History and demographics weaponized for October

The discovery of the sunken Altalena shipwreck has sparked a fierce battle over Menachem Begin's legacy. For the right, raising the ship reclaims a foundational story of establishment persecution.

But critics on the center and left see a cynical campaign stunt designed to distract from current disasters and stoke civil division.

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're looking at a week where politicians weaponized historical symbols, vigilante stunts, and municipal zoning to lock down their bases ahead of the October elections. The lineup today: weaponizing the Altalena for October, Ofer Winter launches his party, Zvi Sukkot and sledgehammer sovereignty, and the push to disqualify Arab parties. And then, for our members, we go deep on who gets to build in the Galilee. It sounds like a local zoning dispute, but the math up north is forcing a radical shift in how the government manages population numbers. We ask what happens when the old tools stop working.

The Altalena was sunk in nineteen forty-eight after David Ben-Gurion ordered the newly formed IDF to fire on the Irgun arms ship, establishing the government's monopoly on force. Now, the vessel Altalena has been located at a depth of five hundred and three meters. The commentary splits immediately over what to do with it. The argument from the right takes the discovery as a chance to dismantle a historical monopoly, while the center reads the exact same push to raise the ship as a dangerous stunt.

We can start with the center's reading. People opposing this point out that Benjamin Netanyahu announced the finding of the sunken Altalena ship, acting like this was some great archaeological breakthrough. But the Altalena was not found, because its location was already well known. It's been sitting there for nearly eight decades.

Retrieving the Altalena's decomposed skeleton would shed no light on what happened. We already know the history. We know who fired, and we know who died.

The question they're asking is why the prime minister is suddenly so interested in maritime archaeology right before an election. The answer from this camp is that he wants to change the subject of the coming election, which is his role in Israel's worst-ever catastrophe. It's a deliberate choice to resurrect a trauma from nineteen forty-eight so nobody talks about October.

The response from the right takes the discovery completely differently. Their argument is that the institutional left exercised enormous influence after nineteen forty-eight. They say that power shaped a historical memory where right-wing movements that win elections are still described as dangers.

People defending the right point out that the narrative leaves out a lot of facts. They note that before the ship even arrived, the Irgun had already agreed to dissolve as an independent organization. State sovereignty was already recognized.

When the shooting started, Begin repeatedly instructed his men not to retaliate against fellow Jews. He chose to lose the fight rather than start a civil war. But because the left won the immediate political battle, they got to write the history.

That history has a very specific modern consequence. Political movements that repeatedly win elections can nevertheless find themselves described as dangers.

That's the right's case here. The left used the Altalena to establish a dynamic where only they get to defend democracy. The right could win at the ballot box, but they're still treated as an inherent threat to the country. So raising the ship isn't a distraction—it's a way to finally break that monopoly on legitimacy.

Which brings us to Dror Bar Yosef in Ynet Deot, the Hebrew news site. He looks at this whole campaign to raise the ship and warns that it's actively destroying Begin's actual legacy.

Bar Yosef goes straight to the core of what Begin took from the event. He says the story is a frenzy of hatred and mistrust between the opposing sides. It wasn't just a cold calculation about sovereign power. Yitzhak Rabin noted that the army enthusiastically fired at the ship whenever Menachem Begin was spotted on deck.

It was personal, and it was venomous. Begin recognized that the same hatred fueled both the Altalena incident and the Kafr Qasim massacre. He spent the rest of his career trying to teach Israelis the difference between a political rival and an enemy.

In Begin's own words, hatred is the primary enemy of democracy. It destroys the ability to see the humanity in the other side. Which is why Bar Yosef insists the project to raise the Altalena from the sea must not be exploited as an election campaign.

Right now, that's exactly what it's being used for. The politicians pushing this aren't trying to heal the wound—they're trying to tear it open again to see what falls out.

That's the actual shape of this fight. Nobody here is really trying to settle the history of nineteen forty-eight. Both sides are using the shipwreck to define who's the true threat to the nation in twenty twenty-six.

Away from the campaign stunts for a minute, the actual electoral math on the right just got a lot more complicated. Brigadier General Ofer Winter's officially launched his new faction, People of Israel. And the first thing he did was box himself in. He announced that Benjamin Netanyahu is the only person we will recommend for prime minister.

It's a massive contradiction, because his actual platform is a direct threat to Netanyahu's coalition. He's demanding that the ultra-Orthodox be drafted into the military. And he says he is willing to do it with or without the Charedi faction operatives. That's a heavy price tag to attach to a Netanyahu endorsement.

He's also pulling in figures like Yoseph Haddad, who's making his own distinct pitch. Haddad argues that Arab-Israelis need parliamentary representation focused on their own interests, not Gaza, Jenin and Ramallah. It's a deliberate play for voters who feel abandoned by the traditional lists on the right.

Winter's also hammering the furthest right edges of the security debate. He explicitly rejects a Palestinian state and says there will be voluntary emigration from Gaza. So he's building a deeply hawkish, pro-Netanyahu list that also promises to dismantle the arrangement with Netanyahu's most loyal partners. The prime minister saw the danger right away. He reportedly attempted to give Winter a reserved spot on the Likud list just to keep him inside the tent, but Winter launched his own party instead.

That refusal is causing outright panic among bloc loyalists. The argument from the right is that these factions are apparently repeating their nineteen ninety-two maneuver: split, remain divided and lose.

The math is brutal. With a three point two five percent Knesset threshold, the cutoff is a minimum of a hundred and sixty-eight thousand, three hundred and fifty votes. If Winter pulls a hundred thousand voters away and doesn't cross, those votes just vanish. The warning from the right is that as in horse racing, a crowded field can result in a nasty collision.

Which is the ultimate nightmare scenario for this camp. Back in nineteen ninety-two, a bunch of small right-wing parties failed to pass the threshold, wasted tens of thousands of votes, and handed the government to Labor, who then signed the Oslo Accords. It took a generation for the right to consolidate after that. As we said last week, the pragmatic right is terrified of third-bloc parties wasting votes below that threshold today.

And Netanyahu knows it. His demand from Likud institutions to allow outside candidates to fill reserved slots is an attempt to consolidate the right and prevent those wasted votes. He wants to absorb these threats before the lists close.

His own faction hates it, though. But a column in JNS Opinion argues that his Likud critics should realize the party's survival has to be the priority, rather than protecting their own spots on the list.

The bloc loyalists are banking on old tactics to keep everyone together. A column in JNS Opinion takes for granted that there is Netanyahu’s long-standing ace-in-the-hole: media interference and bias. The writer assumes the base will rally if they feel the media is attacking the bloc, regardless of who's on the list.

The pragmatic right has a completely different starting point. For them, the old electoral map is dead. A column in JPost Opinion points out that the Hamas massacre exposed systemic failures that were ignored for years. You can't just run the exact same people and expect a different result.

That's the appeal. The case for Winter is that announcing a list free of anyone who held national political office before October seventh offers something Israel has been missing: a genuine chance to start over. It's a roster of people untainted by the current system.

Winter himself is very clear about his allegiance. He insists that we are in the right-wing camp, the leader of the right-wing camp is Netanyahu.

Right, but that's exactly where his endorsement collides with his premise. A column in JPost Opinion points out that he needs to explain how that position squares with the broader message. You can't run against the system while promising to crown the architect of the system. That argument only works if voters are willing to ignore the contradiction, and the piece never defends that assumption.

Winter isn't waiting for the media to unify his voters, though. He's using the draft. He's taking a demand that used to belong entirely to the secular left—drafting the ultra-Orthodox—and weaponizing it from inside the right-wing bloc.

He's forcing the prime minister to choose. Netanyahu needs his Haredi partners to maintain the coalition, but his secular nationalist base is rallying behind new slates demanding universal conscription. The right-wing bloc is tearing itself apart over an issue that used to unify it against the left.

Away from the party primaries for a moment, there's a video out of the West Bank this week that forces a very specific question about who actually wields governmental power. MK Zvi Sukkot pulled out a hammer, filmed himself smashing a concrete monument, and made a perfect campaign video for TikTok.

He did it in the Palestinian village of Madama, under a military guard that thought it was just conducting a standard tour. The IDF soldiers who were drafted into this operation without their knowledge eventually stopped the vandalism. The military was furious afterward, accusing him of deceptively using soldiers as props to guard his election tour.

Sukkot argued that these memorials glorify those who murdered Jews. But a column in Ynet Deot points out that in a proper state, authorized bodies decide when to remove them. When a politician takes the law into his own hands, he promotes anarchy instead of strengthening deterrence.

They look at the core premise of a functioning rule of law. The argument here is that this kind of act is primitive, cheap, and wrong on its own terms, beyond just the damage it does to Israel's international image. The fundamental principle is that true Jewish sovereignty doesn't mean enjoying the privilege of lawlessness.

There's a massive strategic cost attached to that lawlessness. The people making the case for diplomatic discipline argue that the campaign to delegitimize Israel has to be treated as a genuine national security threat. The US Vice President, JD Vance, recently insisted that Israel cannot rely solely on force to solve its national security challenges. When a politician creates these viral images of unauthorized actions, it immediately damages the country's global standing, because a photograph travels around the world before an Israeli spokesperson has finished writing.

The government's response has been incredibly muted. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich reportedly reprimanded Sukkot and told him not to do it again. The critique here is that a mere reprimand is an insufficient response to a national security breach. In a proper democracy, authorized bodies make the decisions about removing monuments, rather than rogue politicians acting on their own.

This tension over who enforces the law is exactly what we talked about last week, with Defense Minister Katz proposing to transfer West Bank settler enforcement to the civilian police. The institutional argument stresses that while terrorist memorials should absolutely be removed, only the military has the legitimate legal mandate to carry out the demolition.

The real divergence in the material isn't about Sukkot's stunt, but about the military's role in enabling it. The military claims it was completely deceived by this visit and that the participants acted in a deceitful and manipulative manner. The official line is that Sukkot acted outside the approved framework and without permission.

The reading from the center simply doesn't buy that official excuse. Their argument is that the military is actively serving as the friction surface that enables Jewish terror, rather than just failing to stop it. They view the army's leadership as playing dumb while facilitating the exact provocations designed to ignite the territory.

The cost is visible in how resources get allocated. The military found the forces to secure Sukkot's provocation, while at the same time denying a left-wing lawmaker's request to visit a Palestinian village by claiming a lack of manpower. You'd have to be completely blind not to see the consistent attempts by far-right figures to set the West Bank on fire ahead of the elections. The argument is that the military is willfully ignoring a systematic campaign to escalate the situation.

The head of Central Command himself warned that nationalist crime is a match that could ignite the entire region. The center's response is that if the military provides the security detail for the people holding the match, the warnings ring incredibly hollow. As elections draw nearer, they warn that this fire will only spread if the public continues to reward political provocateurs.

Vigilante stunts by lawmakers force the military to act as literal props in a political campaign.

It dissolves the boundary entirely. When the army's used to guard a TikTok demolition tour, the line between official governance and nationalist anarchy disappears.

Away from the West Bank for a few minutes: the election mechanics are starting to grind, and the first stop is the Central Elections Committee.

We've got a reading from the center this week warning that right-wing factions are expected to make determined efforts to disqualify the Arab lists.

The committee's a political body, so these votes happen. They frequently vote to disqualify Arab parties, and the Supreme Court almost always overturns those decisions on appeal.

The court demands clear, unequivocal evidence that a party rejects the state's democratic and Jewish character, or supports armed struggle. But the right isn't treating this as a procedural hurdle. The people arguing against Ra'am and the Islamic Movement treat them as an existential, subversive threat masking as a legitimate actor.

In Israel generally, the Islamic Movement is considered fundamentally a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Critics argue the Brotherhood's ideology explicitly permits deception, which is how they explain the movement's shift to non-violent political tactics.

They don't think it's a secret, either. The people making this case point out that Mansour Abbas himself has confirmed there's an ideological connection between his movement and the Muslim Brotherhood. They note that Ismail Haniyeh eulogized the founder of the Islamic Movement in Israel, stressing that despite the physical distance, they share the same holy goals.

So when Abbas speaks moderately in Hebrew, the right sees a tactical deception masking a completely different agenda in Arabic. They point to the financial network to back that up. Israeli authorities recently dismantled a charity affiliated with Ra'am after it transferred millions to the families of Hamas terrorists in Gaza.

Which means that any Jewish politician trying to partner with them is dangerously naive. As we said last week, Yoav Segalovitz's move to Ra'am is a tactic to secure a centrist majority. For the right, incorporating Ra'am into any coalition is trading the country's future for short-term political survival.

The center reads that exact same pragmatism completely differently. Ron Shapira in Ynet Deot makes the case for taking Abbas at his word.

Shapira acknowledges the baseline: Mansour Abbas is neither Jewish nor Zionist, but rather an authentic representative of a large Arab public.

He argues that Zionist parties shouldn't demand complete ideological alignment from Abbas. They just need to look for sufficient practical overlap to cooperate.

Shapira looks at Abbas's recent statements in Arabic, where he defended his recognition of Israel as a Jewish state. Shapira insists Abbas didn't suggest that his recognition was merely a cynical ploy to run in elections.

In his words, Abbas views the Jewish nature of the state as a historical reality forced upon Arabs, which he now accepts as an established fact.

He even goes on the offensive against his rivals. Abbas accused other Arab parties of hypocrisy because they implicitly recognize the Jewish state simply by participating in its elections.

It's a fascinating defense. Shapira's a right-leaning Zionist, but his argument only works if you accept that political coalitions are built on compromises with non-ideal partners. He's telling the Zionist mainstream to accept a pragmatic reality.

Which brings us to the actual mechanics of October. If the center believes Abbas is a legitimate, pragmatic partner, and the right believes he's a subversive threat, the Central Elections Committee is where that collision happens. But the center warns that the legal fight is actually a smokescreen.

A column in Ynet Deot quotes Dr. Amir Fuchs, who argues that democracies shouldn't give unlimited protection to political actors using democratic means to destroy democratic foundations.

They just don't think that's what's happening here, because of the Supreme Court. The court's consistent policy over the years is to minimize candidate and party disqualifications as much as possible. So the right knows they're probably going to lose on appeal.

The center's argument is that the right doesn't need to win the appeal to get what they want. Even if the disqualification efforts fail, the attempt itself could deter Arab voters from turning out and reduce their electoral impact.

It's a numbers game aimed at breaking the opposition's coalition math. They're already preparing the ground for the loss in court. The Likud faction is making unprecedented efforts to target the committee chairman, Judge Noam Solberg. They're setting up a scapegoat.

The right-wing push to disqualify Arab parties is less about winning in the Supreme Court, and more about deterring Arab voters from showing up to the polls at all.