{"id":248767,"date":"2026-08-14T11:06:09","date_gmt":"2026-08-14T11:06:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/248767\/"},"modified":"2026-08-14T11:06:09","modified_gmt":"2026-08-14T11:06:09","slug":"netanyahus-future-is-not-the-question-israels-future-is","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/248767\/","title":{"rendered":"Netanyahu’s future is not the question – Israel’s future is"},"content":{"rendered":"

As another election approaches, Israel needs to ask a question more consequential than whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stays or goes: What kind of country must we become to flourish in a reality we cannot completely change?<\/p>\n

There is an old French expression attributed to the 19th-century writer Alphonse Karr: Plus, \u00e7a change, plus c\u2019est la m\u00eame chose \u2013 the more things change, the more they stay the same.<\/p>\n

For Israelis, it is an uncomfortable thought.<\/p>\n

We are a nation built upon precisely the opposite proposition. Zionism was an extraordinary declaration that history could be changed.<\/p>\n

Jews would no longer accept exile, vulnerability, or powerlessness as immutable conditions. We would change our destiny.<\/p>\n

\"IsraeliIsraeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu attends a state ceremony reburying Shimon and Rivka Herzl, the grandparents of Theodor Herzl, whose remains were brought back to Israel from Belgrade on August 5, 2026. (credit: CHAIM GOLDBERG\/FLASH90)<\/p>\n

And we did.<\/p>\n

Yet almost 80 years after independence, perhaps we need to confront another truth: some things have changed remarkably, while others stubbornly remain.<\/p>\n

We have one of the world\u2019s most formidable militaries, yet our children still run for shelters. We have transformed our diplomatic position, yet face growing international isolation and antisemitism.<\/p>\n

We have peace with Egypt and Jordan and the extraordinary promise of the Abraham Accords, yet we still inhabit a neighborhood containing forces committed to our destruction.<\/p>\n

Iran remains Iran. Its proxies may be weakened, rebuilt, or replaced<\/a>. America\u2019s embrace can tighten and loosen with administrations, personalities, and interests. The world\u2019s sympathy can turn remarkably quickly.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And within Israel, confidence in institutions once treated almost as sacred \u2013 the government, the IDF, intelligence services, and political leadership \u2013 has been badly shaken.<\/p>\n

So what exactly are we trying to change?<\/p>\n

And what happens when we cannot?<\/p>\n

Viktor Frankl offered a profound answer: \u201cWhen we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is a story that captures the idea even more simply.<\/p>\n

The tale of the mother who chose to change her perspective<\/p>\n

A rabbi regularly saw a woman in his synagogue crying and praying for her desperately ill son. Then she disappeared. Nearly a year later, he saw her again. This time she was smiling and seemingly at peace.<\/p>\n

Seeing her changed demeanor, the rabbi assumed the obvious.<\/p>\n

\u201cYour son\u2019s condition has improved?\u201d he asked her.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo, rabbi,\u201d she replied gently. \u201cIt hasn\u2019t changed. But I have.\u201d<\/p>\n

That is not a story about surrender.<\/p>\n

The mother did not stop loving her child. She did not stop seeking his recovery. She had simply discovered that her ability to live could not remain entirely dependent upon receiving the outcome for which she prayed.<\/p>\n

Perhaps Israel needs to discover something similar.<\/p>\n

What is this election actually for?<\/p>\n

We are approaching another Israeli election. But listening to our political discourse<\/a>, one might reasonably ask: For what purpose?<\/p>\n

Is the great objective simply to keep Netanyahu in office or remove him?
If not, why does so much of our political rhetoric revolve around precisely that question?<\/p>\n

Netanyahu matters. Leadership matters. Accountability matters. October 7 matters. The composition of the next government matters enormously.<\/p>\n

But surely the purpose of an election cannot simply be to answer the question: Bibi \u2013 yes or no?<\/p>\n

Iran will be there the morning after the election. So will the Palestinians. So will Hezbollah and other hostile forces. So will antisemitism. So will a complicated America. So will our demographic, economic, and social challenges. So will the fractures within Israeli society.<\/p>\n

Perhaps we are asking our elections to do something elections cannot do: rescue us from reality.
Instead of asking only who should govern Israel, we should be asking what Israel must become.<\/p>\n

How do we build a society capable not merely of defeating threats but absorbing them without being psychologically, socially, and politically transformed by them?<\/p>\n

How do we restore trust without returning to blind faith in our sacred cows?<\/p>\n

How do we remain vigilant without becoming permanently afraid?<\/p>\n

How do we fight antisemitism without allowing antisemites to define our identity?<\/p>\n

How do we value America without making every fluctuation in Washington a national emotional crisis?<\/p>\n

How do we pursue the promise of the Abraham Accords while recognizing the realities of the neighborhood in which those accords must survive?<\/p>\n

Those are questions of resilience.
And resilience is not passive.<\/p>\n

Sun Tzu understood this<\/p>\n

More than 2,000 years before the modern State of Israel, Sun Tzu described a principle that sounds remarkably contemporary: skilled warriors first make themselves resistant to defeat and then wait for the opportunity to defeat their enemy.<\/p>\n

The distinction is profound.<\/p>\n

We cannot control whether an adversary makes a mistake. We can control whether we are strong enough to survive until he does.<\/p>\n

That means resilience is itself a strategic capability.<\/p>\n

Israel understandably invests enormous resources<\/a> in what we can do to our enemies: intelligence, aircraft, missiles, cyber capabilities, and offensive operations.<\/p>\n

But what if an equally important question is what our enemies can do to us without breaking us?<\/p>\n

Can they fracture Israeli society? Can they destroy confidence in our institutions?<\/p>\n

Can they turn Left against Right, religious against secular, Jewish against Arab?<\/p>\n

Can they convince Israelis that everyone outside our political camp is an existential threat? Can they exhaust us?<\/p>\n

Can they make young Jews abroad question their relationship with Israel?<\/p>\n

Can they make Israelis believe that international legitimacy is the ultimate measure of whether our country deserves to exist?<\/p>\n

If they can, then an enemy does not necessarily have to defeat the IDF to achieve a strategic victory.<\/p>\n

Learn from Iran, without becoming Iran<\/p>\n

There is also something uncomfortable we can learn from our Iranian adversaries.<\/p>\n

Not their ideology. Not their brutality. Not their regime. Rather, their patience and resilience.<\/p>\n

For decades, Iran has operated under sanctions, military pressure, internal instability, and international isolation. It has suffered enormous setbacks, its proxies have been attacked, its commanders and scientists have been killed, and its infrastructure has been struck.<\/p>\n

Yet Iran repeatedly absorbs punishment, adapts, rebuilds, and continues pursuing objectives measured not in election cycles but in decades.<\/p>\n

We should ask ourselves why.<\/p>\n

Part of the answer is strategic resilience: redundancy, patience, distributed capabilities, and an acceptance that setbacks do not necessarily constitute defeat.<\/p>\n

Israel should never emulate the Iranian regime. But refusing to learn from an enemy because we despise him is strategically foolish.<\/p>\n

Our resilience must be democratic rather than authoritarian. It must come from trust rather than fear, social cohesion rather than coercion, education rather than indoctrination, and shared purpose rather than enforced conformity.<\/p>\n

That means resilience must become a national project.<\/p>\n

It belongs in our schools, where young Israelis should learn not only mathematics and history but how to navigate disinformation, disagreement, and uncertainty.<\/p>\n

It belongs in national service and the IDF.<\/p>\n

It belongs in government, where institutional redundancy and preparedness must matter as much as political survival.<\/p>\n

It belongs in our relationship with Diaspora Jewry.<\/p>\n

And above all, it belongs in our politics, where disagreement must stop being synonymous with betrayal.<\/p>\n

Israelis have demonstrated that we can get used to missiles. The harder question is whether we can learn to live with uncertainty without allowing it to destroy our faith in one another.<\/p>\n

The more things change, the more some things remain the same.<\/p>\n

Frankl\u2019s answer was not despair. It was agency.<\/p>\n

The mother in the synagogue could not change the reality she desperately wanted changed. But neither did she permit that reality to consume her.<\/p>\n

Perhaps, after nearly 80 years devoted to changing the Jewish condition, Israel has reached another stage of Zionism.<\/p>\n

We must never stop trying to change our circumstances. We must confront Iran, pursue peace, expand the Abraham Accords, strengthen our relationship with America, fight antisemitism, repair our institutions, and demand better leadership.<\/p>\n

But our ability to flourish cannot depend upon succeeding at all of them.<\/p>\n

Sometimes victory means changing the world around us.<\/p>\n

Sometimes victory means becoming strong enough that the world around us cannot determine who we become.<\/p>\n

Perhaps this election should be about learning the difference.<\/p>\n

The writer is a global strategist and a strategic adviser at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs. He can be reached at globalstrategist2020@gmail.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As another election approaches, Israel needs to ask a question more consequential than whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":248768,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[33],"tags":[29674,5291,671,2492,41,9921,423,37,25056,499,6393],"class_list":["post-248767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-israel","tag-2026-israeli-elections","tag-abraham-accords","tag-america","tag-antisemitism","tag-benjamin-netanyahu","tag-diaspora-jews","tag-idf","tag-israel","tag-israels-declaration-of-independance","tag-judaism","tag-zionism"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/117093544036527661","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248767","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=248767"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248767\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/248768"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=248767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=248767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=248767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}