Eran Rolnik, 22 June 2026
Carolina Landsmann has offered an important key to reading Benjamin Netanyahu's recent moves. The con artist whose fraud has blown up does not seek a way forward, but rather to cover the tracks that led to his great diplomatic failure: diverting Israel's political agenda from the Palestinian question to the Iranian nuclear program.
I wish to follow this line inward: from the apocalyptic logic of a prime minister who, by denying the reality of 1967, has dragged his nation and Diaspora Jews back into the existential anxieties of 1948 and into the psychopolitical structure that underlies that regression, and from there to the challenge posed by the coming election.
The 20th-century German-British psychoanalyst Herbert Rosenfeld, working with patients with borderline personality organization, described what unfolds in a mind ruled by destructive narcissism. The destructive parts of the self organize themselves into a kind of internal gang that seizes control of the personality. The gang's power lies in the way it alternates between two roles. First it seduces: It appeals to the dependent, needy part and promises it supremacy – "join us and you will be invincible." Then, once the ego has surrendered itself, the gang assumes the role of the mafioso collecting protection money, branding every appeal for genuine outside help as betrayal.
The parallel at the national level is hard to miss. The gang's two roles are precisely the two stages that Israeli society has passed through during Netanyahu's years in power.
First came the seduction. Israelis were invited to join the Bibi-ist fantasy of unlimited power, power that permits the denial of the most basic facts of their existence: a state that need answer to no one – not to a court, not to its allies, not to international norms and at times not even to facts. Anyone who mentioned a limit of any kind – a judge, a journalist, an officer or a public servant with a conscience – was marked as an agent of the "deep state" or as a defeatist out to sabotage the great promise. The judicial overhaul was meant not only to strengthen the gang's grip on power but also to entrench its hold over Israelis' distorted picture of the world.
Then came October 7. The fantasy shattered against the wall of reality, and the gang switched roles. Now it no longer promises power, but protection. Netanyahu steps forward and says: All around you are nothing but enemies and dangers; even those you took for allies proved to be a broken reed, and only I can protect you.
Israelis protesting against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu outside his corruption trial at Tel Aviv's District Court, on Tuesday. Credit: Tomer Appelbaum
This is the heart of the paradox. The very weakness he helped to create becomes his most valuable political asset. The more frightened the public, the greater – ostensibly – the need for the man who promises to save it.
Here the diagnosis must be completed. The destructive appetite of a leader who sees reality closing in on him from every side does not sufficiently explain Netanyahu's pull over broad audiences, even in his present incarnation as a man whose failure echoes far and wide.
Alongside the appetite for destruction, two additional forces are at work. The first is the fascination with the leader who has no conscience: that primal human attraction to the leader who appears to be unbound by moral restraint. The second is the fear of the collapse that would come with acknowledging the catastrophe he brought upon his people. Large segments of the public, and at times even his fiercest opponents, continue to see in Netanyahu an exceptional figure: a clever, experienced man whose very lack of inhibition appears, paradoxically, to be a source of strength in difficult hard times.
This is the gang's most profound success: not merely to win the loyalty of its supporters, but to conquer the imagination and the political horizons of society as a whole.
At the core of destructive narcissism, then, stands not only a stratagem but an attraction to annihilation itself. Rosenfeld showed how this attraction cloaks itself in the language of resilience and strength, until the life drive can no longer be distinguished from the death drive. This admixture is plainly visible in Israeli society and culture today. This is the real danger now. An organization cornered does not retreat quietly; it seeks to take its entire surroundings down with it. This characteristic may yet play a central role in Netanyahu's efforts to evade justice and defer the moment of reckoning, as he seeks once more to draw us all in – supporters and opponents alike – into a maelstrom that will swallow up the tracks.
But Rosenfeld also pointed to a way out. Recovery does not begin with a stronger leader but with withdrawal: when the ego severs its pact with its own destructive parts and returns to relying on good, realistic objects: boundaries, trust relationships and a recognition of the limits of power.
This, to my mind, is the criterion by which the political alternatives in Israel should be judged. Not who promises the strongest protection or some new cognitive bypass around the Palestinian issue, but who offers Israeli society release from the need for a savior; not who promises greater power, but who is willing to acknowledge that a healthy society does not depend on one person, however charismatic or decent.
The test is not a simple one. Much of the political system goes on speaking the language of power, control and more efficient management. Even when the intentions are good and the values entirely different, the basic promise remains the same: Choose the right leader, and he will solve the problem for you. But Israel's crisis is too deep to be resolved by swapping one savior for another.
The unconscious pact that the overwhelming majority of Israelis made with the "gang" is not the only danger. In October, in a column on "the other Israel," I pointed to the other face of that avoidance of moral reckoning: not the narcissistic pact with power, but the melancholy of the opposing camp. Israeli society, I wrote then, refuses to mourn. It processes the failure of October 7 in military and technical terms while avoiding any moral reckoning. The camp of Netanyahu's opponents may offer a conscience, but not always a reckoning and a change. On the scale of the harm to innocents in Gaza, the magnitude of the devastation Israel continues to wreak in Lebanon and the organized destruction of Palestinian life in the occupied territories, the "anyone but Bibi" camp also remains silent.
It now becomes possible to see that the two phenomena are one. The pact with the internal gang and the refusal to mourn are two modes of the same avoidance: One seeks refuge in omnipotence; the other in nostalgia. Both avoid confronting irreversible loss: the painful acknowledgement that there is no savior, and that we ourselves must bear the loss and the responsibility. The "other Israel" is no alternative so long as it remains desperate for a "unity of the camps" that would restore everything to how it was, as if by magic, instead of taking on the hard work of separation.
And from here the decisive distinction. A genuine alternative is not one that promises to restore Israel to itself without Netanyahu, but rather the one that is willing to convert the melancholic conscience into a Jewish-Arab political force that would break the cycle of nostalgia and victimhood and accept responsibility. The coming election is not merely a choice between leaders or parties, but between continuing to lean on the omnipotent promise – in all its various, interchangeable guises on the right and in the self-styled liberal center – and taking the difficult step of weaning ourselves off it.
The real question is not who will save us from the gang and its fantasies of power, but whether we can once again become a society that recognizes its structural weaknesses and its real challenges, that takes responsibility for its present and for its future – and has no need for a savior.
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Eran Rolnik is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and historian whose books include "Freud in Zion: Psychoanalysis and the Making of Modern Jewish Identity."