In the midst of every crisis, the cliché goes, lies a great opportunity. And there has been no greater crisis for Israel than October 7, the country’s most devastating security failure under its most right-wing government to date. It was a tragedy that exposed not only the profound flaws in Israel’s security apparatus but also the dysfunction of its political system. In a country where national security—and particularly the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—has long been the defining issue, this should have provided the opposition to Benjamin Netanyahu and Itamar Ben-Gvir a rare chance to offer a competing political vision to a shocked and grieving nation. In any functioning democracy, such a response would be expected. In Israel, however, none has emerged. Why not?
The go-to explanation—at least among pundits, strategists, and frustrated liberal voters—has long been to blame the left. It is not difficult to see why such a story holds. For more than a decade, following Netanyahu’s return to power in 2009, leaders of the mainstream Zionist liberal left—Shelly Yachimovich, Isaac Herzog (now President), and others—failed to articulate a coherent politics. In an attempt to court right-wing voters, they avoided firm stances on security and the two-state solution, fearing accusations of weakness or being labelled “too left-wing.” This strategy backfired spectacularly. Israel’s left parties became politically irrelevant as their base shifted to the growing centrist parties.
Meanwhile, the more radical factions of the left retreated from national politics altogether. Some championed the one-state solution, an idea with little political representation—on either the Palestinian or Israeli side—and scant traction outside academic circles. Others turned to human rights advocacy, focusing on legal activism to protect minority groups—especially Palestinians—from grave injustices: a heroic but ultimately nonpolitical stance that, like the program of their liberal counterparts, offered no alternative vision for security. Finally, those who remained in mainstream politics, trying to influence public discourse, focused almost entirely on the moral and legal dimensions of the conflict, often making the condemnation of Israeli society their primary practice. Many turned outward, placing their hopes in international human rights laws and sanctions, relying on global institutions to hold Israel accountable—often at the expense of engaging with the country’s internal political struggle.
This intellectual and political vacuum, combined with a decade-long, brutal, and highly effective smear campaign by Netanyahu and his allies, framed the Israeli left as anti-security. As a result, it has all but disappeared. In two decades, the Labor Party, the modern incarnation of the founding party of the state, has shrunk from holding 26 seats out of 120 in 1999 to just 4 in the 2022 elections. Meretz, once the ideological anchor of the left, won 10 seats in 1999 but has since lost its place in parliament, failing to even cross the electoral threshold in 2022.
But an explanation that places the blame for the ascension of the right at the feet of the left is partial at best. For the past two decades, neither Labor nor Meretz (the two are now merged as The Democrats under Yair Golan) has led the opposition to the right’s growing hegemony. Instead, since the collapse of the Oslo peace process in 2000 and the subsequent outbreak of the Second Intifada, it has been the Israeli center that has dominated what is now called the “liberal camp,” even forming governments in 2006 and 2021.
The centrists have long promised Israeli liberals moderation and stability, claiming that, unlike the “purist left” (using their terms), their pragmatic strategy would attract voters from both wings and secure power. But as they’ve taken their place as the dominant opposition to the right, Israel has descended into its most extreme era yet: one that has seen repeated attempts at antidemocratic judicial overhaul, the horrors of October 7 and the ensuing brutal war in Gaza, the normalization of extremist Jewish supremacist ideologies like Kahanism, and relentless settlement expansion in the West Bank. Despite their relative success at the expense of the shrinking left, the center has failed—not only its voters but the entire country—on its own terms. To understand Israel’s current political predicament, rehashing the familiar critique that has become a trope in Israeli political circles—“the problem of the left”—simply won’t do. A deeper analysis is needed: one that traces the problem of the center.
Israeli politics used to be defined by the rivalry between the left-wing Labor Party and the right-wing Likud Party, with smaller centrist parties, like Shinui, existing only on the margins. The center only became a dominant force at the tail end of the Second Intifada (2000-2005), a period of relentless violence—with buses exploding in the streets and hundreds of Israelis murdered—that, for most Israelis, made peace with the Palestinians seem unattainable. Disillusionment with the peace process gave rise to the “no partner” myth: the belief that Israel genuinely seeks peace but lacks a credible Palestinian counterpart. From this disillusionment emerged a significant constituency that political scientists Alon Yakter and Mark Tessler refer to as the “doubtful doves”: individuals who support the two-state solution in principle but lack confidence that it will be realized anytime soon.
Then came the Kadima Party—the epitome of the “old” center. Founded in 2005 by former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon—a towering security figure in the eyes of the Israeli public despite his role as Defense Minister during the bloody Sabra and Shatila massacre in the 1982 Lebanon War, Kadima capitalized on this “confidence gap” by injecting new competition into Israel’s political system. Leveraging Sharon’s stature, Kadima rejected both the right-wing approach of conflict management and settlement expansion as well as the left-wing strategy of bilateral peace negotiations. Instead, it proposed an Israeli-style third-way politics: unilateral withdrawals from the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank to secure defensible borders while laying the groundwork for future peace talks. Sharon, and later Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, argued that while a negotiated peace was out of reach, Israel could and should shape its destiny unilaterally.
Kadima’s approach was not merely ideological but also deeply strategic. Like any centrist party, it sought to broaden its appeal by attracting voters across the spectrum. For a time, the strategy worked. In the 2006 election, Kadima secured a plurality of 29 seats while Likud plummeted to an all-time low of 12 and Labor’s seat count remained steady—meaning that Kadima had successfully pulled a significant share of right-wing voters toward the center and reshaped the traditional electoral landscape, long divided between Labor and Likud.
The party’s actual record on security issues was significant. It campaigned on a platform of territorial compromise in the West Bank—the “Realignment Plan”—designed to build on Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in 2005 and secure permanent borders for Israel on the path to a two-state solution. It also led the last serious round of negotiations with Palestinian leadership and oversaw the destruction of Syria’s nuclear reactor—one of Israel’s most successful military operations in history.
Of course, it had its share of failures, too. The Second Lebanon War, while bringing nearly two decades of relative quiet to Israel’s northern border, was widely seen as a flawed military campaign that exposed weaknesses in the IDF and, in the long run, allowed Hezbollah to consolidate power. Kadima also led Operation Cast Lead—the first in a string of Gaza offensives that achieved little and resolved nothing. Nevertheless, the party had a clear and distinct vision for security and peace. In that sense, it was a successful political project—demonstrating that centrist politics could foster ideological competition, attract voters, lead governments, and enact transformative policies.
But in the 2013 elections, Kadima collapsed—brought down by corruption scandals, infighting, and the fallout from Israel’s own version of the Occupy Wall Street protests. In its place rose a new, different kind of center. Enter Yesh Atid, a fresh centrist party promising “new politics.” Led by Yair Lapid, the charismatic former news anchor who had rebranded himself as the voice of Israel’s middle class, the party’s rhetoric centered on rejecting the corruption of “old politics” while addressing Israelis’ everyday concerns. But its real novelty lay elsewhere. Unlike Kadima, which tackled the Israeli-Palestinian conflict head-on, the new center avoided any clear commitments on national security or the conflict. Lapid, for his part, paid only lip service to the two-state solution, reducing security—particularly regarding Palestine—to a marginal, almost nonexistent part of Yesh Atid’s ideology.
Other new centrists have taken things a step further. Benny Gantz—the former IDF chief of staff and celebrated general who now leads The National Unity Party, the second largest of the new center in the current Knesset, has turned to openly embracing right-wing positions. Exemplifying this shift is Gantz’s recent vote against recognizing a Palestinian state, coupled with a statement by one of his closest allies, Knesset member Hili Tropper—who, when asked about the prospect of a Palestinian state in the next twenty years, declared that “there will be no Palestinian state in the foreseeable future. We are against it.” In the rare moments when it did voice opinions on critical security issues, the new center merely echoed Netanyahu—including the prime minister’s calls to revoke the Iran nuclear deal.
This ideological retreat culminated with the emergence in 2019 of the Blue and White Party, a coalition of all major Israeli centrist parties led by Gantz and Lapid. Unlike Sharon’s Kadima, Blue and White actively refused to take a clear stance on national security and the conflict. When forced to address the issues, Blue and White simply echoed right-wing talking points, framing Jewish settlements in the West Bank as a security necessity and excluding Arab politicians from coalition talks. Perhaps the most telling was the party’s 100-day program, which outlined proposals on every issue—from transportation to the economy and religion-state relations—except one: security. “On this critical issue [security],” Gantz declared at a high-profile speech at the Munich Security Conference that year, “there is no right or left—no opposition or coalition.” This statement reduced the country’s most critical political debate to rhetorical neutrality—akin to the Democratic or Republican Party abruptly withdrawing from the ongoing debate over the economy or immigration, an unthinkable scenario even for centrist American leaders.
Compare Gantz’s speech to that of Yitzhak Rabin when he presented his new government to the Knesset—the leader Gantz has often been compared to and aspires to succeed—delivered on July 13, 1992. In it, Rabin, a towering figure of the Israeli left who led the country to peace with Jordan, signed the Oslo Accords, and was later assassinated by a right-wing extremist, drew a sharp distinction between Labor under his leadership and the Likud. “Mr. Speaker, Members of Knesset,” he declared, “there are indeed significant differences between the national priorities of the Likud and those proposed by us in the government’s platform. . . . The first issue concerns peace and security.” The stark contrast between Rabin’s clear differentiation and bold vision for security and peace, and Gantz’s empty, depoliticized statement in Munich underscores how hollow the new center has become as a political project.
In my experience in centrist parties’ campaign rooms, I witnessed firsthand how deeply ingrained the belief had become that avoiding clear stances on national security and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict offered a strategic advantage—an ambiguity designed to attract “soft-right” voters and secure electoral victories, the central promise of the “pragmatic” center. But this belief proved false. Where Kadima delivered on its promise by drawing voters from across the spectrum in 2006, the new center parties of Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz has failed to replicate that success a decade later—and massively so. Over the last five election cycles, their main achievement has been to cannibalize the left. Even when Gantz and Lapid managed to form a government, it was under extraordinary circumstances. In 2021—after three exhausting election cycles in just two years with no clear outcome—hard-right figures like Avigdor Liberman and Naftali Bennett temporarily joined forces with them to unseat Netanyahu. It wasn’t because they had successfully drawn voters from the right. For the most part, the mythical “soft-right” voters have opted for the real thing over a center offering little more than its diluted substitute.
As a result, Israel’s political spectrum has shifted further and further to the extreme right. With no serious competition from the center or the left, the mainstream right has found its most formidable challenge not from traditional rivals but from the furthest corners of its own wing. This dynamic has fueled the rapid radicalization of Likud, Israel’s mainstream right-wing party, whose rhetoric, as recent research by political scientist Noam Gidron shows, now mirrors that of Europe’s most extreme far-right movements. This is no accident, but the inevitable consequence of a hollow center—one too timid to lead and too weak to resist.
Left critics of the centrists often contend that they are merely capitulating to power. But that critique, while not without merit, misses the larger point. The new center didn’t just fail to uphold left-wing values like peace, security, and the two-state solution—if that were the only charge, it could simply brush it aside, claiming, “We are not purist leftists; that is not what we are in politics for.” The real indictment is far more damning: the new center has failed its voters on its own terms. It promised moderation and unity but instead deepened polarization and fueled extremism. It vowed to defend democratic institutions yet stood idle as they came under siege. It claimed pragmatism and political savvy but proved incapable of expanding its base. In the end, the new center not only betrayed its own ambitions but actively worsened the very crises it pledged to resolve.
Since October 7, the mainstream debate in Israel has taken on an almost surreal framing. The center-left, willing to bear the necessary costs to bring the hostages home and end a war with no clear objective, is cast as naïve, while the right—rejecting deals and doubling down on a strategy of endless escalation—presents itself as the only faction that takes security seriously. Somehow, the very government under which the October 7 attack occurred—the same government that has failed to achieve its own war objectives for a year and a half, leaving Hamas intact and many hostages either dead or still in captivity—has once again managed to brand the opposition as weak on security.
This happened for a reason. A few days after October 7, Gantz chose to join Netanyahu’s emergency coalition government—one that included Ben-Gvir, the ultra-right Kahanist. Reports from within Gantz’s party suggest there were fierce cabinet disputes over the war’s objectives between centrists and the hard right. But these disagreements have never materialized into a distinct, publicly articulated security plan that can counter the right’s futile strategy of endless escalation. Instead, Gantz’s only geopolitical vision—a vague idea of regional normalization with Saudi Arabia, conveniently omitting a Palestinian state—was quickly dismissed as unserious, as Mohammed bin Salman repeatedly reaffirmed his commitment to a two-state solution. Ultimately, the man who cast himself as the responsible alternative effectively remained silent, clinging to little but empty entreaties to togetherness.
The political consequences were swift. Gantz’s post–October 7 surge in public support—peaking at a projected 42 seats in a November 2023 poll—has collapsed, with recent polls now placing him at just 7. His crisis deepened when Gideon Sa’ar—another right-wing figure Gantz had enlisted to shield himself from being labeled a “leftist”—broke away from their joint party, the National Unity Party (formed in 2022 through a merger of their previous parties), and returned to Netanyahu’s ranks, further cementing his radical right-wing coalition.
Lapid, to his credit, has refused to collaborate with the Kahanists, rejecting the idea of joining a government with Ben-Gvir outright. Lapid was also one of the first Israeli leaders to call for an end to the war in Gaza and attempt to lay out an alternative vision for the region. But that effort has yet to gain traction—partly because of his longstanding avoidance of security issues, and partly because his party has yet to effectively make such a vision its defining policy.
Nowhere was the center’s failure of leadership more glaring than in its response to President Trump’s reckless, immoral, and deeply dangerous suggestion of displacing Palestinians from Gaza. As the hard right erupted in celebration—believing Trump would deliver their long-held fantasy of ethnic cleansing—Gantz’s immediate response was to congratulate Trump on his deep commitment to Israel’s security. Lapid, for his part, sought to avoid addressing Trump’s plan directly and instead praised him for his promise to bring every hostage home.
As this piece goes to print, Israel has broken the ceasefire and resumed its military campaign in Gaza. At the same time, Netanyahu’s government has revived its judicial overhaul plans, escalated its attacks on Israel’s democratic institutions, and is now openly maneuvering to oust the head of the Shin Bet and the attorney general amid allegations that the prime minister’s inner circle was financially entangled with the Qatari government.
Gantz’s response to Israel’s most severe crisis in its history? To warn that Netanyahu’s power grabs “endanger national unity” and should be stopped on those grounds—not because the government is waging war without a strategy, risking the hostages’ lives while consolidating power at all costs. And Lapid? Though taking a harder stance against attacks on Israel’s democratic institutions, he has mounted little meaningful opposition to the decision to restart the war. With no viable political opposition in sight, the Israeli people—at least, the ones not in thrall to the extremists—have once again taken to the streets en masse, just as they have throughout the past two years. But without a political force to lead them, their energy will remain unchanneled.
Amid the failure of the new center, Israel’s liberal camp now stands at a crossroads. As for now, the most popular figure among Israel’s liberal voters is Bennett, the staunch right-winger (a poll conducted in March showed Bennett at the top of the projected Knesset standings with 22 seats—and this was before he had even declared his candidacy or formed a party). Once a close ally of Netanyahu and equally divisive (famously analogizing Israel’s Supreme Court to Hamas in 2019), Bennett has since softened his tone. During his brief tenure as prime minister, he sought to reframe himself as more polite, less polarizing, and a unifying figure. But while his style may have shifted, his views remain as entrenched as ever. Once again, a sizable faction of the liberal camp seems poised to repeat the same failed strategy of the past two decades: drifting further right in pursuit of an illusory, hollow center. This time, they will rally behind Bennett to do so, despite his deep roots in the right-wing establishment, his support for expanding Jewish settlements in the West Bank, and his conflict-management approach—the very same misconceptions that led to the October 7 massacre.
But further to the left, another trend is emerging: the rise of Yair Golan and the newly branded Democrats. A former IDF deputy chief of staff who risked his life saving civilians on October 7, Golan has unified the remnants of the Labor Party and Meretz into a single force. His message is sharper, his opposition more forceful, and his commitment to a two-state solution and a genuine security alternative—while not yet strong enough—clearer than that of any other Israeli political figure. For months, he has been rising in the polls and leading protests in the streets.
Does Golan’s ascension signal that the Israeli public is finally ready for a serious alternative? Predicting exactly what will come next is nearly impossible. What is clear, however, is that the choice between doubling down on the hollow center’s approach to the point of absurdity or presenting a real alternative—whether with Golan at the helm or another leader—will be the decisive factor in determining the shape of Israel’s future. Standing at this crossroads, today’s established centrist parties can, at least in theory, still reinvent themselves and become a force for change, just as the old center did in 2006. But that would require moving beyond empty politeness and vacuous, conciliatory rhetoric—something that, at the moment, Gantz appears unprepared to do. Lapid’s path remains uncertain, marked by mixed signals to his electorate, yet somewhat more promising due to the resistance he has shown over the past year. Ultimately, though, if none of the new center’s leaders can change course, Israeli liberals will have no choice but to look elsewhere—hopefully, to a revitalized left.
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