Israeli president Isaac Herzog casts his ballot at a polling station in Jerusalem, during Election Day in Israel, October 27, 2026. (Yonatan Sindel/FLASH90)
It’s Friday, October 30, and throughout the 2015 election, Isaac Herzog, Benjamin Netanyahu’s rival in the race for prime minister, went around laying out his plan for defeating Netanyahu. There was talk of a “psychological gap” between the two big parties, and of complex coalitions stretching from the Arab city of Umm al-Fahm, through centrist Mizrachi Moshe Kahlon’s periphery voters, to Nokdim, the settlement where Avigdor Liberman, the Yisrael Beiteinu leader, lives. In the end the plan always came down to Netanyahu realizing he had lost by a wide margin and stepping down. I remember telling Herzog that you can’t plan a fight on the assumption the other guy will take a dive.
