Ilan Goldenberg

We just saw what happened in Hungary.

And there is an opportunity that those elections aren't going to necessarily bring you the most left-leaning government you could ever imagine in Israel.

The alternative to Netanyahu is probably kind of a center to center-right government.

But it's one where at least you have people you can work with.

I think what you will see is, first of all, you're going to stop digging, right?

So going back to Ben-Gavir, for example, yeah, his numbers have gone up, but also Smotrich's numbers have gone down, these two parties together.

His numbers in terms of support.

Two real extremists currently in the government, yeah.

Exactly.

Two extremists currently in the government basically stays the same.

But exactly, guys like Smotrich and Ben-Gavir aren't in this new government, right?

And Smotrich and Ben-Gavir, these extremists, play this unique role of essentially being kingmakers, which gives them huge amounts of leverage in Israeli decision-making and pushes the government to more terrible and terrible places.

Whereas if you had, instead,

guys like Yair Lapid or Yair Golan, who are not ideal, but these are kind of the Israeli center-left playing the kingmaker role, that's a meaningful difference.

Yair Golan being a retired general who ran down to southern Israel on October 7th and saved a lot of people, just basically got up and went down there, but also is very much arguing for a two-state solution and is arguing for some of these things.

And what you could get then at least is a government that at least starts cracking down on things like what we are seeing in the West Bank and extremist settler violence in the West Bank.

We're at J Street pushing for legislation actually on Capitol Hill called the West Bank Violence Prevention Act.

that at this point has overwhelming support of Senate Democrats, more than 40, and 130 or so members of the House, which would start to impose sanctions on these guys, on these extremist settlers, but could actually make a real profound difference because

All these things, the violence and the settlements and all of it is tied together.

All these institutions are tied together.