The Daily Populous Tuesday November 4th, 2025 evening edition
Authored by forward.com and submitted by forward

Columnist Dan Perry November 4, 2025

Thirty years ago, on November 4, 1995, I attended a pro-peace rally in Tel Aviv’s central square. It was a joyous, carnival-like atmosphere.

“We have decided to give peace a chance — a peace that will resolve most of Israel’s problems,” Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said. “I was a military man for 27 years. I fought as long as there was no chance for peace. I believe there is a chance for peace. A big chance. We must seize it.” Rabin stepped off the stage and headed toward his awaiting car at the bottom of a concrete stairway. Then, three shots rang out, and the trajectory of Israel’s history changed.

It seems incredible in this era of tunnel vision, radicalism and cynicism to even recall Rabin’s last words. His assassin did more than end a man’s life. He also ended the possibility of a better version of Israel, and set the country on a course that has led to a crisis of identity, democracy and purpose.

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The Israel that emerged after Rabin’s death was one deprived of its moral center. It was an Israel where fear triumphed over hope, where slogans replaced strategy, and where a cunning politician named Benjamin Netanyahu deployed every conceivable cynicism to stay in power. The tragedy of Rabin’s death is not only what was lost, but what filled the void: a political culture of manipulation and paralysis.

Rabin was a successful leader because he embodied a realism forged in battle, combined with the moral courage to pursue reconciliation with the Palestinians.

He knew that if Israel was going to remain a state that was both democratic and Jewish-majority, it needed to separate itself from the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. He could see, too, that rule over millions of disenfranchised Palestinians would corrode Israel from within.

Because of these eminently sensible perspectives, in the months before his assassination, he was targeted by the most virulent and hysterical protest campaign in the country’s history. Led by the youthful Netanyahu, this campaign viewed Rabin’s willingness to partition the Holy Land, and to hand parts of biblical Israel to the Palestinians, as treason and heresy.

The outlines of a final settlement were already visible, and may have been achievable if Rabin had lived. They involved mutual recognition, phased withdrawal, a Palestinian state that was demilitarized but sovereign, and an Israel at peace with itself and its neighbors. The extremists on both sides, who hated compromise, would have lost their momentum. The world, and the Middle East, might have been spared a generation of bloodletting.

Instead, Netanyahu, elected as prime minister by a whisker in 1996, pretended to honor the Oslo Accords while quietly strangling them. His project ever since has been to make Israelis disdain Rabin’s vision of pragmatic decency. He came into office on a wave of fear following Hamas suicide bombings, and his consistent message to Israelis since has been that peace is naive, and negotiation with the Palestinians is futile.

This anniversary of Rabin’s assassination could not come at a more striking moment — with Israel involved in a fragile ceasefire after two years of war, which have decisively proven just how disastrous Netanyahu’s omnipresence in Israel has been.

The few times I met Rabin, as a young political reporter at The Jerusalem Post — including once at his home in Ramat Aviv — I was struck by his how his combination of skepticism and blunt pragmatism with a grasp of strategic realities gave him a kind of credibility that was essential.

That kind of leadership is what Israel needs, again, today. But where can it be found?

The convulsions of the past two years, triggered by Hamas’ invasion and massacre of Oct. 7, 2023, have undermined Netanyahu’s efforts to shape Israel’s future around a rejection of peace. Every poll since that day has shown Netanyahu losing the next election, and badly.

Yet as Israelis contemplate life after Netanyahu, the same lament is heard again and again: “But who could possibly replace him?”

That refrain is as revealing as it is absurd. Versions of the same sentiment have been heard in every country that has fallen under the thrall of an authoritarian populist cloaked in democratic legitimacy: Russia under President Vladimir Putin, Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Hungary under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

The question accepts the premise of personal indispensability that such leaders cultivate — the notion that the state cannot function without them. In all these states, the idea that no one else could govern is a myth propagated by those who benefit from the paralysis.

Who could replace Netanyahu? Not one person, but a democratic alliance — a potential coalition of competence, sanity, and moral seriousness that Israel has long deferred in favor of the familiar. They could band together to try to create a 61-seat majority in the Knesset, enough to oust Netanyahu from the prime minister’s office in the next election.

Perhaps best primed to lead them is former military chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot. He possesses a moral gravitas born of personal sacrifice — he lost a son in the line of duty in the early days of the Gaza war — and combines military realism with a social conscience and intellectual curiosity rare among generals. The son of Moroccan immigrants, he could bridge Israel’s enduring ethnic divides. Quiet in manner, almost austere, he has reminded many of Rabin: uncharismatic but unbreakable.

Former Prime Minister Yair Lapid, who briefly governed before the 2022 election, remains an alternative. Once dismissed as a television personality dabbling in politics, Lapid, the face of liberal centrism, has matured into a disciplined leader of the opposition. His brief premiership was notable for calm professionalism and relative honesty.

He is secular, pro-market, and pro-Western, a believer in diplomacy and inclusion. His weakness: For some Israelis he seems too polished, too Tel Aviv, insufficiently rooted in the gritty national narrative that Rabin embodied. Still, Lapid commands international respect and has a clear moral compass.

Yair Golan, leader of the Democrats party, is the conscience of Israel’s old left: articulate, brave and deeply troubled by the moral decay of occupation and theocracy. He speaks plainly about the dangers of fascism and clerical capture, and his military record protects him from the usual accusations of naivety.

Golan’s appeal is limited to the educated and idealistic minority — but history has a way of catching up to such men. It doesn’t hurt that on Oct. 7, he picked up a gun and rushed into the field, in Southern Israel, hunting for terrorists.

On the pragmatic right, former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett stands as a curious figure: religious but modern, nationalist but not delusional. His short-lived government was marked by quiet competence and a surprising willingness to include Arabs in his governing coalition — something no Likud leader has ever dared. He might, if he returns, be the one who can sell compromise to the right without appearing weak.

And former Deputy Prime Minister Avigdor Lieberman, often caricatured as a hawk, has in recent years emerged as a voice of secular rationalism. A blunt ex-Soviet with the instincts of a bar bouncer — a job that, in fact, appears on his resume — Lieberman detests the Haredi stranglehold on Netanyahu’s current government. He also understands the demographic peril posed by the occupation of millions of Palestinians — which is odd, considering that he is a West Bank settler. He is no liberal, but he is pragmatic and worldly — precisely the kind of tough realist who could, paradoxically, enable reform.

What will matter is not ideology but integrity — the willingness to see the country as a shared project rather than a personal fiefdom.

The real challenge is the electoral math. Netanyahu’s machine persists because it is unified: a coalition of Haredim and ultranationalists bound by shared interests and an obsession with power. The opposition, meanwhile, is fragmented by persistent issues of ego and ideology.

To reach 61 seats, a post-Netanyahu bloc must unite centrists, parts of the pragmatic right, and the Arab parties. This need not mean Arab ministers in the cabinet, but it does require normalization of Arab political participation, as Bennett and Lapid briefly demonstrated. The taboo, although it was broken, is not yet dead. It should be.

But the arithmetic, while brutal, isn’t impossible — because a majority could be united not by ideology, but rather by fury. Fury at corruption, at extremism, at being held hostage by fringe coalitions. A leader who can channel that anger, which keeps building in society, into constructive purpose will find fertile ground.

That night 30 years ago, I ran to nearby Ichilov Hospital after Rabin’s shooting. Inside, Rabin was already on the operating table. I was there when Rabin’s top aide, Eitan Haber, walked out to tell reporters — at the time, I was night editor of the Israel bureau of The Associated Press — of Rabin’s death.

The reporters, ordinarily immune to showing public emotion, cried out. I have goosebumps at the memory of it.

I filed updates to the story from my apartment overlooking the square where Rabin was shot until the early hours of the morning. Around 3 a.m., it occurred to me that no new prime minister had been announced. That something so obvious was overlooked reflects the degree of shock that characterized the moment. I called Uri Dromi, a key government spokesperson, and asked who was now in charge of the country. He didn’t know either.

Dromi called me a short while later to tell me that, in fact, the ministers had held a vote and had in effect elected Shimon Peres, the foreign minister and a longtime rival of Rabin’s for the Labor Party leadership. Peres was destined to fumble the ball: He missed a chance to call a snap election that he would have won by a mile, and by the time he did call a vote, in May 1996, the country was in the throes of a spasm of terrorism.

But the country carried on. Peres replaced Rabin. Netanyahu replaced Peres. Life finds a way forward, in a country as in a person.

bigred1978 on November 4th, 2025 at 17:11 UTC »

> Will Israel ever have another leader who truly wants peace?

That depends on what kind of peace and what kind of sacrifices and compromises they'd have to make.

If your idea of peace is for the Arabs/Palestinians to regain full control of the Levant and de-establish the State of Israel then...no, that will never happen. If your idea is of peace is a single state solution with Israelis and Palestinians living together in harmony then, again, probably won't happen unless there is a verifiable way to ensure that groups like Hamas no longer exist, and even then. If your idea of peace is a two state solution then as with the aforementioned option, only if the Palestinian state is virtually unarmed outside of a national police force and all militias and other groups disbanded, and even then.

So the end answer I am afraid is no, any future Israeli leader will always have the safety and security of the Israelis first in mind always even if that means a continuation of what we see now.

BenedickUSA on November 4th, 2025 at 16:54 UTC »

A lot of the Israelis—die-hard Progressives and Peaceniks—got straight up murdered, raped, kidnapped and tortured by the people with whom they sought to live in peace. Probably gonna be a minute before they let their guard down again.

netowi on November 4th, 2025 at 16:18 UTC »

This article is asking the wrong question. Every Prime Minister in Israel's history has wanted peace. The problem is that no Israeli leader--indeed, no leader of any country--will accept a "peace" that compromises security. There are a thousand examples throughout history that "peace" deals that leave a country in a more vulnerable position just lead to more aggression. See Czechoslovakia's capitulation to Nazi Germany as the purest example. And the reason for the lack of security has always been the same: there is no legitimate Palestinian guarantor for peace.

The problem remains that while Israeli leaders and the Israeli state enjoy the popular legitimacy to enforce a peace on their own people, there exists no entity with similar legitimacy on the Palestinian side that could enforce the peace on Palestinians. The mainstream of Palestinian political opinion is that Israel is wholly illegitimate and its entire territory is rightfully Palestinian land. No Palestinian leader believes they could sign a deal that effectively signs away Palestinian claims to Haifa, Jaffa, and Jerusalem and remain alive, because so many Palestinians would turn to violence to undo the peace treaty.

This is not unique to Palestinians: when the Irish signed a treaty that partitioned Ireland and left some of the island under British control, hard-line Irish rebels rose up and fought the new Irish state to reverse the treaty and maintain the fight for the whole of Ireland. The Irish Free State government that had signed the treaty with Britain had to win a civil war. Does anyone, anywhere believe that there is a Palestinian faction with both the popular legitimacy to agree to a peace deal and the popularity and force to win a civil war against Hamas and the other militant factions in Palestinian society that would reject a treaty?