PELONI: Pay attention to the words of our detractors. They care not what party or leader controls our state. The very existence of the Jewish state, it will be treated as the Jew among the states with double standard and deligitimization based on nothing more relevcant than that Jew Hatred is at the root of all of it.
The demonization of Israeli leaders reveals a hostility not to Netanyahu, but to Israel’s existence.
By Ben M. Freeman | Honest Reporting | October 26, 2026
Israelis will vote on Tuesday for a new Prime Minister for the first time since October 7th. The final polls show Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar party ahead of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud, with neither able to reach a majority on its own.
Surely, for much of the world, this news should be welcome. After all, we have been told repeatedly that Netanyahu is the problem. “I have no issue with Israel,” the line goes, “only with its government.” But as I wrote in August, history tells a different story. Israeli prime ministers from across the political spectrum, including the country’s founders and those who pursued peace, have all been subjected to demonization. Because, for many of those who stand against Israel, the problem was never really Netanyahu. It was Israel itself.
A Familiar Pattern
The pattern is far older than Netanyahu’s career. Shimon Peres shared the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize for the Oslo Accords. When he died in 2016, the Arabic website of Al Jazeera marked the occasion with the headline “Peres, the butcher of Qana,” while an Egyptian daily with ties to the security services announced that the killer had died. The architect of Oslo was remembered as a murderer.
Ehud Barak went to Camp David in 2000 and offered east Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state. Yasser Arafat refused, offered no counterproposal, and within two months the region had turned to violence. Arafat’s own adviser, Nabil Sha’ath, later claimed that Barak had lied and that his offer was never really on the table. The peacemaker was reframed as a liar.
Peres was a man of the left. Barak was a decorated general who offered to divide Jerusalem. Netanyahu is on the right. Their records could not be more different, but the verdict was always the same. This week, two men in London proved it again.
“There Is No Complexity”
On Wednesday night, the Palestine Festival of Literature hosted Ta-Nehisi Coates and Tareq Baconi at London’s Southbank Centre. The event was part of a literature festival curated by Dua Lipa and presented with her Service95 Book Club. Coates, one of America’s most celebrated writers, was launching the paperback of The Message, the book in which he compared Israel to the Jim Crow South. Baconi, a Palestinian writer and activist, was previewing his new book.
Baconi is board president of Al-Shabaka, a Palestinian policy network, and a former senior analyst for Israel/Palestinian issues at the International Crisis Group. In 2018 he published a book on Hamas subtitled The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance. Five years later, that same movement carried out the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
The Southbank Centre is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year, and the event was recommended for audiences aged 15 and over. A teenager in London could buy a ticket and be told, by two of the most celebrated voices in their field, that the Jewish state belongs in the same moral category as slavery.
In a clip PalFest posted to Instagram, Coates told the audience:
“I want to aggressively agree with Tareq’s point about the racism of Zionism… There is no good version of the project, just like there was no good slavery, just like there was no good segregation. There is no majoritarian ethnographic project that… we can endorse that is not racist.”
In the same clip, Baconi went on to say:
“There’s no complexity. Zionism is racist. The State of Israel is committed to the extermination or ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. These are facts.”
Neither statement concerns a prime minister. Neither concerns a policy or a party. Both concern the existence of the Jewish state.
No Good Version
If Zionism is akin to something as universally awful as slavery or segregation, then no election can redeem it. Eisenkot cannot be the good version. Bennett cannot. Golan cannot. Nobody can. The only acceptable outcome is the end of the Jewish state.
Coates has been asked directly. In a 2024 interview on CBS, anchor Tony Dokoupil asked whether Coates simply did not believe that Israel, in any condition, had a right to exist. Coates’s reply was that either apartheid is right or it is wrong. Remarkably, it was the journalist who was called to account. CBS leadership later said an internal review had found that Dokoupil’s interview did not meet its editorial standards. Asking whether a celebrated writer accepts the existence of the Jewish state was treated as an offense, as opposed to the denial of the Jewish right to self-determination.
None of this is new. In 1975, the UN General Assembly, driven by the Soviet bloc and Arab states, determined that Zionism was “a form of racism and racial discrimination.” It took sixteen years for the resolution to be revoked. What Coates said in London is that resolution, rebranded for a literary audience.
Someone will say that Coates and Baconi are criticizing a political project, not Jews. But Zionism is the movement for the self-determination of the Jewish people in our indigenous homeland. To say there is no good version of it is to say there is no acceptable form of Jewish self-determination at all.
Coates insists that no majoritarian ethnic national project can be endorsed. Does that apply to Japan? To South Korea, Armenia or Poland? To the Arab Palestinian state that he and Baconi presumably support? Of course not. The rule exists for one people only. That is the tell.
The “settler colonial” frame fails for the same reason. As I have argued at length, the Jewish people are indigenous to the Land of Israel. Our language, our calendar, our festivals and our prayers all point to one place. A people cannot colonize its own homeland. The accusation only works if Jewish history is erased first, which is precisely what it requires its audience to do.
When the UN adopted its resolution in 1975, Israel’s ambassador, Chaim Herzog, told the General Assembly that it was devoid of any moral or legal value. Half a century later, the same idea has found a nicer venue and better branding. It is just as racist today as it was then.
We Have Already Run the Test
The truth is, we do not need to wait for Tuesday to know what happens when Netanyahu leaves office. In June 2021 he was replaced by a coalition led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, a government that included Ra’am, the first Arab party ever to play a key role in forming an Israeli government. If Bibi was really the problem, then this surely was the answer. But just eight months later, Amnesty International accused Israel of the crime of apartheid, blaming not one leader but successive Israeli governments. The man in charge had changed. The coalition itself had changed. An Arab party even held the balance of power, and the accusation did not move an inch.
There is one more inconvenient truth to the “racist endeavor” crowd. On Tuesday, Arab citizens of Israel, who make up more than a fifth of the population, will vote alongside the rest of the country in a free election. Arab-led parties are forecast to win as many as 16 seats in the Knesset. In 2021, one of them helped remove Netanyahu from office, and it may help decide who replaces him.
Coates has spent a career writing about what it meant for Black Americans to be kept from the ballot box. That is exactly why his comparison is absurd. Slavery and segregation were systems in which the oppressed had no say over who ruled them. Israel’s Arab citizens have a say, and on Tuesday they will use it.
None of this means Israel is perfect. No democracy is. Arab Israelis face real challenges, and Israelis argue about them loudly, in the Knesset and in the press. That is what democracies do. A state whose largest minority helps choose its government is not a plantation.
Meet The Opposition
They did not even wait for the votes to be counted. This week, the Instagram account Let’s Talk Palestine published a slideshow headlined “Israel’s Election Doesn’t Matter.” Its subtitle could have been lifted from this piece, except they meant it as an accusation: “Netanyahu isn’t the real problem. Meet his rivals.”
The slides then introduce the men who might replace him. Eisenkot, the centrist, is said to be directing a genocide. Golan, leader of the center-left Democrats, is reduced to his army rank. Bennett, the man who governed with Ra’am, is filed alongside Lieberman as one more face in a gallery of villains. The final slides deliver the verdict. Every one of these parties is Zionist, which the account defines as being “committed to a racist state.” Israel’s elections, it concludes, will never end the conflict. “Only defeating Zionism will.”
Then comes the line that gives the game away: “We don’t want kinder prison wardens. We want to break free.”
That is Coates and Baconi’s argument with better graphics. If every Israeli leader is a prison warden, the prison is Israel itself.
Accuracy is optional when the verdict comes first. The slideshow says Bennett oversaw the 2021 war on Gaza. That war ended on May 21st, 2021, with Netanyahu in office. Bennett was sworn in on June 13th.
Eisenkot is quoted accurately, saying that anyone thinking about two states after October 7th is delusional. The rest of that interview, in which he opposed building in E1 for now and attacked Ben Gvir and Smotrich for harming Israel’s standing, did not make the cut. Opposing a Palestinian state after the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust is a position many Israelis and Jews around the world now hold. It is not genocide.
Whoever Wins
This is why the outcome on Tuesday will not matter to those who demonise Israel. If Netanyahu wins, it will be proof that Israelis are beyond redemption. If Eisenkot wins, the former chief of staff will become the new face of an army they already call genocidal. If Bennett returns, the man who governed with Ra’am, he will be dismissed as a settler leader. Whoever wins, they will still be the devil.
This is not a verdict on any politician. It is a verdict on Israel and the Israeli people. Israelis are the ones who vote. If no government they could ever elect is acceptable, then the problem is not the government. It is them, and the state they built.
It was never about personalities. It is about whether the Jewish people are permitted a state of our own. On a London stage this week, at one of Britain’s great cultural institutions, two celebrated writers answered that question. Their answer was no.
They told us so themselves. We should believe them.
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© Divuach Ne’eman R”A, 2025
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As you said: Japan and France are entitled to be French and Japanese and as long as a state treats minorities correctly – which Israel does – what is the complaint? We should turn this argument onto the PA / PLO etc who shamelessly want an Arab one state and NO Jews which puts Palestine and Hamas and Hizbollah in particular in the Nazi bracket.
The problem is that is in many ways history. Over the next two decades the petro – era fades and with it the Arab ability to cause political mayhem at the turn of an oil or gas tap. When they have to think twice NOT to offend food and desalination producers the balance will shift. Meanwhile the anti-Zionist cancel culture campaign will send a lot of younger Diaspora Jews to Israel.