The question is not an attempt to predict the outcome of Israel’s upcoming election on October 27, nor is it a wager on whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will fall or survive. Israel’s political landscape today is far too fractured, anxious, and ideologically rigid to be reduced to a single name — even if that name has become the gravitational center of the country’s crisis.

The real question is more unsettling: Does Israel possess the ability to change from within, even if Netanyahu stays? And would Israel truly change if he goes? This is not a search for a comforting answer, but an inquiry into what lies after the election — a reading of the deeper structures that shape Israel’s relationship with itself, with the Palestinians, and with the world.

To understand the magnitude of this moment, it is useful to revisit what Israeli sociologist Yuval Noah Harari has been writing lately. He distills the roots of the conflict into a stark, almost disarming sentence: “What fuels the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is not a shortage of land or resources, but false moral certainties born of overly simplified historical narratives.” At its core, many Israelis and Palestinians believe they hold absolute moral truth — and that the other side holds absolute moral wrong — and therefore the other side has no legitimate right to exist. This conviction makes internal change in Israel far more complex than simply replacing one prime minister with another.

The upcoming election carries exceptional weight because it is the first since the events of October 7, 2023 — a day that exposed the fragility of Israel’s security doctrine and reopened the question of whether Israel can ever be a genuine partner for peace.........

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