Trotsky, Lenin, and Gaza

Three Sundays, three free essays; the vacation continues and so, apparently, does the writing. The first two specials were about Tehran’s wars, on the sea lanes and on American morale. Today’s is about Jerusalem, because sixty-five days from now Israelis elect the person who will finish, or fail to finish, everything this newsletter covers daily. The pause holds, the Dispatch carries the load, and this essay goes to every reader, free and premium alike.

Trotsky, Lenin, and Gaza

The crucible of Israel’s next prime minister.

In 1946, a young functionary of Labor Zionism’s youth movement needed a ride from Tel Aviv to Haifa, and the ride he found was in David Ben-Gurion’s car. The chairman of the Jewish Agency said nothing for most of the trip. Then, on the outskirts of Haifa, he turned to his passenger, a twenty-three-year-old named Shimon Peres, and announced, out of nowhere: “You know, Trotsky was no statesman.”

Peres asked why. Because of no-peace-no-war, Ben-Gurion said, the formula Trotsky carried into the armistice talks at Brest-Litovsk: walk out of the negotiations, declare the fighting over, decide nothing. “That’s not statesmanship. That’s some sort of Jewish invention,” he said. “A statesman must decide, one way or the other: to go for peace and pay the price, or to make war, knowing what the risks and dangers are.”

Lenin, Ben-Gurion went on, was Trotsky’s inferior in intellect, and became the leader of Russia anyway, because he was decisive. Lenin looked at Brest-Litovsk, chose peace, and paid its brutal price in territory without flinching. Ben-Gurion had watched that revolution up close, from Moscow in 1923, and what he admired in Lenin was never the cruelty; it was the refusal to be trapped in what he called the inertia of accepted concepts. Ben-Gurion was no Leninist. He took from Moscow a standard about decision, not a politics.

Peres retold that car ride for the rest of his life, in at least three books, because he understood it was the closest thing to a philosophy of power his mentor ever volunteered. Statesmanship is not intellect; Trotsky had intellect to burn. Statesmanship is the capacity to choose one terrible door, walk through it, and pay what it costs.

Peres, of all people, honored the price side of the sentence. He spent his career choosing the peace door and paying for it at the ballot box, election after election, and he kept telling the story anyway. The standard was the standard, even when it ruled against the man telling it.

Hold that standard up to Israel’s last two decades and the reflection is uncomfortable. Since the Second Lebanon War, the Jewish state has run its longest conflict on the exact formula its founder called a Jewish invention: no peace, no war, no decision. And that is why the election now sixty-five days away is not an ordinary one. The test of the next prime minister is not ideology, not coalition craft, not eloquence. It is the capacity to execute an irrevocable decision. Call it the Ben-Gurion Standard.

No-peace-no-war did not survive in Israel by accident. It survived by acquiring credentials. In the decades after Oslo collapsed, it was rebranded as “conflict management,” and after 2014 it acquired an official metaphor when two scholars at the Begin-Sadat Center named the doctrine “mowing the grass”: periodic short operations to degrade an enemy you have decided neither to destroy nor to accommodate, buying “a period of quiet” until the next mowing.

The appeal was real, and it is important to be honest about it. Managing the conflict deferred both of the prices Ben-Gurion insisted a statesman must choose between. It asked no territorial concession, which is the price of peace, and no mass mobilization with its casualty lists, which is the price of war. It kept every coalition intact because it demanded nothing final from any faction. For a political class that had watched decision-makers destroyed by their decisions, from Oslo’s architects to the fathers of the Lebanon wars, limbo was not cowardice. It was, or seemed to be, prudence.

The boom years made the wager feel wise. Tel Aviv priced in the quiet, the startup decade ran on it, and conflict management acquired the ultimate credential: a policy nobody important seemed to be paying for. By the late 2010s the deferral had hardened into what Israelis would afterward call the conception, the official belief that Hamas was deterred, buyable, and even useful, and that quiet was the same thing as safety. The country had been here before. In 1973 another conception, that Egypt would not dare cross the canal, survived every warning until the morning it cost more than 2,500 Israeli lives, and a state commission spent years mapping how intelligent men defend a comfortable assumption.

The bill compounded quietly. Across the managed years the adversaries used the quiet exactly as Ben-Gurion would have predicted: to build. Hezbollah assembled the largest missile arsenal ever pointed at a democracy. Hamas dug a subterranean city under Gaza and drilled the assault it would finally execute. Iran wrapped a ring of fire around the country one proxy at a time, on the correct theory that a state that mows will never uproot. Each operation bought a season of calm, and the roots grew back deeper each time, which the doctrine’s own metaphor conceded from the start.

The deeper damage was institutional. A generation of Israeli ministers learned that the safest decision is the deferred one, and a generation of staff officers learned to brief option menus in which “manage” was always the recommended line. Decision itself atrophied, the way an unused muscle does. By the middle of the last decade the state possessed the region’s finest military instrument and no theory whatsoever of what the instrument was for.

“Ben-Gurion’s point was not that war beats peace or that peace beats war. It was that refusing to choose is worse than either.”

If the pathology has a definitive case file, it is the two and a half years when Avigdor Liberman ran the Defense Ministry and Gadi Eisenkot ran the army. The hawk of hawks and the institutionalist of institutionalists shared one cabinet room, one enemy, and one border. What the state produced from that pairing was the purest limbo in its history.

Start with the ultimatum. In March 2016, out of government, Liberman went on the record with the most famous threat in modern Israeli politics: if he became defense minister, Hamas’s leader would have 48 hours to return the bodies of Oron Shaul and Hadar Goldin and the two held civilians, “or you will die.” He added a flourish about buying a grave. Two months later he was defense minister. One week into the job, asked about the deadline, he answered: “It’s only been one week. Ask me those kind of questions at the end of my term.”

Ismail Haniyeh outlived the term. He outlived the ultimatum by eight years, and when death finally found him, in Tehran in 2024, it came in a different war, under the logic of a different day. The lesson was never about Liberman’s sincerity. It was that the vocabulary of war, however fluent, is not a decision, and the state’s machinery quietly absorbed and neutralized the loudest hawk ever to hold the portfolio.

The disagreement across the cabinet table was structural before it was personal. Through 2018 the border burned on a slow flame, mass riots at the fence and incendiary balloons torching the Gaza envelope’s fields week after week, and the minister demanded a response that would end it while the army calibrated responses designed not to start anything. Farmers watched wheat burn under a doctrine that classified the fires as sub-threshold. The threshold, wherever it sat, belonged to the enemy.

Across the table sat the machinery’s finest product. Eisenkot’s General Staff argued, with discipline and data, for the other lane: containment in Gaza, the underground barrier then rising along the fence, precision raids, and strategic priority to the north, where Hezbollah’s precision-missile project threatened something Gaza never could. His tenure’s term of art, the campaign between the wars, described a doctrine of constant sub-threshold action so that the big war would never have to be fought. It was brilliant, analytical, Trotsky-esque in the exact sense Ben-Gurion meant: intellect arranged in defense of not deciding.

The two doctrines fought each other to a standstill inside the security cabinet while the state executed neither. Liberman pressed for pre-emption and was refused. The General Staff pressed for restraint and got it, along with a minister who, reports later said, told the top brass they sounded like Peace Now. Netanyahu publicly rebuked him for the comparison. The state’s civilian and military leadership were now trading insults over which of them was refusing to decide.

By that autumn the security cabinet leaked like a sieve, and every leak indicted somebody’s softness or somebody’s recklessness. Ministers demanded the reconquest of Gaza in the morning and voted for quiet in the afternoon. The forum that existed to decide had become a stage for performing the refusal to.

The collapse came in one November week in 2018. A covert operation was exposed near Khan Younis and a lieutenant colonel died getting the team out. Hamas answered with 460 rockets in roughly 48 hours; Israel struck 160 targets; and then the cabinet accepted an Egyptian-mediated ceasefire. Liberman resigned rather than sign, calling the truce “a capitulation to terror” and warning that Israel was “buying quiet for the short term at the price of serious damage to national security in the long term.” On the way out he disclosed that he had opposed the Qatari cash suitcases too, and lost that argument as well.

The aftermath completed the file. Residents of Sderot burned tires in the road to protest the truce their own government had accepted, and Hamas declared victory, because for Hamas a truce survived is a victory. Naftali Bennett demanded the vacated Defense Ministry and threatened to walk; Netanyahu kept the portfolio for himself, Bennett stayed anyway, and six weeks later the coalition dissolved into what became four elections in two years, a political system managing itself exactly the way it managed Gaza.

Read the week as a unit and every actor performed his assigned role in the pathology. The hawk resigned, which is what hawks did instead of striking. The institution restrained, which is what institutions did instead of resolving. The quiet was purchased again, cash included. No-peace-no-war was no longer a lapse of Israeli statecraft. It was Israeli statecraft, ratified by the resignation of the one minister who objected. The organization on the other side of the fence was taking notes.

On October 27, sixty-five days from today, Israelis choose the person who inherits all of it: Gaza’s day after, the north’s disarmament file, Iran’s day after, and the price tags attached to each. This file endorses no one. It applies a standard, the only one the moment supports: not left against right, but deciders against managers. Grade the field yourself.

Benjamin Netanyahu, Likud. The longest-serving prime minister in the state’s history is the doctrine’s grand architect, and it takes nothing from his real gifts to say so. He kept wars short, the economy open, and the coalition alive, and he treated finality itself as the threat. Attendees of a 2019 Likud meeting quoted him saying that whoever wants to thwart a Palestinian state should support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas; he denies ever saying it, and the denial matters less than the policy, which everyone could see: the divided Palestinians, the Qatari suitcases, the managed quiet. October 7 priced that strategy for him. He has since fought the Iran war at America’s side with real resolve, and the question the standard asks him is still the one he has deferred for nineteen years: name the end state. His answer, on the evidence, remains another season of quiet, skillfully purchased. Even his politics ran on the doctrine: four elections in two years, each managed to a draw, none permitted to decide anything.

Gadi Eisenkot, Yashar. The revelation of the cycle is that the field’s frontrunner is its purest institutionalist. The former chief of staff walked out of Benny Gantz’s party in the summer of 2025, founded Yashar that September, and now leads Likud by a seat in the August polling and ties Netanyahu as preferred prime minister, which is why the New Yorker just profiled him as the strongest challenger, and why the Netanyahu campaign answered his rise with an AI-generated smear video that even allies found repellent. No one should doubt what he has paid: he buried a son, Master Sergeant Gal Eisenkot, killed in Gaza in December 2023, while serving in the war cabinet himself. But the standard is not about sacrifice; it is about decision, and Eisenkot is the author of the very grammar this essay indicts, the campaign between the wars, the barrier, restraint as a craft. His campaign centers on governmental reform and a state commission of inquiry into October 7: accountability for the last decade, and near silence about the next one. An inquiry looks backward. The Ben-Gurion Standard looks forward, and it is still waiting for him to name the decision he would make. His answer so far is the institutionalist’s answer, first the commission, then the mandate, then, presumably, the choice. Ben-Gurion declared the state with the invasion already rolling.

Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, Together. The merged center list is running two consensus politicians on one hedge. Bennett’s contribution to the doctrine had its own name, “shrinking the conflict,” borrowed from the philosopher Micah Goodman: reduce friction, improve conditions, decide nothing, which is conflict management with better lighting. He governed for a year as a competent manager of the unmanageable, and that is both the compliment and the indictment. Lapid built a career on broad diplomatic consensus, and consensus is a coalition instrument, not a decision; the merger itself was a hedge, and the electorate has treated it as one. Thirteen seats and falling is the market’s price for management sold as change.

Avigdor Liberman, Yisrael Beiteinu. Still in the field at eleven seats, still the most fluent speaker of ultimatum in the country. His tenure remains the controlled experiment the others should study: he proved that hawkish rhetoric survives contact with the machinery of limbo exactly as long as it takes to schedule the first situation assessment. To his credit, he resigned on principle rather than co-sign a truce he opposed, which is more finality than most of the room ever showed. The standard’s question for him is what he would do differently with authority he once held and returned.

Yair Golan, The Democrats. The left’s candidate is the one man in the field campaigning openly on the second half of Ben-Gurion’s sentence: peace, and pay the price. The reserve general who drove south on October 7 to pull survivors out of the killing ground now says he entered politics to advance separation from the Palestinians in a regional agreement, while conceding that a “galactic leap” to two states is beyond a traumatized public for now. Readers of this newsletter know how far his prescription sits from mine. The standard does not care about my prescription or his; it records that he has named a decision and priced it in public, which is more than most of the field has done, and that his eleven projected seats measure exactly what that honesty costs in this electorate.

And Benny Gantz. The man most completely identified with responsible management, the unity candidate of four straight elections, is now polling below the threshold. File that under verdicts: the electorate that lived through October 7 has already priced pure management at zero. The only question left is whether it can tell the difference between a manager and a decider wearing a manager’s record.

The luxury that funded two decades of limbo is gone. October 7 spent it, and the war that began on February 28 liquidated the estate: Israel now fights alongside America against the patron itself, while Hezbollah faces disarmament talks, Damascus digests a verdict on its past, and the Gulf writes mutual-defense pacts as if the old region were already over. Every file on the next prime minister’s desk is a Ben-Gurion question. The day after in Gaza, the north’s demilitarization, the terms of Iran’s defeat, the price of Saudi normalization: each one is a door you walk through and pay for, or stand in front of until events choose for you.

And for the first time in the managed era, standing still is not on the menu, because this is a coalition war. Washington is writing end-terms for the region this autumn, from Hormuz to the Lebanon file, and it will not wait on a Jerusalem that answers every question with a situation assessment. An ally that cannot name its end state will get one named for it.

This newsletter has argued since Issue 029 that wars are judged by an End-State Standard: not how they are fought but what they convert into. Elections deserve the same accounting. The Ben-Gurion Standard is the End-State Standard applied to a person, and it asks one thing of whoever wins in November: choose. Choose the war’s completion, with its risks, or choose the settlement, with its price, and then execute relentlessly, in public, without the exquisite hedges that passed for strategy in the managed years.

That is why the old man’s outburst in the car has outlived everyone who heard it. It locates statesmanship not in intellect, which Trotsky had and squandered, but in the character that decides, which Lenin had and misused, and which Ben-Gurion had and spent on building a state. The founder liked to say that the Jews had produced a wealth of prophets and not enough statesmen. Prophets tell a people what is true. Statesmen tell a people what it costs.

Sixty-five days from now, Israel picks. The war has stripped away every option except the two Ben-Gurion allowed, and the next prime minister will choose one, pay for it, and be remembered for it, or refuse to choose and be remembered for that. That is the whole job now. The rest is Trotsky.

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The hours Avigdor Liberman gave Ismail Haniyeh in March 2016, two months before taking the Defense Ministry. The ultimatum expired in office, unenforced, and Haniyeh outlived it by eight years. The distance between 48 hours and eight years is the distance today’s essay is about.

The daily Insider stays on pause and returns before the September briefings. The MEF Dispatch, our summary of new articles and analysis from meforum.org, arrives three times a week in the meantime. One click:

New readers can orient with the Field Guide. The pause’s first two specials: the book and the lone soldiers, and Tehran’s war on American morale. Tonight’s second special, on Turkey and the war nobody needs, is here.

Today’s essay is the Philadelphia question: what finality costs, and who is willing to pay it.

Boston · Tuesday, September 1 · Bankrupt the Revolution: The Money War Against Tehran

Philadelphia · Thursday, September 3 · Finish the Job: What Victory over Iran Requires

New York · Wednesday, September 9 · The Tentacles of the Outlaws: Iran’s Reach into American Life

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