Read: The two things that will determine Netanyahu’s fate

On the Palestinian issue, the divide between Blue and White and the Likud is subtle but crucial. Centrists share the fear of the right—that a precipitous withdrawal could turn the West Bank into another Gaza, risking a Hamas takeover and rocket attacks on Israeli cities. But centrists also share the fear of the left—that the occupation of the Palestinians threatens Israel as a democracy and as a Jewish-majority state. A centrist tends to have two nightmares: that there won’t be a Palestinian state and the occupation will continue indefinitely, and that there will be a Palestinian state and Israel won’t be able to adequately defend itself from narrow borders in a disintegrating Middle East.

Despite a shared pessimism with the right about the chances for peace anytime soon, centrists believe that Israel must hold open that possibility—if only, as Blue and White’s Gantz recently put it, to prove to our children that we tried. And, implicitly, to prove to an increasingly skeptical international community that Israel remains committed to an eventual two-state solution.

No less crucial for Israel’s future is the divide between Blue and White and the right on democracy. Netanyahu’s Jewish-state law, which passed half a year ago and which reiterates Israel’s long-standing self-definition as the state of the Jewish people, upset the delicate balance between this country’s two essential identities: as the homeland of all Jews, whether or not they are citizens of Israel, and as the state of all its citizens, whether or not they are Jews. The law sins not so much for what it contains but for what it omits: a definition of the state not only as Jewish but as democratic. And while a law guaranteeing individual rights does exist, no law defines the nature of the state as democratic. Gantz has promised to amend the Jewish-state law.

Netanyahu’s apparent motive in emphasizing the Jewishness of the state was to push back against those in the legal system who downplay Israel’s Jewish identity. But here, too, he is fighting against ghosts: That tendency, while prevalent in the 1990s, has been suppressed by a more conservative supreme court. The Jewishness of Israel is no longer seriously challenged within Israel. And if the law’s purpose is simply to preempt such future challenges, then why not also define the state as democratic?

If anything, it is Israel’s democratic identity, and not its Jewishness, that is under threat today—most of all, from Netanyahu himself. In one of the most cynical moves of his career, he sponsored the merger of the mainstream right-wing party Jewish Home with the far-right fringe party Jewish Power, whose leaders have, in the past, celebrated terrorism against Palestinians. Netanyahu initiated the move precisely because Jewish Power is so marginal and had almost no chance of passing the electoral threshold, thereby losing some votes for the right-wing bloc. In the process of preserving those votes, Netanyahu has legitimized a racist, pro-terror party and debased the state he is committed to defend.