Israel’s strongman faces re-election jitters
“Woe unto the man whose dreams come true, because he may find he had the wrong dreams,” the American happiness expert and Harvard professor Arthur Brooks warns, and were he in a reflective mood, it’s a sentiment Benjamin Netanyahu may well agree with as he ponders his political future.
When US President Donald Trump decided to launch a full-scale war with Iran in late February, it seemed as if Netanyahu’s fantasies had been realised. The Israeli prime minister had been lobbying Trump to strike Iran, including in a now infamous February 11 meeting in which he argued that the theocratic Tehran regime was ripe to be overthrown.
The war started off with a spectacular success – the killing of Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei – and had almost universal support among Jewish Israelis.
Four months later, that initial success looks like fool’s gold. The Iranian regime remains in place and is widely judged to have emerged as the war’s strategic winner. Meanwhile, Netanyahu’s relationship with Trump has taken a battering. More broadly, Israel has never been less popular with the American people, raising long-term doubts about its most important security relationship. The biggest loser from the war, for now, is the man who wanted it the most.
“You won’t find anyone in Israel who doesn’t think this deal is somewhere between a disaster and a catastrophe,” Mark Sofer, who served as Israel’s ambassador to Australia from 2017 to 2020, says of the memorandum of understanding signed between the US and Iran.
“This agreement is highly detrimental to Israel and hasn’t achieved any of the aims Netanyahu thought would come out of this war.”
Netanyahu has been the undisputed master of Israeli politics: he first became prime minister in 1996 and has been in power for most of the time since.
“Netanyahu is one of the cleverest politicians on the planet,” says Ian Parmeter, a former diplomat who is now a Middle East expert at the Australian National University.
But Netanyahu’s poll ratings have been consistently poor for the past three years. First he tried to overhaul Israel’s judicial system, sparking massive protests. Then he oversaw the worst security failure in Israeli history: Hamas’ October 7 attacks, which led to the death of 1200 people.
He has achieved impressive tactical victories against Israel’s opponents – including the killing of top Hamas and Hezbollah leaders – but Hamas remains in power in Gaza and Hezbollah continues to lob bombs from Lebanon into northern Israel.
Netanyahu must face a reckoning with voters by the end of October at the latest, and his prospects look grim. Defeat could entail not just the end of his political career but time in jail, if he is found guilty on longstanding fraud and corruption charges.
“In a country where the swing vote is extremely small, there’s been a relatively huge swing away from Netanyahu in the last few years, and it seems that people have, generally speaking, made up their minds on whether they support him or not,” Sofer says.
Netanyahu’s opponents are using the war in Iran to paint him as a man of the past, one who has failed to keep Israelis safe and has mishandled relations with the US.
Netanyahu’s Likud party has shelved plans to make Netanyahu’s close ties with Trump a focal point of his re-election campaign, according to Israeli outlet i24News.
“He’s been humiliated by being left out of the negotiations with Iran and … he appears to have lost a lot of credibility with Trump when he claimed to have an intimate relationship,” Parmeter says.
While insisting that they still work well together, Trump has lashed out at Netanyahu as “crazy” and criticised Israel for failing to protect civilian lives while going after Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Since the end of 2022, Netanyahu has governed with the most far-right coalition in Israeli history. To stay in power he has had to placate radical politicians such as Itamar Ben-Gvir and offer concessions to ultra-orthodox Jews, including exemptions from military service that infuriate more secular Israelis.
The polls have consistently shown Netanyahu’s coalition hovering around 50 seats, well below the 61 required to form a government. Meanwhile, the so-called Zionist opposition bloc sits on about 57 seats, on the precipice of power.
‘He bestrides the Israeli political system like a colossus so he can’t be written off.’
Ian Parmeter, a former diplomat who is now a Middle East expert at the Australian National University
Netanyahu’s opponents span from the right to the left, united by their desire to force him from office. Conservative Naftali Bennett and centrist Yair Lapid – who governed in a power-sharing arrangement from 2021 to 2022 – have again united and formed a new alliance known as Together.
In recent weeks, Gadi Eisenkot, a former head of the Israeli military, has been surging in the polls, becoming the most popular opposition leader.
Given the fractured state of the opposition and the quirks of Israel’s proportional electoral system, few are willing to consign Netanyahu to history just yet. “He bestrides the Israeli political system like a colossus so he can’t be written off,” Parmeter says.
Joel Burnie, executive manager of the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council, says: “Israelis are naturally very interested in the memorandum of understanding and related strategic developments, but it is too soon to judge their implications for an election that is yet to be called.”
Sofer, the former Israeli ambassador to Australia, is more definitive. “At this juncture, I cannot envisage a situation in which Netanyahu wins the next elections,” he says.
“On the other hand, I can envisage a scenario in which the opposition doesn’t reach the 61 seats necessary to set up a government.”
This could require a new government formed with the support of the so-called Arab parties, even though several opposition leaders have vowed to exclude them from any coalition.
Or for Netanyahu to step down, allowing Likud to enter a power-sharing agreement with the opposition. Or for Israelis to head back to the polls again.
With less than four months until polling day, uncertainties abound and the stakes are immense. “These aren’t regular elections,” Sofer says. “From an Israeli point of view they are almost existential.”
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