Do we like Isaac Herzog?
Our score: 6 out of 10. Decent record on LGBTQ+ people, racism, climate and political civility, held back by a wartime remark that the ICJ cited and critics call incitement.
Herzog is Israel's president, a mostly ceremonial job he took up in 2021 after years in the Knesset, where he led the opposition. He's a career politician rather than a firebrand, and the job asks him to be the nation's referee rather than a team captain. That matters for how you read him: a lot of what he does is speeches, visits and quiet decisions.
The stain he can't shake is from 12 October 2023, days after the Hamas attack. At a press briefing he said there was “an entire nation out there that is responsible.” The ICJ quoted his words in its genocide case. He hit back in January 2024, calling the case a blood libel and saying the judges “twisted my words” with partial quotes. A UN commission later found his words amounted to incitement, according to activists cited by Al Jazeera. Where you land depends on whether you read the line as collective blame or as a bad sentence in a long briefing.
He also gave his own side of it. In a CBS interview a month later he expressed “my utter pain and sorrow for any innocent casualty on the Palestinian side” and said Israel was following humanitarian law. Critics say the policy matters more than the sorrow, and many protesters said so loudly during his February 2026 Australia trip. Four-day visit, thousands of protesters, pepper spray in Sydney, and a letter from more than 1,000 Jewish Australians asking Albanese to rescind the invite.
On the rest of the harm check, he comes out well. He turned up to Jerusalem's 2025 Pride parade to remember Shira Banki, who was killed at the 2015 parade, and called for “love, respect, and equality” for all groups in Israeli society. He described the IPCC climate report as a grave warning to all of humanity in a 2021 meeting with the US vice president. We found nothing from him on vaccines or trans people, so we can't say more than that.
The pardon saga is the big test of his backbone. Trump publicly pushed him to pardon Netanyahu, calling him “weak and pathetic” in March 2026 for waiting on a Justice Ministry opinion. His office said the decision would be made without pressure from outside or inside, and as of that report he hadn't decided. You may like or loathe the outcome, but he's not folding on cue.
Past trouble is thin. In 2017 the attorney-general closed a corruption case against him over his Labor days for insufficient evidence, while his top aide was likely to be indicted. In July 2026 he told Israelis the election should be free of incitement, saying “elections are not a civil war” and “Do not turn rivals into enemies.” That's a decent thing for a head of state to say in a nasty campaign.