Rewriting October to survive the next election

The sharpest tension in the reading this week is over whether Likud's October seventh conspiracy campaign is actually working. The argument from the center says the generals' treason narrative is a desperate trap that completely fails to clear the prime minister of responsibility.

The reading from the left takes that messaging as a highly successful operation that's already convinced a third of the public to distrust the military. It starts with Sara Netanyahu on Channel Fourteen, asking why Yair Golan was in uniform so early that morning.

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.

The fight for the next election is forcing every camp to rewrite its own foundational myths. Today: the October treason campaign, striking down the draft freeze, Itamar Ben-Gvir's succession bid, and Likud targeting the expat airlift. Then, for our members, we go deep on the Democrats and the security dilemma of the Zionist left.

Let's start with that Channel Fourteen interview, because it sets the baseline for the whole week. Sara Netanyahu is asked about October seventh, and she pivots to Yair Golan, the head of the Democrats, who drove down south to rescue survivors. Her question is how he was already dressed and ready at a very, very early hour when others didn’t know what was happening.

She's laying down the conspiracy narrative—the idea of an inside job. The prime minister's pushing the same fundamental claim, just in a more careful register. He's out there arguing that the massacres wouldn't have happened if the military and defense leadership had just woken him up early that morning.

In his telling, they viewed politicians as laymen, and they were worried he'd wake up the whole IDF.

They didn't wake him. He insists that while the decision not to wake him to avoid annoying Hamas was a great failure, it wasn't intentional betrayal. The political effect is exactly the same: the blame shifts entirely from his desk to the military. This builds on what we saw back in January, when that cabinet confrontation over Herzi Halevi's internal probe first fractured the military's autonomy to investigate itself.

In the center's view, he's trying to frame the criticism of his failures as a partisan attack on the right wing.

That tactic's worked for him before. When the Attorney General brought legal charges against him, he successfully framed the personal persecution as a partisan struggle against the right.

This reading insists that October seventh is different, because he built and funded the collapsed conception by repeatedly containing Hamas and transferring Qatari money in suitcases. If that rebellion claim is true, he allowed the army to grow completely out of control on his watch.

That's the case for why the campaign fails. The counter-reading says that assumes the public is evaluating this rationally, and they aren't. A column in Ynet calls this a Finkelstein-style method. The strategy is to take a simplistic, negative message and just repeat it endlessly until the public accepts it.

The numbers show it: after three years of this kind of messaging, polls indicate that more than a third of the public willingly accepts the conspiracy of an inside betrayal.

You see the mechanics of it with Yair Golan. Golan says he began his drive south at eight in the morning, an hour and a half after the attacks started. The facts don't matter when the goal is to flood the zone.

A column in The Forward takes this a step further. They argue this isn't just about surviving the fallout of October seventh. By teaching the public to distrust the security establishment, the civil service, and the judges, the Netanyahu machine is building a trap door for the next election.

It's structural. If he loses, that defeat can be interpreted as further evidence of the establishment’s power. It becomes another conspiracy by the deep state to remove him, and his voters are already primed to believe it.

The immediate tactical victory is already here. The strategic reading notes that the uproar over Sara Netanyahu's remarks actually succeeded.

It hijacked the agenda. The political strategist Moshe Klughaft argues that in a campaign, what matters isn't necessarily what's being said, but what's being talked about.

Right now, instead of the country talking about rising gas prices or the arrest of a Hamas leader, the security establishment's decision not to wake the prime minister has become a major part of the pre-election conversation.

The political machine hasn't just survived the disaster—they've weaponized it. They turned the military's wake-up protocols into the entire public debate, laying the groundwork to treat any future loss at the ballot box as just another coup by the generals.

The High Court just dismantled the government's seven-month freeze on arresting Haredi draft evaders. It's the end of a very long procedural road. Following the invalidation of the Tal Law in twenty twelve, we watched years of legislative delay that culminated this past July, when the coalition passed an amendment on July fourteenth after being warned, repeatedly, that it was illegal. They pushed it through anyway, and the court just killed the freeze. All nine justices found the law to be flawed on procedural grounds.

Nine to zero. But the detail that really matters here is how the state handled the hearing, because that tells you what the strategy was. They didn't actually mount a legal defense. The government just submitted a short position saying the result of the case was known in advance. They walked into the Supreme Court and essentially told the bench to just get it over with, which is a bizarre way to defend national security legislation during a war.

Which is exactly how a column in JPost Opinion reads the entire episode. The argument there is that the legislative failure wasn't an accident—it was the strategy. Haredi politicians needed a scapegoat to show their base. They knew the law would fall, and they used the judgment as another judgment around which to rally their voters and another opportunity to portray the court as the enemy of the yeshivas. It's much easier to run against the judges in Jerusalem than it is to explain why the draft notices are arriving.

Shas proved that thesis the minute the ruling dropped. They called the justices the greatest generators of chaos in the country, and accused them of trampling democracy. But the government still has to face the electorate. To manage that anger, Netanyahu is now offering a formula: Haredi men who do not study will be drafted.

Right, the study-or-serve compromise. It sounds like a reasonable middle ground, but the center's writers are tearing it apart this week. The response from the people analyzing this formula is that it requires the state to decide who is really studying Torah. And that means building an enforcement apparatus from scratch. Historically, the government has struggled to enforce even basic core-curriculum requirements in institutions it funds. So the idea that they can suddenly monitor yeshiva attendance with military precision is pretty hard to take seriously.

Because the oversight mechanism is a complete illusion. Regulators would need daily attendance records and Talmud exams inside institutions that want absolutely no part of this system. The yeshivas have zero incentive to report the slackers, which means almost any young man determined to avoid service will find a way to be classified as a student. It's a blanket exemption wearing a uniform. And the people who actually serve in the reserves know it.

And he wrote in the decision that the freeze constitutes clear discrimination in the enforcement of the law, based on sectoral-religious affiliation. He went further than the legal language. He wrote, to anyone willing to listen, that this is not the way of Torah.

You saw that same fracture in the courtroom itself. When an attorney for a Haredi organization argued that the Torah prohibited enlistment under current conditions, Justice David Mintz—who is also observant—said from the bench, I simply cannot believe what I am hearing. As we said last week, this fight is actively fracturing religious Zionism and driving a wedge deep into the coalition. The religious right is losing its patience with the Haredi leadership.

And the broader public lost its patience months ago. After three years of war and heavy strain on regular and reserve soldiers, public tolerance for blanket military exemptions has all but vanished. Which means this ruling could be a blow to Netanyahu’s bid to remain in office after the October twenty-seventh election. He's trapped between a base that demands universal service and Haredi partners who demand legal immunity.

Most of the political parties are outwardly in favor of the removal of the group’s exemption. The center is demanding that everyone serves, arguing that only a very small quota of exceptional Torah scholars can be allowed to continue studying. There's just no political space left for a compromise that doesn't put actual soldiers in boots. The electorate is looking at a deficit of twelve thousand soldiers, and they are out of patience for creative accounting.

The coalition got their grievance, but they lost their legal cover—and the country's still waiting to find out if the army will actually start sending military police into yeshivas to make arrests.

The fight over who gets to inherit the Israeli right is finally out in the open, and it's starting over a shipwreck.

For years, Itamar Ben-Gvir has operated under one very strict rule: you don't attack Benjamin Netanyahu directly. Because his own voters won't tolerate it. They still want Netanyahu as prime minister, so Ben-Gvir has always been careful to aim his fire somewhere else. But that rule just broke. Amit Segal, writing in It's Noon In Israel, notes that Ben-Gvir is now going after the prime minister in public, claiming credit for recovering the Altalena wreckage and accusing Netanyahu of trying to push him out.

And it isn't just rhetoric. It's showing up in the electoral math. Netanyahu has been pressuring Ben-Gvir to run on a joint ticket with Bezalel Smotrich, because the threshold to get into the Knesset is three point two five percent. Gambling with that number has historical consequences. You just have to look at what happened in twenty twenty-two, when left-wing parties missed the cut and handed Netanyahu his majority.

Smotrich is hovering dangerously close to that line, and a split ticket risks wasting tens of thousands of right-wing votes. But over the weekend, Ben-Gvir's party put out a statement officially refusing the merger. A column in The Forward suggests he is just betting that Netanyahu is going to lose. Likud's traditional secular base is fracturing, and Ben-Gvir wants to run alone so he can emerge as the undisputed leader of the radical right once the Netanyahu era ends.

So why is Ben-Gvir taking this risk now? For Segal, picking this fight is a mistake. He reads the attacks on Netanyahu as a rare campaign error from a usually disciplined politician. The argument there is that Ben-Gvir's misreading his own stability, launching a succession bid before his base is actually secure enough to support it.

The counter-argument from the center is that it isn't an error at all, because the boundary between Likud and the Kahanist right just doesn't exist anymore. The case here is that Netanyahu's own survival tactics made this inevitable. In the nineteen eighties, Likud leaders used to walk out of the Knesset plenum when Meir Kahane spoke. But to stay in power during his criminal trial, Netanyahu took a politician he once called unfit and made him the minister of national security. By legitimizing Ben-Gvir, he made it psychologically comfortable for mainstream Likud voters to cross over, and that normalization could drain Likud down below twenty seats in the next election.

Both of these columns point to the demographic engine driving that crossover. The Israeli right is transforming. It used to be a secular, nationalist movement, led by people like Ariel Sharon, who eventually broke with Likud. Now, it's becoming a religious, ethnonationalist one. The math is stubborn. The secular population simply has lower birth rates than the Haredi and religious-Zionist communities. That means every single election cycle shifts the balance of power further away from Likud's traditional secular base.

That demographic shift cycle after cycle. The argument goes that Netanyahu represents the older, secular version of that camp, while Ben-Gvir represents its future. And that brings us back to his refusal to throw Smotrich a lifeline. The reading from the center is that Ben-Gvir is looking past October. He's running separately because he wants to preserve his own identity, weaken Smotrich, and emerge as the undisputed leader of the radical right.

He's betting that the Netanyahu era is ending. The calculation here is that Netanyahu is going to lose the next election. And if the prime minister falls, Ben-Gvir is positioning himself to inherit the entire bloc. He doesn't want to share that inheritance with Smotrich, and he doesn't want to be tied to Likud's sinking ship.

What stays open is the consequence. We don't yet know whether this fragmentation will drop the far-right below the electoral threshold, or whether it'll successfully crown Ben-Gvir as the new leader of the conservative camp.

Israeli expats trying to fly home to vote—it's turned into a massive logistical operation. Israel generally doesn't allow citizens living abroad to cast absentee ballots, so the only way to participate in October is to physically return. The Israeli travel company Gulliver is already seeing a jump of “tens of percent” in bookings to Israel during election week. And prices reflect the demand: flights from Greece were up twenty-four percent compared to the same period a year earlier.

Right, and organizers are stepping in to bypass the bottleneck. Fly&Vote has arranged a dedicated flight from Lisbon and blocks of seats on six flights out of New York. The scale of this airlift is staggering. About thirty thousand eligible voters had already registered with Fly&Vote by late July. That sheer volume is triggering a direct legal threat from the governing coalition: Likud sent a legal warning arguing that the assistance offered to overseas voters could violate campaign-financing and anti-bribery laws.

The government already has administrative tools to restrict this electorate. The Interior Ministry regularly uses the Code 51 nonresident classification to purge citizens from the voter rolls if they live overseas. As we said last week, the high emigration rate among educated professionals has turned this expat vote into a real flashpoint over who actually holds moral standing in Israeli democracy. Now, Likud's trying to shut down the physical flights before they even take off.

Baruch Katzman dismisses the bribery claim entirely. If a citizen who didn't serve in the military is permitted to vote, there's no justification for disqualifying citizens who fly to Israel specifically to participate. He argues the flights are conceptually identical to what parties already do inside the country on election day. We all know there's organized transportation to polling stations locally. The election laws recognize and permit the transportation of eligible voters. The only question that matters for a democracy is whether the citizen is eligible and voting freely.

The consensus across the week's writing is that this massive effort proves exactly how high the stakes are in October. Another reading from the center captures the personal drive behind these flights. The writer historically opposed expats voting, believing it wasn't fair for someone in New York to influence life-and-death decisions for residents of Israel. But a conversation with a bereaved mother—whose first son was killed and whose second son was wounded in Gaza—changed her calculus. She views this election as an existential question of what kind of country Israel will be in ten or twenty years.

She points to the country deteriorating from the inside, with rising crime and struggling schools. So she isn't asking for a ballot box in New York; she's boarding a plane. The antisemitism on American campuses and streets means that when Israel's in an international storm, Jews outside the country feel it deeply. They're treating the state's survival as their own, because its existence changed the situation for all Jews globally.

The current system practically guarantees this kind of chaotic, privately funded airlift every cycle. A column in JPost Opinion offers a structural fix to separate temporary expats from permanent emigrants. Demographic research estimates roughly six hundred thousand Israelis live abroad. If all of them were allowed to vote, they could account for up to ten Knesset seats. And nearly half of Israelis living abroad weren't born in Israel. The writer suggests basing voting eligibility on tax residency. If a citizen paid income and social-security taxes in Israel during at least one of the four years before an election, they'd get to vote from abroad.

That fixes the structural problem for the next cycle, but the October fight is already here. The readings settle that the lack of absentee ballots has triggered a massive, privately funded logistical mobilization of overseas voters. What stays open is whether Likud's legal threats will actually ground the charter flights before election day arrives.