New York (VINNEWS/Rabbi Yair Hoffman) Dan Perry’s recent column in the Forward, warning that a cornered Benjamin Netanyahu may cancel Israel’s elections and place the country in “existential peril,” reads less like analysis than like the artificial projection of a particular political milieu onto an entire nation.

It is worth answering, because the column compresses into a few paragraphs nearly every misreading of the Netanyahu era that has become fashionable in certain precincts. The policy implications it gestures toward, dressed up as “concern for Israeli democracy”, would be genuinely dangerous if taken seriously.

Let’s begin with the central factual claim: that “none of our enemies have actually been vanquished,” that the wars have produced no “clear returns,” that Netanyahu has promised victory and delivered exhaustion.

Really? Is he serious?

Consider what the regional map looked like on October 6, 2023, and what it looks like today:

• Hamas’s military wing — the organization that perpetrated the worst massacre of Jews since the Shoah — has been operationally dismantled in Gaza.
• Yahya Sinwar is dead.
• Mohammed Deif is dead.
• The entire architect-tier of October 7 has been eliminated.
• Hezbollah, which for nearly two decades menaced northern Israel with what was widely considered the most heavily armed non-state force in the world, was decapitated in a series of operations whose audacity will be studied at staff colleges for generations. Hassan Nasrallah is dead.
• The pager operation alone reshaped public perception of Israeli capabilities across the Arab and Persian worlds. Hezbollah’s senior command was gutted, and the organization was forced into a ceasefire that pushed it north of the Litani — the long-standing northern-front objective that eluded Israeli governments for forty years.
• Then there is the matter of the Assad regime, which collapsed in December 2024, severing the Iranian land bridge through Syria.
• And then, of course, the twelve-day war with Iran in June 2025, which struck Iranian nuclear facilities directly, neutralized much of Iran’s strategic air defense, and demonstrated Israeli air superiority over Tehran. None of this had ever been done before. Much of it was previously considered impossible.

To describe this record as “none of our enemies have actually been vanquished” is not analysis. It is a refusal to look.

Perry concedes, in passing, that Israel’s foes are “certainly bruised.” This is the rhetorical equivalent of describing the Wehrmacht in May 1945 as having had a difficult spring. Bruised is not the word. Shattered is closer.

The prophet Yeshayahu, speaking of a future Israel, declared: “No weapon formed against you shall prosper, and every tongue that rises against you in judgment you shall condemn” (Yeshayahu 54:17). The verse contains two clauses, and the second is not incidental. The military weapons of Israel’s enemies have been broken to a degree few imagined possible three years ago. The rhetorical weapons aimed at Israel, on the other hand, from sympathetic platforms in the West have not yet been broken. They have, if anything, sharpened. The Forward column is a small piece of that second front.

Now to the column’s second move: the suggestion that Netanyahu, facing electoral difficulty, will “ignite an external front” or fabricate an emergency to suspend elections. This is presented as the considered opinion of “serious observers,” though the actual citation is to a Haaretz columnist whose Netanyahu derangement is well documented and who, in the passage quoted, simply asserts the worst possible motive without evidence.

Set aside the question of whether such a maneuver would even be possible — Perry himself acknowledges the Supreme Court would almost certainly strike it down, and that Israeli civil society would resist massively. To accuse a sitting prime minister, without proof, of plotting to manufacture war in order to cancel an election is not a small charge. It is the gravest accusation that can be leveled against a democratic leader. The Forward would never permit such a charge to be made, on equivalent evidence, against an Israeli politician its editors found congenial. The asymmetry is itself revealing.

Netanyahu’s political difficulties are real, but they are the ordinary difficulties of a long-serving leader presiding over a long war. Ariel Sharon was deeply unpopular before Operation Defensive Shield. Menachem Begin’s coalition was written off repeatedly. David Ben-Gurion lost elections. Israeli polling is volatile precisely because Israeli reality is volatile, and the seat counts in May tell observers very little about the seat counts in October — particularly in a country where roughly a third of voters reliably make up their minds in the final fortnight.

Perry’s proposed “uncomfortable bargain” — that Netanyahu plead guilty to a reduced charge, accept a pardon from President Herzog, and exit public life — is presented as magnanimous. In fact, it is patronizing in the extreme. Israeli voters, not Forward columnists, decide who leads Israel.

The corruption cases against Netanyahu, whatever one’s view of them, have proceeded for years under exactly the judicial system the column elsewhere praises as the bulwark against tyranny. If that system reaches an outcome, it will reach one. The notion that a sitting prime minister should be pressured to confess and retire because his removal would be tidier for his opponents is not a defense of democracy. It is a subversion of it.

What, then, are the genuine paths forward?

First, finish the work. The Gaza file is not closed. Hamas’s residual networks still need to be uprooted, and the question of post-war governance in Gaza — the question successive Israeli and American governments have ducked since 2005 — must finally be answered. Netanyahu has earned the standing to lead this conversation. So have his eventual successors, whoever they may be.

Second, complete the Iran file. The June 2025 campaign degraded Iran’s nuclear infrastructure but did not end the program. The Trump administration’s posture creates an opening that has not existed in two decades for a definitive resolution — whether through diplomacy backed by credible force or through further military action. Netanyahu, who has warned about Iranian nuclear ambitions when warning was unfashionable, is uniquely positioned to bring this to closure.

Third, expand the Abraham Accords. The Saudi file remains open. Quiet contacts with additional Gulf states, with Indonesia, and with North African capitals have continued through the war years. A Saudi normalization agreement — which once seemed within reach and was disrupted by October 7 — is again being discussed. This is not the agenda of a leader without horizon. It is an agenda larger than any single election cycle.

Fourth, go to the voters. The election that must be held by October will be held. Netanyahu will make his case. His opponents will make theirs. Israelis will decide. This is what democracies do.

Rav Yitzchok Hutner zt”l, Rosh Yeshiva of Chaim Berlin, developed across several ma’amarim in Pachad Yitzchak on Chanukah a reading of the verse “הֵמָּה כָּרְעוּ וְנָפָלוּ וַאֲנַחְנוּ קַמְנוּ וַנִּתְעוֹדָד” (Tehillim 20:9). The conventional reading takes “they fell” and “we rose” as two sequential events — first the enemies collapsed, then Klal Yisrael stood firm.

The Rosh Yeshiva read the verse otherwise.

The falling and the rising are not two events but one process. The Chashmona’im did not emerge despite the persecution of Yavan; they emerged through it. The very pressure of Greek imperial power generated the spiritual concentration that produced the Chashmona’im. Without the threat there would have been no answer to the threat. Apply this to the matter at hand. What Dan Perry diagnoses as exhaustion may be, read more carefully, the very pressure under which the most consequential strategic transformation in Israel’s modern history has been generated. The fatigue is not the opposite of the achievement. It is the medium of it.

The Forward’s columnist would prefer that Israelis be saved from themselves — that the man they have elected six times be coaxed out of public life through a plea bargain, lest they be tempted to elect him a seventh. There is a word for the disposition that distrusts voters this thoroughly.

The word is not democratic.

Netanyahu’s record is not beyond criticism. No leader’s is. But the case against him being made in the Forward and its echo chambers bears little resemblance to the case an actual Israeli voter must weigh: the destruction of Hamas’s military capacity, the decapitation of Hezbollah, the collapse of Assad, the strike on Iran, the survival of Israel’s economy under unprecedented strain, the Abraham Accords, the continuing relationship with the Trump administration, and the still-open possibility of historic Saudi normalization.

Those are not the achievements of a leader in “existential peril.” They are the achievements of a leader who, whatever his flaws, has done more to reshape the Middle East in Israel’s favor than any prime minister since Begin.  Many Israelis will recognize what he has done and will undoubtedly, express their hakarat haTov.

These voters will judge in October. And whatever they decidem they are perfectly capable of doing without instruction from abroad.

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