Parents who attended the graduation ceremony for newly commissioned IDF officers this week say they sat there listening to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, tears of rage filling their eyes. "How can he exploit a ceremony to which we were invited to celebrate our loved ones, who stood on that parade ground after months of grueling physical and mental effort, just to scrape together a few more votes ahead of Election Day?"
Indeed, Israeli soldiers have recently become little more than a backdrop for Netanyahu's countless appearances. He moves from military base to military base, turning the men and women of the IDF into scenery for his political performances, without Justice Noam Sohlberg, chairman of Israel's Central Elections Committee, issuing the red card that would put an end to it.
Trump, of all people, is protecting Israel's democracy from Netanyahu's Iran gamble
(Photo: ATTA KENARE / AFP, JOE RAEDLE / AFP, Anna Moneymaker / AFP)
"We face an existential threat, and our duty is to save the nation. It is to be or cease to be. It is either us or them. And it will be us!" Netanyahu declared at the ceremony. But we must ask: Hadn't the prime minister already proclaimed that the Iranian regime had suffered a crushing defeat? Now, apparently, all those grand declarations have turned out to be so much hot air.
There are grounds to believe that Netanyahu is afraid. Very afraid. Afraid of the verdict voters are about to deliver. In other words, afraid that his days as prime minister are numbered. It is important to emphasize that under Section 9A of Basic Law: The Knesset, postponing elections requires legislation supported by at least 80 of the Knesset's 120 members, and only under exceptional circumstances that prevent the elections from taking place as scheduled. Our examination of the security situation has found no indication of an imminent threat to Israel from Iran or any of the other enemies in our troubled neighborhood that would justify such a move.
The irony is that Donald Trump is the one coming to our rescue. It is the American president who, according to reports, has prevented Netanyahu from sending Israeli Air Force jets to attack targets whose names have been circulating in the media: energy facilities, ballistic missile production plants and nuclear installations buried deep underground. What an irony. Trump helped bring the hostages home, and now he is preventing Netanyahu from finding the tricks that might allow him to postpone the elections. Trump is saving Israeli democracy.
These things must be said, and they must become a lesson repeated by everyone who cares about Israeli democracy. The elections to the Knesset on Tuesday, October 27, are fateful not merely because they give every voter an opportunity to pass judgment on what Netanyahu's government has done, and, more importantly, what it has failed to do. They are fateful because they will determine the future of our country. Any disruption could accelerate the departure of scientists, doctors and other highly skilled Israelis who have the means to build their lives elsewhere.
Consider the reports accompanying the deliberate escalation of tension around us. Earlier this week, Israeli Air Force jets reportedly flew through Iraqi airspace and reached the vicinity of the Iranian border. The obvious interpretation, in our view, is that the aircraft were sent to provoke the Iranians in the hope that they would respond. But they did not.
And why did they not respond? Because the regime of the ayatollahs is still trying to persuade Donald Trump to accept an arrangement that would allow it to preserve the potential to break out toward producing a nuclear bomb, in exchange for understandings that would satisfy Washington concerning passage through the Strait of Hormuz, the strategic waterway through which a substantial share of the world's oil shipments passes.
Based on the information we have obtained, we maintain that there is no immediate threat to Israel's security that requires declaring an emergency or dispatching Israeli fighter jets to Iran. Netanyahu is selling the public falsehoods when he warns about the "bombs of death" supposedly being produced in Iran. He compounds the deception when he claims to have saved us last year from Iranian nuclear bombs, when Iran did not possess atomic weapons. The threat posed by Iran's nuclear ambitions is one thing; presenting a nuclear bomb that does not exist as an established fact is another.
The bottom line is that Netanyahu's declaration that the Iranian regime must be overthrown, an objective he says he has assigned to the IDF, the Mossad and Israel's other security agencies, has no practical value in the present circumstances. Anyone seeking the clearest evidence of the hot air Netanyahu and his associates are spreading about military readiness and the supposedly imminent renewal of war with Iran should examine the unannounced meeting between U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz.
The meeting took place at Ovda Air Base in southern Israel, without the participation of IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir. They talked for hours, but as far as we can establish, nothing concrete emerged from those discussions. What was certainly produced was another photo opportunity, this time for Hegseth with the American troops stationed at the base.
In short, Tuesday's Knesset election is the most consequential in the history of the State of Israel. It is unthinkable that Netanyahu should be allowed to interfere with it.