Democracy Is on the Ballot in Both America’s and Israel’s Elections

Oct. 27 and Nov. 3, 2026, are shaping up to be two of the most important dates in the history of two of the most important democracies — Israel and America. Those countries will be holding hugely consequential elections on those dates, just a week apart. Why so consequential? Because what is on the ballot in both places is not just the political futures of President Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It is the future of democracy in both places.

Let me start with Israel’s election, which comes first. Netanyahu is in a coalition with Jewish supremacists whom a former Israeli Mossad chief once described as worse than the Ku Klux Klan. If they are re-elected, they are very likely to complete their project of undermining both Israel’s independent attorney general and its Supreme Court. Annexation of the West Bank and Gaza and ethnically cleansing Palestinians from both places will come next. And Israel as a democracy will be gone.

Once that happens, Israel will become a pariah, à la apartheid South Africa. The Jewish state has already lost the support of much of the Democratic Party in America, of many young Republicans and of pretty much every liberal party in Europe. Israeli academics and singers will be increasingly banned from appearances across the globe. Thousands of Israel’s scientists, mathematicians, A.I. software designers, engineers, fighter pilots, nuclear physicists — its best and brightest — will gradually emigrate. A recent study found that 1,370 doctors left Israel for at least 12 months over the past three years, a number that exceeds the number of doctors at many of Israel’s major hospitals.

For several years now Moshe Ya’alon, a thoughtful, right-of-center former defense minister under Netanyahu, has been expressing alarm about the direction of the Israeli government. As my Times colleagues in Israel reported, Ya’alon has taken his warnings to a remarkable new level, likening the ideology of extremist Israeli settlers in the West Bank to that of Nazi Germany in local news reports.

“What is Jewish supremacy?” Mr. Ya’alon recently asked on the Israeli news site Ynet. “Eighty years after the Holocaust, ‘Mein Kampf’ in reverse. The master race is us.”

This is a clanging alarm bell. Israeli society is still too traumatized by the war in Gaza to jump directly into new peace negotiations with the Palestinians. But I have no doubt that if the opposition to Netanyahu — now most prominently led by the former chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces Gadi Eisenkot, a very decent man with much in common with Yitzhak Rabin — is able to triumph on Oct. 27, at least the shameful pogrom that Netanyahu has enabled Jewish settlers to perpetrate in the West Bank will be halted and Trump will have an Israeli partner ready to make a good faith effort to implement his peace plan for Gaza. Trump would be a complete fool to endorse Netanyahu, who has done everything he can to frustrate Trump’s Gaza initiative.