Israel must put restoring its global standing above domestic politics - opinion

ByYEDIDIA STERNNOVEMBER 14, 2026 17:10

Israel’s next leader will sit at the head of a national table laden with critical challenges: the open fronts in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria; a vengeful Iran; the erosion of the rule of law in the West Bank; international sanctions; domestic polarization and crime in the Arab sector.

Yet towering above them is the greatest threat of all: Israel’s diplomatic collapse around the world, especially in the United States. There is a non-negligible probability that, two years from now, a president hostile to Israel will sit in the White House, and the consequences could be catastrophic.

Israel needs leadership that will make restoring the country’s standing in the world – especially in the United States – the top national priority for the next two years.

Former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger is said to have remarked that “Israel has no foreign policy, only domestic politics.” Israel’s next leader must take precisely the opposite approach: navigate domestic politics with a constant eye to how every decision will affect our foreign relations.

Israelis do not fully grasp how deep a pit the country has fallen into and the severe consequences that might lie ahead. We must realize that a tragedy – an American arms embargo, for example, or exclusion from the international banking system – is knocking at Israel’s door, seeking to enter and change our lives dramatically.

The next prime minister must marshal all available political capital to prevent this. The clock is ticking; we have two years to do everything possible to regain the legitimacy we have lost.

That is no simple task. Israelis live in the realm of the immediate, preoccupied with the political and security questions that dominate the nightly news. Conventional leadership could easily be swept along by the daily torrent of crises the population has endured for years.

The urgent – what goes into the coalition agreement, who gets which portfolio, where the IDF is deployed, who supports which bill – can obscure the essential task of restoring Israel’s legitimacy.

Not everything depends on us. Deep-seated antisemitism, once confined to the extreme fringes of Western public opinion, has burst into the open.

Across the world, liberalism is weakening, the political center is being hollowed out, public discourse is growing more radical, trust in institutions is eroding, and the international order established after World War II is increasingly contested. None of this bodes well for Jews or the State of Israel.

Yet much still depends on us. The situation is not hopeless: according to a recent CNN poll, 50% of Americans still support Israel. Israel’s next leaders must act swiftly and decisively to stop the hemorrhaging of public support and reverse the trend. If this is recognized as a paramount national interest, Israeli politics will align accordingly.

What does this priority require? First and foremost, this calls for further consideration of who should be part of the coalition now taking shape. Israel’s far Right cannot be part of the next government. Even its inclusion as a minority partner in a broad unity government would thwart any prospect of restoring Israel’s standing.

Israel must regain its bearings and reassert control in the West Bank, even at the cost of bitter confrontations with Jewish lawbreakers.

The IDF’s use of force across the various theaters must be measured: tactical considerations, however legitimate, must not undermine the strategic objective. Israel should move quickly to end the fighting on all fronts, abandoning the illusion of “total victory” in favor of reasonable diplomatic arrangements.

Bringing Ra'am into the coalition

Ra’am, the party of Mansour Abbas and Yoav Segalovitz, should be brought into the coalition. Its inclusion would expose the lie that Israel is an apartheid state. Should Likud wish to join, it should be welcomed, even under an agreement to rotate the premiership. But the first to serve must be someone other than the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel’s diplomatic standing collapsed on his watch.

Beyond all this, Israel’s next leaders must guide the country out of the postwar trauma that makes Israeli’s believe that force is the only answer to every challenge. For three years, the black curtain that descended on Israelis on October 7 has shut down virtually all discussion of any national objective other than victory on the battlefield.

As it stands, all the parties in the anti-Netanyahu change bloc are ignoring this challenge and offering no diplomatic vision. New leadership must lift that curtain, look ahead, and reposition Israel within a viable diplomatic framework suited to the conditions now taking shape across the Atlantic. To ignore this is to gamble recklessly with the future.

Yedidia Stern is president of the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI) and a professor emeritus of law at Bar-Ilan University.

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