The path to defeating Netanyahu may hinge on unity across ideological divides.
On Saturday night, April 25, Israeli protesters against the extreme right-wing government led by Prime Minister Netanyahu marched to the Hungarian Embassy in Tel Aviv carrying Hungarian flags. They shouted, “As one bloc, we’ll win together,” “Ultra-ultra-right is a failure,” and “The time has come to overthrow the dictator.” They were celebrating the defeat of right-wing populist Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. The irony was that, in previous pro-democracy demonstrations against the attempt to undermine the independence of the courts, freedom of the press, and academic freedom, the protesters shouted, “We don’t want to become Hungary!” However, now that Orbán has been defeated, Hungary has become a symbol of the struggle against antidemocratic, autocratic leadership in Israel.
Orbán’s defeat was also a defeat for his allies Trump, Netanyahu, and Putin. While Netanyahu didn’t go as far as Vice President JD Vance did in flying to Budapest to express the Trump administration’s support for their ally and role model, he did call Orbán to express support for his reelection.
New Hungarian Prime Minister Peter Magyar’s victory has inspired all of the pro-democracy forces around the world. It suggests that it is possible to defeat illiberal authoritarian forces. What has to be analyzed now is how to interpret the victory of Magyar and his Tisza (Respect and Freedom) Party, and how that can be applied to Israel, the United States, and other countries where the struggle between democratic and antidemocratic forces is taking place.
One of the elements being discussed is the fact that Magyar was a member of Orbán’s right-wing Fidesz (Hungarian Civic Alliance) party and holds many right-wing views, and his former wife was even a minister in the defeated prime minister’s government. Thus, is the winning formula for the right, center, and left-wing opponents of the illiberal leaders to join forces behind a younger leader who holds right-wing positions on nationalism and immigration, eschewing corruption and repressive policies regarding the press, academia, etc., while focusing on the economy? That was the formula in Hungary.
That is how former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett interprets it. Bennett was a member of Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud Party and director of the Yesha (Judea, Samaria, Gaza) Settlement Council in the West Bank. Yet as prime minister in a rotation agreement in 2021 together with the centrist Yair Lapid, he was ready to form a government coalition with all of the anti-Likud right, center, and left parties. It included for the first time a Palestinian-Israeli party as a full member of the government coalition, the Ra’am (United Arab List) moderate Islamic party headed by Knesset member Mansour Abbas. His government even had a Palestinian-Israeli, Issawi Frej, from the left-wing Meretz Party, as minister of regional cooperation. To his credit, Bennett has never been accused of corruption. He also said that one of the first acts of a new government would be to establish a governmental commission of inquiry about the reasons for the failure to prevent October 7, something that Netanyahu has been avoiding like the plague, and would pass a law to limit prime ministers to a maximum of two terms.
This time around, Bennett, who established a “Bennett26” party heading to the October elections, has been the leading candidate to replace Netanyahu if the opposition wins. His interpretation of the election results in Hungary was to say that the entire opposition should rally around Magyar. On Sunday, April 22, Bennett and his former partner Lapid, head of the Yesh Atid (There’s a Future) party, the official head of the Israeli opposition, with 24 seats in the Knesset (though the current polls give it only six to eight seats), announced that they were going to run in the coming elections as a joint list called “Beyachad” (Together). They called on the other leading centrist candidate, former IDF chief of staff Gadi Eisenkott, who lost a son in the war and founded the Yashar (Honest or Direct) party, to join forces with them. Trying to establish his right-wing credentials to draw votes from Netanyahu, he said that he is clearly “right-wing,” and would “not give up an inch” of Israeli territory. Lapid, who expressed support for a two-state solution at the UN when he was prime minister, said that they agreed to work together despite the fact that they have differences of opinion, without saying what they are.
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The polls have consistently said that the current right-wing coalition of Netanyahu’s Likud Party together with the two extreme right-wing racist messianic religious parties led by ministers Betzalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir and the ultra-Orthodox parties would get an average of around 50 seats out of 120 in the Knesset. The opposition right-center-left Jewish Zionist parties would get about 60 seats, while the four primarily Palestinian-Israeli parties would get 10 seats, 15 if they decide to run together in a joint list as they have in the past.
Bennett declared that he will lead a government composed only of the Zionist parties and would not want a government that relied on “the Arab parties” for support. In the first poll taken after the Bennett-Lapid agreement, the Beyachad (Together) Party would receive 28 seats and the Likud only 26. The problem is that without the support of at least one Arab party, they will probably not have a majority. The lingering trauma caused by the murderous October 7 attack by Hamas has clearly made the majority of the Israeli public much less ready for Palestinian-Israeli partnership in a government. Yet that may be the only way to form an alternative coalition.
The only Zionist party head who has declared support for Jewish-Arab partnership in government is Yair Golan, the former deputy chief of staff who is head of the left-wing Democrats Party, the merger of Labor and Meretz. He is also the only Jewish party leader who has declared the need for a “diplomatic horizon,” a political resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to guarantee Israel’s security.
The Israeli peace movement is very frustrated with this situation. Yet the first step for any progress is to defeat Netanyahu and his extreme right-wing coalition.
On April 29, the German and French ambassadors to Israel hosted the launch of a new book—The Future Is Peace: A Shared Journey Across the Holy Land, by Maon Inon and Aziz Abu Sarah—at the Peres Center for Peace and Innovation in Tel Aviv. The symbolism of the fact that it was hosted by the representatives of two countries that have fought so many bloody wars but reached a post–Second World War reconciliation was clear. A similar launch will be hosted by the Palestinian Educational Book Shop with the support of the European Union in East Jerusalem. Inon lost both of his parents on October 7 and Abu Sarah lost his brother to Israeli military torture. The two have already met with Donald Trump’s friend Pope Leo and appeared on both Jon Stewart’s program and Peter Beinart’s weekly webinar. The book will soon be published in Hebrew and Arabic as well.
On Thursday, April 30, the peace movement held the third annual “It’s Time People’s Peace Summit,” an all-day conference at the Tel Aviv Expo Center, with the participation of over 5,000 Israeli Jewish and Arab peace activists and over 100 supportive diplomats.
Sessions were devoted to “Between Gaza and Tehran: A New Regional Order,” “Operational Plans for Getting Out of the Abyss,” “It’s Possible: A Coalition for Peace,” “An Age of Forever Wars, or a New Regional Order?,” “A Child Is a Child,” “Eyes on Gaza” and “Eyes on the West Bank,” and “Make Diplomacy Great Again!”
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In the final gala plenary session, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza who were unable to come spoke via video, and EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Kaja Kallas announced that the European Union will give large grants to support Israeli and Palestinian civil society activity for peace. Democrats Party member of Knesset Reform Rabbi Gilad Kariv said “we commit in the next government to ending Jewish terror in the West Bank, to ending settlement expansion and funding, to going to Ramallah to meet with the Palestinian leadership and to putting a diplomatic negotiated solution for two states back on the agenda.” Knesset members Ayman Odeh and Ahmad Tibi, heads of the Hadash and Ta’al Palestinian-Israeli parties, said they were “committed to creating a joint list of all four Palestinian-Israeli parties and to get out the Arab vote to ensure that Netanyahu and his extreme right-wing coalition will be defeated.”
And this week, 94 Israeli and Palestinian civil society activist leaders will meet together in Beit Jallah in the West Bank, a location where both Israelis and Palestinians can meet, organized by the Alliance for Middle East Peace (ALLMEP), a network of 200 Israeli, Palestinian, and joint organizations, to discuss strategy for the future.
One of the primary goals of all this activity is to place peace back on the Israeli, Palestinian, and international agenda. A poll carried out by the aChord Center, cited by Avi Meyerstein, the American Jewish lawyer who founded ALLMEP, indicated that a significant majority of both Israelis and Palestinians support the idea of a regional peace and security arrangement that includes the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel. There is something to work with.
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