Three questions Israelis must ask themselves before voting on October 27 - opinion

OCTOBER 4, 2026 13:58Updated: OCTOBER 4, 2026 14:39In preparation for the upcoming Israeli elections scheduled for October 27, I thought it would be worthwhile to ask the prime ministerial candidates whose chances at least put them in competition for the position what they see as the major problems facing Israel today and how they plan to address them.One would think, of course, that providing this information to the electorate would be a given in any democratic society. However, in the polarized world in which we now live, politics seems to have been dumbed down to personal rather than ideological battles.In an attempt to change the discourse, a colleague and I prepared an extensive questionnaire addressing three major subject areas: (a) how candidates structured their party lists and their associated campaigns; (b) what they perceive as the key challenges facing Israel; (c) their approaches to foreign policy issues, including reversing the effects of our having become a pariah state in the opinion of most of the world.About six weeks ago, I sent the document in Hebrew to all the identified candidates except the current prime minister.Sadly, but not unexpectedly, I received only one response, and that was from the Bennett/Lapid camp.From the others, despite almost daily dispatches of my blogs and op-eds to all of them, nary a peep. Thankfully, I have thick skin and can handle rejection, although I’m not sure why they didn’t even offer the courtesy of a note saying they weren’t interested in responding.Nevertheless, on September 29, I had an extended conversation with fellow Chicagoan Jeremy Saltan, an American-born Israeli political analyst, strategist, and former Knesset faction secretary, who is part of the B’Yachad party’s Knesset slate in the upcoming election. He was good enough to spend time with me by phone to discuss many of the points in the questionnaire.As the reader can see the party’s entire platform at https://be-yahad.org.il/en/home-en, there is no need for me to repeat all of it here, but it can be summarized as follows:Governance and institutional reformElectoral reform: Imposing an eight-year term limit for the office of the prime minister. Constitution: Promoting a long-awaited constitution that will be rooted in two sections: (1) the Declaration of Independence as its preamble; and (2) a Basic Law: Legislation section clearly defining the process for the passing of, and judicial review of, Basic Laws, as well as the powers allocated to the three branches of government: executive, legislative, and judicial.Educational reform: Recognition that the education system is broken and needs restructuring for the 21st century and beyond.Starting salaries for teachers need to be raised, principals need to be given more autonomy, and the core curriculum (i.e., math, science, and English) needs to be taught in every school, including those in the haredi and Arab communities.Further, expanding state-haredi (Mamlachti Haredi) schools that teach core subjects while allowing haredim to maintain their identity and way of life.Sixty percent of the curriculum in all schools, including Mamlachti Haredi ones, will be composed of the common core subjects; 40% will be at the discretion of individual communities. Schools that don’t meet these requirements will not receive state funding.State inquiry: Establish a state commission of inquiry into the October 7 attack, to be launched on the new government’s first day.National resilience: Fostering national unity, reducing political polarization, and restoring public trust in state institutions.Civic duty and social policyUniversal conscription (“equality of burden”): Ensuring that all segments of society, including the ultra-Orthodox community, share the military, civic, and national service burden of the state.For all sectors, receiving state benefits will depend on completing military or national service. The vision, when it comes to enlistment, education, and the workforce, is for all parts of society to be part of one shared Israeli story.Cost of living: Prioritizing economic measures to lower both housing prices and the day-to-day cost of living, including slashing bureaucracy and import barriers, dismantling monopolies, and making it easier to build apartments and rent them long-term.Security and foreign policyAn active security doctrine: Maintaining a firm, assertive security policy on all fronts, alongside deepening alliances with moderate elements in the region.Conscripting the 20,000 soldiers that the IDF says it is short of today.Declaring Qatar, with its present modus operandi, as an enemy state.Zionist and democratic identity: Preserving Israel as a Jewish, democratic, and liberal state in the spirit of our founders.Repairing Israel’s reputation: A full-court press to reestablish Israel’s diplomatic credibility worldwide, with special attention to strengthening ties with members of both political parties in the US, based on Naftali Bennett’s continued personal relationships with American politicians even after he ended his earlier term as prime minister.For those specifically interested in the party’s slate, its list of candidates for the Knesset and associated biographies can be found here: https://be-yahad.org.il/en/teamEvery voter can decide whether this is a platform with which he or she can identify. This is not an endorsement of any candidate but rather an effort to help all of us, the voting public, understand what issues the party in question sees as important.But what of the others who did not respond? Do they not care enough to provide at least the basic data that every thinking voter should have access to?Or is it that the English-speaking population here is perceived as unimportant? If that is an issue, it is easy to refute.There are as many as 300,000 English-speaking voters in the electorate.If they were to vote as a bloc, they would command seven Knesset seats.While we don’t vote as a bloc, an abnormally high percentage of us do vote, so our influence is magnified beyond our absolute numbers.It would certainly seem that we, along with the entire electorate, are owed a full exposition of the platform of every party that would like our vote.October 27 will be a critical election, as it will decide what direction the country will take after a decade in which we experienced a mass health casualty event, three years of a seven-front war that continues, a year of seemingly nonstop demonstrations against judicial reform, which many saw as the end of democracy, and the emigration of 270,000 citizens (almost 3% of the population) in the last three years.Any party that wants our votes needs to show that, at a minimum, it acknowledges the challenges it will face if elected and is prepared to meet them in the most productive way possible.Those candidates who choose not to share their intentions simply do not deserve our votes.The writer, a 42-year resident of Jerusalem, is a former national president of the Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel, a past chairman of the board of the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies, and a board member of the Israel-America Chamber of Commerce.Follow us on Google