset, only thirty-one of the hundred and twenty members are women. And the cabinet itself has just five female ministers out of thirty-three. The exclusion's often formal and tolerated. Two coalition parties outright refuse to include women on their electoral lists at all. Keeping women out of these decision-making rooms means the state's priorities remain skewed away from the crises that disproportionately affect them. Without equal political power, the national agenda ignores the daily burdens women carry during wartime. That means managing households alone and losing work days while schools shut down. Crucially, it fails to advance economic equality. It also fails to address the domestic violence that hundreds of thousands of women and children in Israel suffer from every day.

A different view on that lack of power comes from campaigners tracking candidate pipelines for gender parity. They see the public backlash to these all-male lineups as proof that old norms are breaking down. No Israeli election's ever featured more than two parties headed by women. But the outrage over the top slots misses the shift happening just beneath them. Even with the country ranking seventy-first globally in overall gender equality and ninety-third in political empowerment, the deliberate placement of women in realistic seats means the next generation of party leaders is already moving into place.

That makeup of the next Knesset will test whether placing women in realistic list positions translates into actual legislative influence. Whoever forms the next government'll have to decide if the cabinet table remains overwhelmingly male. Or if the growing demand for parity forces a change in how power is distributed.

Alongside party lists, the national parliamentary election is scheduled for October twenty-seventh. And the Central Elections Committee just voted thirty-one to four to disqualify Balad chairman Sami Abu Shehadeh from running. Arab citizens make up twenty percent of Israel's population. But the bans targeted several of their political lists. The central piece of evidence against Abu Shehadeh was a single article he published on October eighth, two thousand and twenty-three. So a Supreme Court panel of nine judges was scheduled to hear the disqualification cases.

That hearing brings us straight to the case for the ban. Argued in Mida, the view is that the October eighth text directly legitimized and praised an armed assault as an operative model. The Attorney General's office told the committee that publishing a calculated, reasoned article in Arabic during an active massacre, without a single word of condemnation, constituted clear support for terror. The text itself noted that if a small, besieged territory could execute such an operation, others could do it even more efficiently. For the Supreme Court justices who reviewed it, the rhetoric was painful, disturbing and revolting. And the argument continues that a democratic parliament isn't obligated to tolerate politicians who endorse violence and seek the destruction of the state. Section Seven A of the Basic Law governing the Knesset explicitly establishes grounds for disqualifying candidates who support the armed struggle of an enemy organization. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir petitioned for the ban. He told the committee he was standing on behalf of the eleven hundred and sixty-three people murdered in the attacks. He argued that anyone who praises such violence can't be permitted to operate freely in the legislature.

But those on the left look at that exact same committee and argue that the disqualifications expose a racist double standard. One that selectively suppresses Arab political representation. The legal center Adalah points out that disqualifying a candidate over a single sentence in one article establishes a dangerous and entirely new legal threshold. Abu Shehadeh himself argues that the committee refused to disqualify extreme right-wing politicians who have serious files against them. His analytical text was penalized. Yet coalition figures who called for starving two million people or killing thirty to forty people in Gaza every night faced no such barriers to their political careers. The defense insists that a single poorly timed publication doesn't erase thirty years of political activity dedicated to peaceful, democratic politics. Abu Shehadeh has maintained that the horrors of military control don't justify the massacres in the Gaza envelope. Just as those massacres don't justify erasing Gaza. He told the committee that he has never supported armed struggle against Israel. His path has always been public and lawful. His party, Balad, ultimately concluded that he had to step aside voluntarily. They did that to prevent the court from handing down a formal disqualification that would carry grave consequences for the country's political and parliamentary life.

With him stepping aside, the election is now weeks away. And the boundaries of Arab political participation have been drawn tighter. The immediate result is one fewer candidate on the ballot. But the broader consequence is a new legal reality. One that dictates exactly who is permitted to represent the Palestinian minority in the Knesset.

Even with those legal challenges reshaping the race, at the start of October, polling showed the Israeli opposition stalled near twenty percent. That was amid internal leadership disputes between Gadi Eisenkot, Benny Gantz, and Naftali Bennett. But this week, five heads from four main opposition parties gathered for a coordination meeting. A photograph of the gathering featured the five male politicians sitting together.

For the leaders of the mainstream opposition factions, that meeting establishes a practical framework for replacing the government. Their proposed shared governing platform prioritizes four key agenda items. Those are draft equality, a state commission of inquiry, term limits for prime ministers, and a constitution. B'Yachad proposes limiting prime ministers to an eight-year term limit. Currently, there's no limit. And Benjamin Netanyahu's combined terms total almost nineteen years. Yashar also emphasizes universal military and civilian conscription. They're campaigning on the phrase service for all. The argument is that presenting a unified front reassures an anxious public. It establishes the foundation for a broad Zionist coalition. Opposition leaders demonstrated unified public messaging within twenty-four hours of their meeting. Lihi Lapid is the wife of the opposition leader. She wrote on Facebook to describe how she spontaneously took the photograph of the meeting of opposition party leaders. For the factions involved, capturing this coordination proves they can work together.

But those on the left and proponents of Arab political inclusion argue that this display of unity masks a mathematical failure. Writing in the Jewish Journal, Shmuel Rosner notes that the ruling coalition is projected by polls to secure between fifty and fifty-five seats. The two Arab parties are projected to win between twelve and fifteen seats. Between them, the four opposition Zionist parties stand to control about fifty-four seats in the upcoming Knesset. Yet according to a Channel corporation poll, a third of opposition voters support disqualifying Ra'am. The case continues that imposing ideological litmus tests on Arab parties and excluding them alienates essential voters. It caves to the right wing's political framing. Yair Golan made radio remarks about Arab parties fewer than twelve hours after meeting with other opposition leaders. For this camp, the constant maneuvering around whether to include these factions shows the opposition surrendering to right-wing terms. Finally, those on the left argue that by refusing to name a single prime ministerial candidate and avoiding core diplomatic and societal issues, the opposition bloc fails to offer a genuine governing vision. The argument is that opposition politicians fail to articulate a distinct security policy. The assessment is that Israeli opposition parties refrain from challenging the government's military approach. Because they see that if they say anything about security that isn't what Netanyahu is saying, they'll be considered a traitor.

So the opposition factions now share a signed platform on institutional reforms. But they still lack a consensus candidate to lead them. To form a government, these party heads have to secure the required parliamentary majority. And that means deciding the exact role the Arab parties will play in their coalition.

That's the count this week. Sixty One is a Daily Lion production. Don't forget to tune in to the other Daily Lion shows: Crosswinds, All Fronts, and Tribe & State. See you next Monday.