Netanyahu’s opposition wasted a decade. Is it too late for an Israeli state?

Rogel Alpher writes in Haaretz on 3 November 2026:

I have a unique perspective from which to measure the evolution of the “bloc of change.” For a decade, from 2014 to 2023, I suffered from the image of a provocateur. During those years, my columns were devoted to warning of the rise of messianic fascism in Israel.  Many people in the bloc, including many Haaretz readers, rejected my analysis and warnings out of hand. They called them exaggerated or ridiculous, and attributed them to a desperate need for attention. In their view, every mention of reality was a “provocation.” They branded the country’s problem as my own psychological problem.

Their eyes were opened when the judicial overhaul began. Ever since Justice Minister Yariv Levin’s speech on January 4, 2023, my opinions – which haven’t changed at all – have been accepted as mainstream in the bloc of change.

It’s clear to all of them that the disaster exists not only in my imagination, but also in reality. Statements that were once met with shock and anger are now accepted as self-evident. The collective mechanism of repression has been shattered. I’m not the one who is “sick”; Israeli society is.

I’ve stopped “challenging the public conversation.” The fascist bloc is doing a fine job of challenging the conversation on its own. And that bloc – with help from the “deep state” it created in the police and the Shin Bet security service, from U.S. President Donald Trump and from the war with Iran, which may well erupt again this week – no longer hides its intention of preventing any possibility of replacing the government, exercising democracy or holding fair elections in the future.

The good news is that this bloc finally understands the nature of the disaster befalling us. But this recognition has arrived with great and fatal belatedness. The danger was clearly discernible as far back as the war in the Gaza Strip in 2014. But an entire decade was wasted in a willful refusal to see, denial and disdain of “alarmism.”

And that is how we reached a situation in which the bloc of change understood this was the last chance to avert the disaster, but has been forced to move too quickly toward an understanding of the necessary principle, an understanding that could have developed more naturally had the danger been recognized back in 2014 – namely, that Israel is not and cannot be a Jewish state.

In America, where Blacks constitute 13.5 percent of the population and Hispanics account for 20.5 percent, Americans who call the U.S. a white man’s country are rightly called racists. Nor does America officially define itself as a white country. In Canada, one of every five Canadians is of ethnic French origin from Quebec, and most Canadians today wouldn’t dream of calling it an Anglo-Saxon country.

But one in five Israelis is an Arab. And nevertheless, even the vast majority of people in the change bloc define Israel as a Jewish state.

Last week’s election proved just how wrong, discriminatory, anti-democratic, and racist this definition is. And it also proved that if the change bloc wants to live, it must recognize Israel as an Israeli state, not a Jewish state. It must also recognize the immediate implication of this enlightened definition – ending the occupation and apartheid in the West Bank.

Unfortunately, the tragic belatedness in identifying the growing fascism and messianism in Israel between 2014 and 2023, coupled with the continued denial of the necessary alliance with the Arabs – including during the anti-government protests of the past several years – has led the bloc of change to its current critical point, in which it is led by yesterday’s men, who aren’t fit for the job.

Gadi Eisenkot, Naftali Bennett, Yair Lapid and Avigdor Lieberman look like people who aren’t capable of making the daring conceptual leap that is needed in the short time remaining before the final, terminal slide into dictatorship. And that is true of most of their parties’ Knesset members and voters as well.

This is the price of the bloc of change’s lost decade. History races forward, and it doesn’t wait for its victims to see things correctly.

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