Every Israeli agrees on one thing: These are the most fateful elections in the history of the State of Israel.
The agreement ends right there. The real argument is about what kind of Israel each of us wants.
In practice, very few will vote for what they actually desire, and fewer still vote for what they believe that future should be. This is the great contradiction of our political moment. We announce a historic hour, and then we walk up to the ballot box like gray clerks filling in a form.
As elections approach, most Israelis become amateur analysts. They calculate the electoral threshold, weigh surplus vote agreements, assemble and dismantle coalitions, and in the end, they slip a ballot into the envelope for a party or a leader they do not really believe in.
Millions leave the polling station disappointed, and then spend the next four years wondering why reality is so grim. The answer is simple. You, the voter, are responsible. Tactical voting produces petty politics, and petty politics produces yet another generation without a horizon or a vision.
I have one question for everyone who talks about the change bloc. What change, exactly? An end to the occupation? Serious political negotiations? Perhaps an end to the wars we ourselves have initiated across the region? A withdrawal from Lebanon, Syria, Iran, or at least Gaza?
Not a chance. All of it is off the table, and every one of the candidates leaves it unmentioned, even in a whisper.
As for reining in the pogromists in the territories, the settlers who murder, burn villages, and drive shepherds off their land, there is nothing to discuss at all. Dismantling settlements is on nobody’s agenda.
Even gradually phasing them out, the most minimal step anyone could imagine, is missing from every platform and every speech. That silence is a declaration in its own right.
When they say change, they mean more of the same, minus the daily havoc of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, the coalition of corruption and extremism.
They offer themselves as tidier, more respectable managers of the very same filth, the same social gaps, the same cruel and distorted economy. Removing Netanyahu and his far-right allies from power would be a welcome and necessary change. But it must be the starting point of change, not its end goal.
Israel's new operating system
Only one party offers exactly what most voters in the change bloc actually want.
Peace as an aspiration and negotiations as a practice. An end to the occupation. Justice for all. Social equality. Affordable housing. Rent control. A minimum wage that makes a decent life possible. And an uncompromising struggle that runs from the street into the government, all the time, for all of us.
That party is A Place For Us All, and it says out loud what so many people whisper to themselves on their way to the polls.
This alternative is precisely the one everyone has declared war on. You are wasting votes, they tell us. Really? The real wasters of votes fall into two categories. The first are the illusionists who win the public’s trust and then, for an entire term, do one thing only: secure themselves a seat for another term of nothing at all.
The second are those with no hope, no energy, and no enthusiasm to offer. Because of them, masses stay home on Election Day for one simple reason. They have nobody to vote for. Those are the votes that go to waste, the ones that never leave the house.
We are the real thing. Values without compromise. Proven resilience in every struggle that demands courage. Human solidarity that leaves nobody out. We bring young people into a life of political responsibility. We bring back to the ballot box large numbers of voters who gave up long ago because conventional politics bored them into despair.
We are the ones we have been waiting for all these years. We will keep fighting for a better public life and for tangible social gains. In the Knesset and outside it. In the streets and in the corridors of power. Because this struggle is bigger than any single election campaign.
We are Israel’s new operating system. The purple sunrise rising against all the sad sunsets of the bloc of sorrow and apology. On Election Day, you can cast your vote based on petty calculations, or you can cast it based on great faith. Only one of the two can give birth to a new reality.
The writer is a Knesset candidate for A Place For Us All.