The Case for a Jewish Republic

Chaim Weizmann, the first president of Israel, presents a Torah scroll to President Truman at the White House, May 25, 1948, eleven days after the United States recognized the new state. Photo: Brown-Suarez Photo, Harry S. Truman Library and Museum, no known copyright.

Israel votes on Tuesday, October 27, for the first time since October 7 and eight months into the war with Iran. This edition takes the threats to the vote in turn: Tehran’s options and the law Israel has for a vote under fire; the information war, foreign and domestic; and then the longer problem, a democracy with no constitution, in which the winners of one election can change the rules of the next. It ends with what the next Knesset should do, whoever leads it, and why that matters in Washington. The opening is free for every reader; the rest is for premium subscribers.

The Case for a Jewish Republic

On Sunday afternoon, two days before Israel votes, Benjamin Netanyahu posted on X an image made by artificial intelligence: a mushroom cloud over Tel Aviv, the city burning beneath it, above a text by the right-wing commentator Yuval Bloomberg that the prime minister shared with the words “Read the important words of Yuval Bloomberg.” The text said that if two atomic bombs fell on central Israel no one would care about “all these meaningless controversies,” and it warned voters of “the danger of a second Holocaust” if they chose a leader who could not confront Iran. Gadi Eisenkot, the former chief of staff of Israel’s army, whose new Yashar party led Netanyahu’s Likud in the last polls, answered on X the same afternoon: “Netanyahu, you’re hysterical,” and “As in every election campaign, it’s the same method of lies and scare tactics.” Naftali Bennett, the former prime minister who heads the Beyachad list, called the message “a lie”; Yair Golan of the left-wing Democrats asked that the prime minister be “kept away from social media.”

A few hours later the prime minister released a video from an Arrow missile-defense battery: “We have intelligence signs that Iran and its proxies could challenge us with attacks in order to disrupt the elections,” and, to Tehran, “Don’t test us. You will suffer disproportionate blows.” The same report carried an account from Israel’s Channel 13 that the current army chief, Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, told a private meeting that he sees no operational need to strike Iran before the vote. Israel Hayom reported on October 18 that senior officials see “no concrete intelligence pointing to rising tensions”; Ynet’s Ron Ben-Yishai wrote on Wednesday that there is “no concrete intelligence indicating that Iran or Hezbollah intends to attack Israel before or after the elections,” and that the danger is a miscalculation.

Those are the two threats to Tuesday’s vote, in one afternoon. One comes from outside: a regime at war with Israel and the United States since February 28, when the two countries struck Iran and killed Ali Khamenei; whose chairman of parliament’s national security committee posted a map of Israel’s energy facilities, desalination plants and bridges on Saturday with a threat to make the country “uninhabitable in under an hour”; and which the head of the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security service, said in July was trying to interfere in the vote. The other comes from inside: a campaign in which both camps have run AI-generated fakes, in which the elections committee has received more than 276 complaints, nearly five times the 2022 total, and in which the Shin Bet now guards three opposition leaders against threats from Israelis.

The vote will be held. Israel’s law gives no one the power to move a national election short of 80 members of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, and the Knesset has moved one once, in 1973, by 67 votes to 1, in the last days of the Yom Kippur War and before the 80-vote rule existed. Abraham Lincoln stated the principle on November 10, 1864, in the fourth year of the Civil War, in answer to a serenade: if the rebellion “could force us to forego, or postpone a national election it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us.”

Israel holds its elections on time and settles its disputes in court, and each camp still campaigns as if losing meant losing the state. The reason is in the rules. Israel has no constitution. Its fourteen Basic Laws can be amended by a simple majority of the Knesset, 61 of 120, which the Israel Democracy Institute, a research institute in Jerusalem, says has “no precedent in any democratic state in the world.” The Knesset that won the last election can change how judges are chosen, which it did in March 2025; declare Torah study a constitutional value, which it did in July by 63 votes to 52; and strip the Supreme Court of a standard of review, which it did in 2023, until the court struck the amendment down by one vote.

“We can not have free government without elections.”

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