The honourable, non-Netanyahu, anti-Netanyahu face of Israel

In addition to fomenting and inciting violence against Jews, the anti-Israel agitators and demonstrators who demonise Israel as a state, Israelis, and supporters of Israel collectively with calls for “Death to Israel”, “Death to the IDF”, and “Death to Zionists” wilfully ignore all those Israelis and Zionists who have spoken out against and are condemning the policies and actions of the Netanyahu government. 

A case in point is the open letter addressed to US President Donald Trump by retired Israeli Major General Matan Vilnai as chair of Commanders for Israel’s Security (CIS) in advance of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent trip to Washington, DC. 

CIS is a movement made up of “more than 550 retired Israel Defense Forces [IDF] colonels and generals as well as Mossad, Shin Bet [Internal Security], police, National Security Council, and diplomatic corps equivalents” who are “committed to securing Israel’s future as the strong democratic home of the Jewish people”. According to its mission statement, “CIS views separation from the Palestinians, leading to an eventual two-state solution, as a most essential condition for a secure future and is convinced that the continued slide towards a one-state reality jeopardises that vision and must be reversed”. 

This alone puts CIS and its members on the other side of the Israeli political divide from the Netanyahu government, which has consistently sought to undermine Israel’s democracy and categorically rejects any consideration, let alone recognition, of Palestinian rights and Palestinian self-determination in any shape or form. 

Vilnai’s letter, couched as a “Red Alert”, calls President Trump’s attention to the looming “calamity” of “escalating violence” by, to use Vilnai’s term, “Jewish terrorists” – that is, radical Israeli settlers – against Palestinian civilians in the West Bank. “It is no secret,” Vilnai wrote, “that certain members of our current government orchestrate much of this chaos, including by shielding their followers, who are armed and driven by messianic impulses, from the law and its enforcement … Should the rising swell in Jewish settler terror activity and the government policy of choking the Palestinian Authority (financially and otherwise) continue, the consequences may prove even more catastrophic than the 7 October Hamas atrocities and its multi-front fallout.” 

The letter’s warning is unambiguous and blunt. “Unless arrested swiftly and decisively, escalating violence in the West Bank is poised to ignite the region and carries severe ramifications for both Israeli security and US regional interests.” 

As The New York Times columnist Bret Stephens has pointed out, the violence in question includes, most recently, settler rampages “in several Palestinian villages, reportedly setting fire to a home and two mosques, attacking a stonecutting factory and committing other acts of outright terrorism”. In 2025, Stephens went on, citing a Times of Israel report, there were 867 incidents of such “nationalistic crime and settler violence … up from 682 the previous year”. 

To understand the true significance of this letter, we must focus on the fact that, as Stephens noted accurately, “Vilnai is no peacenik”. But neither is he an ultranationalist or crypto fascist in the mould of far too many members of the present Israeli government, including but by no means limited to National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. On the contrary, Vilnai is as “Israeli establishment” as they come. So are the other CIS members. But I am referring here to the pre-Netanyahu Israeli establishment that was committed to the vision of a simultaneously Jewish and democratic Israel, one rooted in adherence to law and the protection of the civil and legal rights of all for whom Israel is responsible, Israeli citizens and residents, as well as Palestinian civilians in the West Bank and Gaza. 

Vilnai epitomises that establishment. Born in Jerusalem in 1944, he served as a major general in the IDF before holding numerous government positions between 1999 and 2012, including deputy minister of defence and minister for home front defence. From 2012 to 2017, he served as Israel’s ambassador to China. “But,” again in Stephens’ words, “like many other patriotic Israelis, he’s aghast at a government that prioritises the prime minister’s political needs and his Cabinet’s ideological obsessions over the rule of law”. 

It is also important to note here that the members of the CIS have long been opposed to the Netanyahu government’s vision of indefinite if not permanent Israeli control over the West Bank and Gaza. In a prior letter to Trump, dated 14 December 2025, Vilnai wrote that, “Based on our cumulative millennia of security experience, it is our professional judgement that once Gaza is demilitarised, the IDF can effectively defend our border and nearby communities from within Israel’s sovereign territory.” 

Not only that. In the same letter, Vilnai emphasised that “the involvement of the Palestinian Authority – however imperfect and in need of reform — is essential” in the implementation of the plan, and that “early Palestinian Authority involvement will ensure a smooth eventual transition to reformed PA governance and signal commitment to a future in which Gaza and the West Bank form a single polity”. 

Contrary to the jingoism emanating from Netanyahu and other members of his government, the CIS members with their “cumulative millennia of security experience” believe that the eventual withdrawal of the IDF from Gaza and returning it to a non-Hamas led Palestinian governance is not only possible but in Israel’s best interests and that the Palestinian Authority, shunned by Netanyahu ever since he became prime minister in 2009, must play a part in this process. In other words, Vilnai and the CIS affirmatively support an eventual union of Gaza and the West Bank into “a single polity”, in effect, a two-state solution. 

Vilnai and the CIS aren’t outliers on the Israeli scene. Far from it. Gadi Eisenkot, the former chief of the IDF General Staff who has the greatest chance of replacing Netanyahu as prime minister in Israel’s coming October elections, is cast in the same mould. As a Knesset member of the opposition National Unity party, together with former Defense Minister Benny Gantz, he joined the short-lived emergency war government in the aftermath of the 7 October pogrom. However, Eisenkot, whose son and nephew were killed fighting Hamas, publicly criticised Netanyahu’s conduct of the Gaza war while a member of that government. 

“As a democracy,” Eisenkot said in a January 2024 television interview, “the State of Israel needs to ask itself after such a serious event, ‘How do we continue from here with a leadership that has failed us miserably?’” 

Several months later, in June 2024, both Eisenkot and Gantz resigned from the war government. 

Yair Golan, a former deputy chief of the IDF General Staff and the leader of Israel’s left-wing Democrats party, is another retired major general who has been unsparing in his criticism of Netanyahu and his government. On 7 October, he was hailed as a hero for courageously rescuing survivors of the Hamas rampage. 

The likes of Vilnai, Eisenkot, Golan, and the CIS members remind us of the honourable, the non-Netanyahu and anti-Netanyahu face of Israel. They personify the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who have demonstrated against the present extremist Israeli government since its inception and who want Israel’s future to be a continuation of its pre-Netanyahu past. And they deserve our acclamation and support as they fight for Israel’s soul and moral integrity. 

• Menachem Z Rosensaft is visiting professor of the practice at Cornell Law School and lecturer-in-law at Columbia Law School. His most recent book is Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai after Auschwitz.