Middle Israel: Person of the year is Benjamin Netanyahu - opinion

Our person of the year 5785 has to be an Israeli.

With all due respect to assorted foreign candidates – from the omnipresent Donald Trump to the martyred Charlie Kirk – the year that will end on Monday night was the most intense of Israel’s 77 years.

The year that began a day after 201 Iranian missiles landed here was later punctuated by a massive Israeli attack in Iran, in between 11 attacks in Yemen, and one in Qatar. In between these, sirens repeatedly wailed across Israel, sending millions to bomb shelters while 3,000 homes were destroyed.

Underpinning this mayhem was the ongoing fighting in Gaza, where Israel lost another 70 soldiers, bringing the IDF’s overall death toll since October 2023 to 904. Overarching the entire turmoil was the unending hostage crisis, a millstone on millions of Israeli necks even after the elapsing year’s incremental release of 26 living captives, and 21 dead.

Finally, beyond these Middle Eastern affairs, antisemitic winds traveled freely between Australian plazas, European soccer stadiums, and a mayoral race in New York.

Set against this backdrop, our person of the year would ideally represent some aspect of this mayhem’s emotional toll on the Israeli soul. Seen this way, three names come to mind.

THE PETITE and fiery-eyed Einav Zangauker, mother of Matan, who was hijacked from Kibbutz Nir Oz, has awed millions, fighting like a lioness for her son’s release, day after day, night after night, with courage, dedication, and resolve. Every sensible Israeli feels that this unassuming municipal administrator from Ofakim is their sister.

The same popular adoration went to the happier story of 25-year-old Yuval Raphael, who, while attending the Supernova music festival, found herself lying wounded and bleeding in a roadside bomb shelter, under a pile of dead rockers.

Raphael’s emergence from that nadir to stardom in the 2025 Eurovision Song Contest, where she won second place, offered Israelis a much-needed dose of pride, defiance, and hope.

However, Zangauker and Raphael were emblems of resilience rather than shapers of events. That cannot be said of Tzviki Tessler.

The 61-year-old kibbutznik from Yavne is a candidate for person of the year, not because of what made him famous – his daily TV appearances during the war with Iran in his capacity as Deputy Home Front Commander.

True, in an era when the public service is politically contaminated and administratively inept, Tessler’s professional and calm instructions offered a reminder of what Israeli public servants can be. Then again, this role was not about shaping events.

Where Tessler is shaping events is in Kibbutz Nir Oz, where Hamas murdered 37 residents and hijacked 77 while burning 394 of that community’s 400 buildings. Eager to rebuild, the kibbutz’s survivors hired Tessler – a retired Air Force general – as the kibbutz’s chairman.

Tessler has since spent his days and nights overseeing the shattered community’s physical, social, and psychological rehabilitation, salvaging hope from the ashes of despair.

Most tellingly, Tessler is religious, while the kibbutz he serves is secular, and in fact was founded by atheists. This gap is meaningless to Nir Oz’s survivors. They know that the observant leader they chose is the able manager and patriotic Israeli with whom they will rebuild what Hamas destroyed.

Tessler, then, is shaping events, and in a way that hopefully signals the beginning of the great renewal our traumatized society craves. Then again, what he is shaping is the future, while our search is for a shaper of the past, namely, the multiple dramas and agonies of 5785. And that can be only one Israeli: Benjamin Netanyahu.

THE JEWISH year’s most dramatic event was June’s Operation Rising Lion. The far-flung attack’s military success has many fathers, a whole generation of planners, spies, and analysts whose painstaking accumulation of information was indispensable for what hundreds of pilots, mechanics, and commandos achieved.

This might have made us crown as person of the year one of this orchestra’s conductors, someone like the commander of the Air Force or the director of the Mossad, but that would have missed the point. Such Israelis made the attack possible, but they did not make it happen. That credential belongs to Benjamin Netanyahu. He made the decision.

That also goes for the rest of 5785’s military events, from the attacks in Yemen and Qatar to the offensive in Gaza now underway. The same goes for the social tragedy that overshadowed this year.

The abyss that has come to yawn between ultra-Orthodoxy and the rest of the Jewish state has Netanyahu’s name written all over it. In 5785, he removed the lone Likud lawmaker who set out to change this gross injustice.

It was but one of multiple shots in the dark that a bewildered Israel followed in 5785, all fired from one man’s hip. Last fall, he fired the defense minister; in the spring, the head of the Shin Bet; and in the summer, he targeted the attorney-general. Having killed dozens of Iranian generals, Yemeni ministers, and Hamas leaders, such political liquidations became a piece of cake for him.

Understandably, then, when faced with the Mossad’s disagreement with the attack he resolved to wage in Qatar, Netanyahu went ahead anyhow, and attacked without the agency that specializes in such operations.