How often campaigns call elections 'most fateful' in Israel
A political analyst counted instances of Israeli campaign rhetoric declaring the current vote a make-or-break moment for the country's future.
By Kenji Hassan ·
One in five Israeli election campaigns has described itself as the most fateful or most important vote in the country's history, according to an analysis by political analyst Danny Kushmaro.
Kushmaro introduced election segments night after night with that phrasing during the current campaign, and the phrase has appeared repeatedly across political messaging this year. The election is scheduled for Tuesday.
The wording matters because it recasts ordinary partisan competition as a survival question. When a campaign frames the contest between pro-Netanyahu and anti-Netanyahu blocs as existential, losing stops looking like a setback that can be repaired at the next vote. It starts to sound like damage the country cannot absorb, which can make accepting an unfavorable result harder.
Israeli political history offers examples on both sides. After Naftali Bennett formed his government in 2021, Benjamin Netanyahu called the arrangement "the greatest election fraud," referring to broken campaign promises rather than ballot theft. The characterization cast a government assembled through parliamentary procedure as illegitimate. Opposition lawmakers then worked to defeat it from the day it took office. The coalition held a narrow Knesset majority, so each vote carried weight, and the opposition sometimes voted against measures it supported when doing so would weaken the government. In recordings published in May 2022, Likud MK Miri Regev defended voting against legislation that benefited soldiers and vulnerable groups on those grounds.
Netanyahu won the 2022 election and built a hard-right government. Yair Lapid conceded and arranged an orderly transfer of power. As protests against the judicial overhaul filled the streets, the language of illegitimacy returned. At a large Tel Aviv demonstration in April 2023, former Shin Bet director Yuval Diskin said that while the government had been elected legally, it was morally illegitimate because of its "appalling composition and reprehensible actions."
Kushmaro's analysis counts how often campaigns have deployed such framing across Israeli electoral history. The current campaign's repetition of the phrase is consistent with that pattern.
Kohelet, a policy group, cautions against romanticizing earlier periods and against treating any single election as uniquely decisive.
Source: The Jerusalem Post
