By claiming total failure, Israel's opposition hurts itself - and helps Netanyahu

Because when the votes were coun­ted, oppos­i­tion MKs had joined the coali­tion to approve addi­tional fund­ing for haredi edu­ca­tional insti­tu­tions – pre­cisely the type of alloc­a­tion they had spent months rail­ing against.

In prac­tical terms, then, the vote may amount to noth­ing. But polit­ic­ally, it says a great deal about how the oppos­i­tion is oper­at­ing.

What happened in those early morn­ing hours was more than a tech­nical slip. It was a reveal­ing moment – one that encap­su­lates a broader prob­lem: an oppos­i­tion that is not only strug­gling to stop the gov­ern­ment but also, at times, to keep up with it.

The clause on the haredi insti­tu­tions was bur­ied among thou­sands of budget reser­va­tions – the kind the oppos­i­tion routinely votes against as a mat­ter of course. This time, however, they weren’t pay­ing close enough atten­tion. The res­ult: a vote that ran dir­ectly counter to their own mes­saging.

Sym­bolic? Yes. But sym­bolic in more ways than one.

Sym­bolic not only because the fund­ing is unlikely to mater­i­al­ize, but because it reflects an oppos­i­tion that has been repeatedly out­man­euvered – pro­ced­ur­ally, polit­ic­ally, and rhet­or­ic­ally.

This was more than an isol­ated mis­step. It reflec­ted a broader pat­tern: an oppos­i­tion strug­gling not only with mes­saging but with exe­cu­tion. And that, in turn, points to a deeper issue.

It is a power­ful argu­ment. It is also an abso­lute one. And that is where the prob­lem begins.

That abso­lut­ism was on dis­play out­side the Knes­set this week as well.

As the budget was being approved, a small group of pro­test­ers gathered nearby, issu­ing a state­ment that after two and a half years of war, “the Octo­ber 7 gov­ern­ment has not achieved a single vic­tory” – not against Hamas, not against Hezbol­lah, and not against Iran.

It is a stark claim.

It is also a sweep­ing one – and one that under­scores the gap between polit­ical mes­saging and a much more com­plex real­ity.

Because while there is no short­age of cri­ti­cism to be leveled at this gov­ern­ment – and much of it jus­ti­fied – the oppos­i­tion’s broader claim of total fail­ure is hard to recon­cile with real­ity. At the same time, the oppos­i­tion itself has struggled in what it has long defined as its cent­ral mis­sion: bring­ing down the gov­ern­ment.

That fail­ure is not the­or­et­ical. It is meas­ur­able.

From the moment this gov­ern­ment was formed, oppos­i­tion lead­ers declared that it would not last. Lapid, speak­ing in Novem­ber 2022 at the last cab­inet meet­ing he chaired as prime min­is­ter, said, “We’ll be back in this room, sooner than you think.”

Yet here we are, years later, with the coali­tion hav­ing just passed a budget – all but ensur­ing it will com­plete its full term, no small achieve­ment con­sid­er­ing that only six of the coun­try’s 37 gov­ern­ments have done so.

And this is not just any gov­ern­ment.

This is the gov­ern­ment under whose watch Octo­ber 7 occurred – an event that shattered pub­lic con­fid­ence, upen­ded assump­tions about secur­ity, and, at the time, seemed polit­ic­ally fatal for Prime Min­is­ter Ben­jamin Net­an­yahu.

The expect­a­tion, widely shared in the days and weeks after the attack, was that Net­an­yahu’s polit­ical era was over – that the scale of the fail­ure would be too great to with­stand.

Yet he with­stood it.

Not only that, but polling sug­gests that if elec­tions were held today, his party would still emerge as the largest, trail­ing its 2022 res­ult by only a hand­ful of seats.

That real­ity does not speak only to Net­an­yahu’s polit­ical acu­men – though that is cer­tainly part of the story. It also speaks to the oppos­i­tion’s inab­il­ity to trans­late what should have been a moment of max­imum vul­ner­ab­il­ity into polit­ical change.

AND THAT brings us to the second part of the prob­lem: the argu­ment the oppos­i­tion has chosen to make.

Ben­nett cap­tured it suc­cinctly in an inter­view last month, arguing that Israel is “not win­ning any­where” – not in Gaza, not in Lebanon, and not in Iran.

It is a strik­ing line. But is it accur­ate?

Was Octo­ber 7 a cata­strophic fail­ure? Undeni­ably.

Has the war, since then, waged on dif­fer­ent fronts, been long, costly, and deeply pain­ful? Without ques­tion.

But does that mean that noth­ing has been achieved?

Is Hamas today what it was on Octo­ber 7? Does it pos­sess the same cap­ab­il­it­ies, the same free­dom of oper­a­tion, the same capa­city to threaten Israel in the way it did then?

Is Hezbol­lah the same organ­iz­a­tion it was before the cur­rent round of fight­ing – oper­at­ing with the same arsenal, the same con­fid­ence, and the same pos­ture along the north­ern bor­der?

Obvi­ously not. And that goes to the heart of the oppos­i­tion’s nar­rat­ive.

Take Hezbol­lah. The organ­iz­a­tion con­tin­ues to har­ass the North, dis­rupt daily life, and pose a real and ongo­ing threat. That is undeni­able. But to sug­gest that noth­ing has changed is to ignore the cumu­lat­ive impact of months of fight­ing.

If Hezbol­lah once pos­sessed an arsenal estim­ated at around 150,000 rock­ets and mis­siles, and that num­ber has been sig­ni­fic­antly reduced – even if tens of thou­sands remain – that is not insig­ni­fic­ant. Nor is the fact that its elite Rad­wan force is no longer posi­tioned along Israel’s bor­der com­munit­ies in pre­par­a­tion for an Octo­ber 7-style attack.

This is not total vic­tory. But neither is it fail­ure.

The same holds for Iran. No one is sug­gest­ing that every last bal­listic mis­sile launcher will be des­troyed, or that every site in its nuc­lear pro­gram will be com­pletely oblit­er­ated. But the dam­age to the coun­try’s mil­it­ary infra­struc­ture after more than a month of relent­less bomb­ing is highly sig­ni­fic­ant.

The regime’s responses – even as it fights for its sur­vival – have been far more lim­ited than they were last June dur­ing the 12-day war, reduced largely to sporadic mis­sile fire rather than sus­tained bar­rages. That, alone, sug­gests the extent of the dam­age.

And Hamas? The organ­iz­a­tion has not been erad­ic­ated. It remains present in Gaza, attempt­ing to regroup. But it is not oper­at­ing in the same way it did before Octo­ber 7. Its infra­struc­ture has been heav­ily degraded, its lead­er­ship decim­ated, and its free­dom of move­ment cur­tailed.

Between total vic­tory and total fail­ure lies a wide spec­trum, and Israel is oper­at­ing some­where along it – with real achieve­ments, though far from abso­lute vic­tory.

SO WHY, then, does the per­cep­tion of fail­ure remain so strong?

Part of the answer lies in how the war is exper­i­enced, and part in how those opposed to the gov­ern­ment are present­ing it.

Israelis encounter the con­flict in imme­di­ate, con­crete ways: sirens, safe rooms, dam­age to homes, funer­als for fallen sol­diers. These are tan­gible, vis­ible, and deeply per­sonal.

What they do not see – at least not in com­par­able terms – is the dam­age being inflic­ted on the other side.

The dis­par­ity in vis­ib­il­ity is sig­ni­fic­ant: Israeli losses are extens­ively covered in imme­di­ate, human terms, while the dam­age inflic­ted on Iran is repor­ted in far more lim­ited and abstract ways.

And that imbal­ance shapes per­cep­tion. It makes it easier to believe that little is being achieved, even when that is not the case.

The oppos­i­tion has tapped into that per­cep­tion – but in doing so, it may also be over­reach­ing.

By fram­ing the gov­ern­ment’s record dur­ing this war as one of broad fail­ure, it risks dis­con­nect­ing from a sig­ni­fic­ant part of the pub­lic that, while crit­ical and often frus­trated, does not neces­sar­ily see the situ­ation in such black-and-white terms.

That dis­con­nect is not only in the argu­ment – it is also about tone.

Over the past week, the oppos­i­tion has been con­sumed not only with cri­ti­ciz­ing the gov­ern­ment but also with internal jost­ling over who will lead it – Ben­nett, Eis­en­kot, Lapid – each stak­ing a claim and warn­ing

against the oth­ers.

This is nat­ural in polit­ics. But com­ing at a time when much of the coun­try is still liv­ing under the strain of war – run­ning to shel­ters, absorb­ing losses, adjust­ing to an unsettled routine – it can come across as out of step with the pub­lic mood.

And when a polit­ical camp appears out of step, its mes­sage – no mat­ter how sharp – car­ries less weight. Cred­ib­il­ity in polit­ics rests not only on cri­ti­cism, but on the abil­ity to reflect real­ity as people exper­i­ence it.

This is not to sug­gest that the gov­ern­ment has suc­ceeded across the board. It has not. The fail­ures of Octo­ber 7 remain pro­found. The war con­tin­ues to exact a heavy toll. The deep soci­etal divi­sions that pre­ceded the con­flict have not dis­ap­peared.

But not everything since Octo­ber 7 has been an abject fail­ure – not the cam­paigns against Hamas, Hezbol­lah, or Iran. An oppos­i­tion that insists oth­er­wise risks weak­en­ing not the gov­ern­ment, but its own cred­ib­il­ity and the case against it.