Israel's election lays bare its founding fault lines

On 14 May 1948, members of the People's Council of Israel inscribed their names at the bottom of a long piece of parchment.

Foremost among them was David Ben-Gurion, the Zionist leader who was soon to become Israel’s first prime minister.

The parchment was ostensibly Israel’s Declaration of Independence - proclaiming the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.

But the ceremony, at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, was arranged so hastily, and the text settled so late, that there was no time for the calligraphy. They signed a blank scroll - and the words were inked in above their names afterwards.

It was a state built in a hurry - and the man who laid the foundations would go on to dominate it for a generation.

Mr Ben-Gurion served as prime minister for some 13 years, and his imprint on the country - its institutions, its army and its sense of itself - has endured.

For decades, no one came close to his record. Then, in 2019, Benjamin Netanyahu overtook it.

Mr Netanyahu first became prime minister in 1996. Across three spells in office, he has now held the job for nearly two decades - long enough that many young Israelis have never really known any other leader.

Over those years, he has cannily built a mythology around himself - that there is simply no one else who can do the job.

On Tuesday, that mythology faces its most serious test in years.

But the vote is about more than one man, not least because some of the most basic questions about what kind of country Israel should be were left unresolved in 1948 - and they remain unresolved today.

The declaration promised that a constitution would be adopted "not later than the 1st October 1948".

It never was.

The assembly that was elected to write one couldn’t agree on its contents, not least on the role of religion.

In 1950, it opted for a compromise: Israel would build its constitution gradually, chapter by chapter, through a series of so-called Basic Laws.

Some 75 years later, that work remains incomplete.

And most of the Basic Laws that do exist can be repealed or amended by a simple majority in parliament.

In the absence of an actual written constitution, Israel’s Supreme Court has held, since a landmark ruling in the 1990s, that it can strike down laws that clash with those Basic Laws.

In 2023, weeks after Mr Netanyahu returned to power for a record sixth term, at the helm of the most right-wing government in Israel’s history, that unresolved question became a battlefield.

His coalition moved to curb the court’s powers, including by allowing parliament to override its rulings by a simple majority.

Hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets. For 39 consecutive Saturdays, they protested.

The 40th protest was due to take place on 7 October, 2023.

It never happened.

Three years on, Israelis vote in the first election since that day - the deadliest day in the country’s history.

And three of the key questions the founders left unresolved in 1948 run beneath it like fault lines.

The wound

The first concerns accountability.

Every Israeli election is, to some degree, about what Israelis simply call "security".

Elsewhere, people might call it defence. Here, the word carries far more weight - it’s about the country’s survival.

That instinct runs back to the state’s very foundations. The day the declaration was signed, fighting between Jewish and Arab forces had been raging for months.

That night, Mr Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary: "Jewish independence was declared and the state was founded. Its fate is in the hands of the security forces."

The following day, the armies of five Arab states invaded Israel.

Somehow, Israel’s security forces won out. The victory felt improbable, even miraculous. Some Israelis see in it the hand of God.

Ever since, Israelis have put their faith in those forces to hold the line.

But, on 7 October 2023, they did not.

That failure, and who is to blame for it, looms over this election.

Hamas-led gunmen killed some 1,200 people in southern Israel in a matter of hours, taking more than 250 hostage.

Much of it was filmed, and some of it was broadcast live by the attackers themselves.

"It’s traumatised an entire nation," Tal Schneider, a political correspondent for the Times of Israel, told me.

Mr Netanyahu has spent much of the past three years arguing that the failures that led to the attacks were not his.

The country’s security services, his allies say, did not warn him.

That defence took a blow last month, when the newspaper Haaretz reported that the ruler of the United Arab Emirates had personally warned him before the attack.

Mr Netanyahu’s office has called the report "an absolute lie".

But it struck at the very heart of his defence.

Israel has a tried-and-tested way of answering questions like these.

Almost exactly 50 years before the 7 October attacks, Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar.

Israel was caught both unaware and unprepared - and more than 2,500 of its soldiers were killed before the end of the war.

Within weeks, a state commission of inquiry was established.

It laid the blame squarely on the military.

The prime minister at the time, Golda Meir, Israel’s first and only woman to hold the job, was not implicated.

But she resigned anyway shortly after the commission published its first report.

For three years, Mr Netanyahu has resisted any such inquiry into 7 October.

His supporters argue that a state commission would be stacked against him.

His opponents say he is afraid of what it would find.

Last night, families of those murdered or abducted on 7 October gathered in Hostage Square in Tel Aviv to demand a state inquiry.

The plaza earned its name as the focal point of the long campaign to bring the hostages home - rallies were held there every Saturday for 24 months.

Though the last living hostages were freed a year ago, the demand for answers has not gone away.

"Why would you do everything in your power not to investigate something that you are responsible for?" asked Karen, one of those in the crowd.

But not every Israeli sees it that way.

Mr Netanyahu’s supporters accept that the attack happened on his watch - and that he bears some responsibility.

But they argue that he should be assessed just as much on what came after: the war against Hamas, and the blows dealt to Hezbollah in Lebanon and Iran.

"I think he was able to convince some of the people that he came to his senses on 8 October," Ms Schneider said.

"I’m not convinced by that, but, you know, some people are convinced."

On Tuesday, Israelis will decide which date matters more: 7 October, or 8 October.

The world

The second fault line concerns Israel’s standing in the world.

Near its end, the declaration of Independence appealed to the United Nations to "receive the State of Israel into the comity of nations".

Nearly 80 years later, Mr Netanyahu’s chief rival is campaigning on a pledge to return Israel to what he calls "the community of nations".

Whether or not the echo is intentional, it is telling.

Gadi Eisenkot is a former head of the Israeli military whose son was killed fighting in Gaza in December 2023.

He is a relative newcomer to politics - and leads a new party, Yashar, which he founded last year.

His pitch rests on a deeply uncomfortable premise - that Israel has become isolated.

Most of that comes down to Gaza.

More than 74,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza. Much of the enclave has been turned to rubble.

Mr Netanyahu faces an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court over alleged war crimes, which he rejects.

Israel has also been forced to defend itself against a case at the International Court of Justice, brought by South Africa, accusing it of genocide.

And, last year, an independent commission of inquiry established by the UN concluded that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza.

Israel has rejected both outright.

In the Occupied West Bank, the rapid expansion of illegal Israeli settlements and a surge in settler violence against Palestinians have only deepened that isolation.

Even ordinary Israelis feel it.

"When they get into a cab in Europe now, they’re embarrassed to admit that they’re from Israel," said Professor Yael Sternhell, a historian at Tel Aviv University.

And yet it has barely registered as an election issue.

Many Israelis, particularly on the right, see the country’s isolation as just more evidence that the world judges Israel unfairly - not as an indictment of the man who leads it or of its conduct in Gaza and the West Bank.

If anything, they see a leader who has stood up to the world.

"It’s the first time in my life that I feel that someone is putting Israel first," said Lilach Elgrably, who runs a dog grooming salon on Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv.

"I feel that someone is putting Israel first and showing the world that, with you or without you, we’re going to defend ourselves."

Mr Netanyahu has always prided himself on his ties to Washington, and few American presidents have been as close to him as Donald Trump, who has endorsed him for re-election.

But, beyond the White House, the ground has been shifting.

Here in Tel Aviv, one sign of that looms over the Ayalon Highway, one of the busiest roads in Israel.

A billboard from Mr Netanyahu’s Likud party there features the faces of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Turkey’s president and the head of Hezbollah, alongside Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York.

"They want Netanyahu to lose," it reads.

"Don’t let them win."

Mr Mamdani, a fierce critic of Israel’s war in Gaza, was elected last year to lead the city with the largest Jewish population outside Israel.

And that concern is increasingly being voiced beyond the left.

In a New York Times poll from May, nearly a third of potential Republican voters said Mr Trump had been "too supportive of Israel".

Some of the starkest warnings now come from Mr Netanyahu’s oldest allies.

"You’ve lost the Democratic Party, and you’re losing the Republican Party," said Ronald Lauder, the President of the World Jewish Congress, on Friday.

In an interview with Haaretz, Mr Lauder broke years of public silence to warn against the prime minister’s re-election.

"If Bibi is elected," he said, "Israel stands to lose badly."

He called Mr Netanyahu "a one-person show".

Gaza itself has been almost entirely absent from the campaign.

And opposition to Mr Netanyahu should not be mistaken for support for a Palestinian state.

Few of the major Jewish parties offer one, and after 7 October, the idea has little support among Israeli voters.

The divide

The third fault line is over religion, identity - and who gets to belong in Israel.

Even the declaration’s most solemn line was a compromise.

Religious members of the People’s Council wanted God cited in the text. The secular members opposed such an inclusion.

In the end, they settled on "the Rock of Israel", a phrase vague enough to mean whatever each side needed it to.

Not every compromise has held as well.

In 1949, Mr Ben-Gurion agreed to exempt ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students from military service, so they could devote themselves to religious study.

At the time, there were around 400 of them.

By 1963, he was writing to his successor that he believed he was "in part responsible" for what the arrangement had become.

Most Jewish Israelis are conscripted at 18 - men for nearly three years and women for two, and many are called back as reservists for years afterwards.

Today, tens of thousands of ultra-Orthodox men are exempt.

After three years of war, few issues in Israel generate more anger.

The issue has almost brought this government to the brink several times, because Mr Netanyahu has relied on the ultra-Orthodox parties to stay in power.

The declaration also promised "complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex".

Arab citizens make up around a fifth of Israel’s population.

Their parties are polling at around 14 seats, quite possibly enough to decide who governs.

An Arab party has sat in government before, in the short-lived coalition that briefly ousted Mr Netanyahu in 2021.

But, with Mr Netanyahu’s campaign framing the choice before the electorate on Tuesday as "right or Palestine", Mr Eisenkot, like most opposition leaders, has steered clear of saying whether he would work with them.

It has seeped into everyday life.

"Even in families in Israel, there is a difference of opinion and people are not speaking to each other," Limor Dvir, who runs Yashar’s election-day operation in the city of Modi’in, told me.

In Hostage Square, a man called David put it more bluntly.

"Everybody hates everybody," he said. "It’s unbelievable."

The polls tell the same story, in numbers.

In the final surveys published before a legal blackout on polling came into force on Friday night, Mr Netanyahu’s bloc and the opposition parties lined up behind Mr Eisenkot were separated by only a handful of seats.

Both fell well short of the 61 needed for a majority in the 120-seat Knesset.

Israel, quite literally, is split down the middle.

All of this makes the strangest feature of this campaign all the more striking: how quiet it has been.

For an election being called the most consequential in Israel’s history, and fought across such deep divides, there have been remarkably few rallies, and little signage on the streets.

"There’s a kind of weird quiet here right now," Prof Sternhell said.

The quiet may well suit Mr Eisenkot, a soldier who sells calm, not charisma, and who has been cautious not to give Mr Netanyahu’s supporters a reason to mobilise.

On the campaign trail, Mr Eisenkot has reached for history himself.

This election, he told supporters at a rally on Wednesday, could be compared with Israel’s first, held months after the state was founded, when "the foundations of Israeli democracy were laid".

It is an ambitious comparison.

That first election, in January 1949, chose an assembly whose task was to write Israel’s constitution.

It never did.

The Tel Aviv Museum of Art, where the Declaration of Independence was signed, has since moved.

Its old home on Rothschild Boulevard, where Mr Ben-Gurion read the document, is now a museum in its own right, known as Independence Hall.

In 1971, the museum opened a new building about two kilometres away.

The plaza in front of it is now known as Hostage Square.

Last night, barely two days before the election, as many as 100,000 Israelis gathered there to demand what they believe their state owes them.

Nearly 80 years after its founders signed a blank scroll, Israel is still divided over what the words written above their names were supposed to mean.