Israelis went to the polls today convinced that the life of their nation hangs on the result.

Both camps say so. The Times of Israel summed up the mood: Each side insists that only its own candidates can keep Israel alive, and its opponents will ruin the country. The paper asked whether there is any outcome the whole electorate would accept without protests, riots or fistfights.

Three years after October 7, that is the question hanging over the Jewish state.

Look at what is already happening. Haredi protesters against the military draft blocked roads week after week. One night they threw rocks at police and hurt an officer. Last Friday, Palestinian gunmen killed two Israeli soldiers in the West Bank. Jewish extremists attacked a Washington Post photographer, putting her in the hospital; another mob stoned a car carrying European diplomats. Yair Golan, leader of the left-wing Democrats party, has received death threats. Likud and the Religious Zionist Party plan to post nearly 2,000 activists at Arab polling stations.

President Isaac Herzog stood at the memorial for Yitzhak Rabin, murdered by a fellow Jew in 1995, and warned his people that words kill.

The polls cannot even agree on what is real. The Times of Israel’s final survey put Likud at 21 seats and Netanyahu’s bloc at 51, which would fall 10 short of the 61 needed to govern. Channel 14 puts Likud at 30 and the bloc at 62. One side will wake up on Wednesday sure the election was stolen. Researchers at Reichman University point to a survey showing that only 68 percent of Israeli Jews would accept a democratically elected government whose policies they oppose.

Think about that: Nearly 1 in 3 will not accept a loss.

Now look at who is cheering outside the walls. In his sit-down interview with the Jerusalem Post, Benjamin Netanyahu laid it out: “The ayatollah says Netanyahu has to lose. Hamas and Hezbollah say Netanyahu has to lose.” He warned that Iran, about a year ago, “was on the verge of developing several atomic bombs” and was building up to 20,000 ballistic missiles, a military reality that, for the tiny nation of Israel, “is by itself an existential threat.” The regime’s own description of Israel is that it is a “one-bomb country.”

My father, Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry, has described Netanyahu as Israel’s Winston Churchill. In the August 2025 issue of the Philadelphia Trumpet, he wrote that God used Churchill’s courage to save Britain and all of Western civilization from Nazi tyranny and that God is now using Netanyahu’s fighting spirit to hold off radical Islam’s forces of evil.

This fight is everything: If Iran gets the bomb, it will be lights-out for little Israel!

On October 18, after weeks of holding back, United States President Donald Trump gave Netanyahu his “complete and total endorsement” in a long Truth Social post. He warned that if Israelis choose anyone else, America will have to finish the job against Iran alone, and he is not inclined to do so. Commentator Gadi Taub said pollsters told him that endorsement may be worth one or even two seats. In a race this close, two seats could decide everything.

The ayatollahs want Netanyahu gone. Hamas wants Netanyahu gone. Hezbollah wants Netanyahu gone. And half of Israel wants him gone.

I can’t figure out how a nation surrounded by enemies sworn to wipe it off the map can hate its own wartime leader more than it fears its main enemies’ terrorists and nuclear bombs. But that is exactly what we are seeing.

Where is God in any of this? Watch the rallies. Read the polls. You will find coalition math and back-channel deals. You will not find anyone asking what God thinks. Yet God has a great deal to say about the kind of leader Israelis are judging today.

The Bible describes the tribe of Judah as having a lionlike quality (Genesis 49:9). That spirit is real, and it is rare. In the life of Benjamin Netanyahu, you can see what it costs a man to live by it.

In “Netanyahu: Israel’s Rising Lion,” my father wrote that Ezekiel 33:1-6 is a prophecy about both Churchill and Netanyahu: courageous watchmen who roar like lions to rouse their people to fight evil. But a significant change comes in verse 7. As the threats facing our world grow beyond what any political leader can solve, God raises up a new watchman to warn the people, one who, unlike Churchill and Netanyahu, was not elected. “The success that Israel has had with Operation Rising Lion is going to give way to the end of the watchman work of a man chosen by the people,” my father wrote. “Then there will be only one watchman message left—that of God’s watchman, before the worst suffering ever on Earth!”

Winston Churchill was Britain’s last lion. Benjamin Netanyahu is the last lion in any nation of Israel. (The United States, Britain and related nations also descend from the ancient Israelites.) Netanyahu is holding off the atomic forces of evil, but the clock is ticking. That is why you need to heed the message of God’s watchman, a man who warns you, just as the prophets of the Bible did, not only of coming national catastrophes but of the sins that cause them.

Request your free copy of Winston S. Churchill: The Watchman.