Photo- Benjamin Netanyahu, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich
Benjamin Netanyahu’s determination to cling to power has endangered Israel’s long-term security, eroded its moral standing, and gravely weakened its international legitimacy. Whether a future government can repair the damage remains to be seen.
As of today — August 21, 2026 — Netanyahu has served a record 6,901 cumulative days as prime minister, more than 2,000 days longer than David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister and the previous record holder. Bibi, as he is widely known, has exceeded Ben-Gurion’s tenure by about 42 percent. Another term would push the record even further beyond the reach of any likely successor.
To that end, Netanyahu has repeatedly advocated whatever policies would win him the most votes to keep him in power. In his early days, he opposed the whole notion of Palestinian statehood. When the political winds shifted, however, he publicly embraced a two-state solution. “In my vision of peace, in this small land of ours, two peoples live freely, side by side, in amity and mutual respect,” he said at Bar-Ilan University in 2009.
He played on both sides in 2015. On the eve of that year’s election, Netanyahu said that no Palestinian state would be established while he was prime minister. Three days later, after winning, he insisted that he still wanted “a sustainable, peaceful two-state solution,” but only if circumstances changed. His government’s accelerated expansion of West Bank settlements told a clearer story than either statement did. By 2023, he was openly saying that Israel had to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state. In September 2025, he stated flatly: “There will be no Palestinian state.”
By then, of course, Netanyahu had long since surpassed Ben-Gurion’s record and was determined to extend it as far as possible. After returning to power in December 2022, he formed the most right-wing government in Israel’s history and made two of its most extreme figures — Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir — important to his survival.
In less than a year, they became indispensable to it. Netanyahu had always positioned himself as “Mr. Security.” That image was shattered on October 7, 2023, when the Hamas-led assault produced the deadliest day for Jews since the Shoah. That is when Netanyahu began leaning ever more heavily on Smotrich and Ben-Gvir. Again and again, because his political survival required their support, he gave them whatever they wanted.
What Bibi’s two ministers want most is for him to bring to a permanent end the very idea of a two-state solution by doing whatever is necessary to drive out the Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank. The harsh measures they impose, and their incendiary rhetoric, are unmistakable.
Ben-Gvir’s most outrageous comments were made just last Saturday night, August 15. Appearing on the premier episode of former Gaza hostage Rom Braslavski’s new podcast, “October 8,” he called for killing “30 to 40 [Gazans] every night,” and he made clear that he did not just mean people associated with Hamas. “There are people there [in Gaza] who are not worthy of life,” he said. “They shouldn’t live. They’re not even people.”
Among his other provocative remarks, in early 2025 Smotrich urged Israel to force the entire population of Gaza into a narrow coastal strip in the territory’s southwest, and from there to “immediately begin the migration of Gaza’s residents to other countries.”
Thanks to Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir has blanket security authority over the West Bank, while Smotrich has sweeping authority over settlement planning, land registration, and other civilian matters. Their heavy-handed use of the power Bibi gave them has helped to fuel the worldwide depiction of Israel as a racist, even genocidal, state.
With Israel’s election scheduled for October 27 and his “Mr. Security” image shattered, Netanyahu desperately needs their continuing support.
At the moment, the two-state solution is probably on life support, if it ever had much life at all. Palestinian leaders and terrorist organizations bear enormous responsibility for bringing it to this point. Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah never accepted Israel’s legitimacy. “From the river to the sea” is not a new slogan. They have long sung the same tune, as their actions have proven.
Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon in May 2000 and dismantled the security zone it had maintained there since 1985. Less than five months later, Hezbollah crossed into Israel, killed three IDF soldiers, and abducted their bodies.
Between these two events came the Camp David summit in July 2000. It failed, although it left open the door for renewed talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. However, as PA officials and Yasir Arafat’s widow, Suha, would later claim, the PA president began planning the second intifada immediately upon his return from the summit.
Arafat’s plan, however, required an excuse to set it off. The then Likud Party leader Ariel Sharon provided it on September 28 when he made his controversial visit to the Temple Mount — known to Muslims as the Haram al-Sharif, the Holy Sanctuary. Sharon did not cause the intifada, despite having been blamed for it, but he should have known better.
Sharon handed Hamas a huge victory in 2005 when, as prime minister, he ordered Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. Hamas went on to win the Palestinian legislative election in 2006 and then violently seized control of Gaza from the PA in 2007. The rockets and cross-border attacks now coming from both north and south convinced many Israelis that trading land for peace really meant trading land for war. That helped embolden the nationalist camp and radicalized many formerly centrist Israelis.
The non-charedi religious right grew especially strong. Jewish law, its leaders insist, forbids surrendering even a dunam (a quarter of an acre) of the biblical Land of Israel. One prooftext they repeatedly invoke is the Sifrei’s commentary on Deuteronomy 12:29: “Settling the Land of Israel is equivalent to all the commandments of the Torah” (see Sifrei Devarim 80:5). The Talmud also controversially permits a deed for the purchase of a house in the Land of Israel to be written on Shabbat (see the Babylonian Talmud tractate Bava Kama 80b and BTGittin 8b).
That “equivalent to all the commandments” phrase, however, is familiar rabbinic hyperbole, nothing more. It is used to emphasize a commandment’s importance. The same praise is applied to tzitzit (BT Shevuot 29a), Torah study (Mishnah Peah 1:1 and BT Shabbat 127aphraise), and tzedakah (BT Bava Batra 9a). There is something in Jewish law that outweighs virtually all the other commandments, however, which the non-charedi religious right ignore: pikuach nefesh, the sanctity of life. It is the Torah’s prime directive; I will return to it below.
The biblical record also undermines the “Torah forbids it” claim. 1 Kings 9:10-14 reports that Solomon gave King Hiram of Tyre 20 towns in the Galilee after Hiram had supplied him with the building materials needed for the Temple and the palace. The text does not report any divine condemnation of what he did. If land can be traded for building materials, it surely can be traded for life-saving peace.
Two of the last century’s greatest halachic authorities rejected the claim of an absolute halachic ban on the grounds of pikuach nefesh. Israel’s late Rishon L’Tzion (Sefardi Chief Rabbi) Ovadia Yosef, zt”l, and the late Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, zt”l, known affectionately among the Orthodox on the center and left as “the Rav,” both held that pikuach nefesh permits territorial compromise if retaining territory creates a danger of war and relinquishing it offers a realistic prospect of lasting peace. Other Orthodox decisors also ruled this way.
The real questions are whether a given agreement would save lives or endanger them, and whether the Palestinian leadership can be trusted to negotiate in good faith, especially because support for doing so is growing among the people they lead. A Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research poll conducted earlier this month found 44 percent of Palestinians supporting the general concept and 50 percent opposing it; but when asked to choose among three political arrangements, 52 percent of West Bank respondents preferred two states based on the 1967 lines, while only 10 percent preferred a single state with equal rights. Those numbers hardly prove peace is at hand, but they do prove the idea is not dead.
Israel needs a courageous new leader who will not abandon the two-state solution just yet. A credible Israeli offer could see peace finally break out “between the river and the sea.” But if, given past Palestinian perfidy, a new state instead becomes a base for renewed war, Israel will retake the West Bank — and Palestinians will have shown the world, more convincingly than any Israeli public relations campaign could, who are the real obstacles to peace.
Israel must never surrender its security, to be sure, but it should have the courage to test whether security and peace can truly exist side by side. For that to happen, though, requires Israel’s voters to have the courage to choose new leaders on October 27.
Shammai Engelmayer is a rabbi-emeritus of Congregation Beth Israel of the Palisades and an adult education teacher in Bergen County. He is the author of eight books and the winner of 10 awards for his commentaries. His website is www.shammai.org.
Jewish Standard ( The original article was published on August 20)
Shammai Engelmayer is a rabbi-emeritus of Congregation Beth Israel of the Palisades and an adult education teacher in Bergen County. He is the author of eight books and the winner of 10 awards for his commentaries. His website is www.shammai.org.
