Two Nations, Two Elections, One Fate |
Two Nations, Two Elections, One Fate
The clock is ticking for both Israel and the United States. What happens next?
Max Dublin | October 17, 2026
Had the Flydubai attempted hijacking succeeded, it would have made for quite an October surprise leading up to the Israeli general elections slated for October 27. Since that failed attempt, we have learned through interrogations that the co-pilot’s goal was to crash the plane into a terminal of Ben Gurion airport, in which case not only the passengers and crew on the plane, but also potentially thousands of other people would have been killed. In other words, the hijacking was planned as a 9/11 copycat terrorist attack.
After 9/11, America was briefly united in outrage, but politics being politics, it was not long before the finger-pointing began. Since October 7, many pundits have observed that, given its small population, for Israel, October 7 was the equivalent of about a dozen 9/11s, and for a while it too united the state. However, even in Israel, that unity soon began to fall apart. And that division is very much at the fore going into the upcoming election.
The main leader of the opposition is Gadi Eisenkot, founder of the Yashar party. As a retired general and former chief of staff of the IDF, he has a great résumé. He also lost a son early in the war, and, not surprisingly, that fact has a great deal of cachet in Israeli society. Moreover, Eisenkot is descended not from the old-guard Ashkenazi establishment that arrived from Europe in the early days of the Zionist movement, but from Mizrachi parents from Morocco. That matters because at this point in history, the majority of Israelis claim eastern descent. He has been in politics only since 2022, when he won a seat in parliament as a member of Benny Ganz’s National Unity Party and, after October 7, was briefly a non-voting observer in........