Netanyahu’s challengers are selling the same poison

Iran's hostility has hardened. Turkey has turned venomous. The peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan are fraying. The Abraham Accords have lost their momentum and their moral cover. Israel is now widely described as a pariah state, and increasingly as an apartheid one. The label is not propaganda, but a description of a state beyond the pale.

Another irony: Israel calls itself the Middle East's only democracy, yet both Eisenkot and Bennett rule out inviting Palestinian parties into a coalition. Their disdain extends beyond the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza to the Palestinian citizens of Israel-20 percent of the population.

Once again, more than two million Israeli Palestinians will have no voice in their own government. If Israel denies the rights of Palestinians within its own borders, will it ever accept the rights of those living outside them, which are viewed as a mortal threat? To deny Palestinians their right to a state is to forfeit the moral ground on which Israel's own claim to statehood rests.

What would it take? Two things must happen. Neither is easy, but both are necessary.

First, Washington must stop talking and start acting. Successive administrations have endorsed two states while funding the machinery that makes two states impossible. Words without leverage are complicity.

American public opinion has already moved. Politics will follow, though slowly. If Republicans lose the House in the midterms, and if a Democratic president takes office in 2029, which is more than likely, the opening for a genuine policy shift-recognition of Palestinian statehood, and real pressure on Israel to accept it-becomes real for the first time in a generation.

Second, and more important: the change must come from Israelis themselves. No foreign power can rewrite a nation's self-understanding. Only Israelis can do that.

There remains a serious constituency inside Israel that knows the truth-that Palestinian statehood is not a threat to Israel but the only path to its survival as a Jewish and democratic state. That constituency must stop whispering.

It must be organized with courage. It must speak publicly, relentlessly, and without apology. It must tell the Israeli public what its leaders will not: that the danger is not a Palestinian state. The danger is the endless occupation that is hollowing Israel out.

This will be slow, thankless, tedious work. It may take a decade, but there is no alternative.

I hold no illusions that the next government will pursue two states. But it may be less brutal, less contemptuous, and less openly annexationist. It is not the opening of a door, but the cracking open of a window. Cracks are where dialogue begins.

The question before Israelis is not which politician to elect. It is whether anyone among them has the courage to tell their own people the truth.

Eighty years of blood has settled nothing. Another eighty will settle nothing. Israel's enemies did not bring it to this pass. Its own leaders did-and now its challengers are prescribing the same poison, only with a different color.