Peter Beaumont
The Guardian / October 1, 2024
Despite deep unpopularity outside his right-wing base, Israel’s leader continues to use war and political divisions to his advantage.
Jerusalem – At the beginning of September, the discovery that six Israeli hostages had been killed by their Hamas captors as troops operated near the tunnel where they were being held propelled huge crowds into the streets of Tel Aviv and other cities.
The focus of the dismay and anger: the government of Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel’s main trade union, the Histadrut, called a short-lived but significant strike. Opposition politicians spoke of their dismay at the prime minister’s handling of the hostages-for-ceasefire negotiations he has widely been accused of undermining.
Senior military officers and the defence minister, Yoav Gallant, let it be known in private and in public that they preferred a compromise that would prioritise the release of the remaining hostages over Netanyahu’s deal-breaking insistence on keeping military control of the Gaza border area with Egypt.
But despite being deeply unpopular outside his own right-wing base, polling at the end of the month for news outlet Maariv revealed that the Likud party of Netanyahu, which many believed could not personally survive the fallout of Hamas’s surprise attack almost a year ago, would win the largest number of seats if elections were called now.
In the aftermath of Israel’s killing of Hassan Nasrallah, analysts expected that trend to continue, at least in the short term. A poll for Channel 12 on Sunday – two days after the assassination of the Hezbollah leader – showed another slight improvement in his standing, although at the expense of other parties in his coalition.
The reality is that even before Nasrallah’s death, Netanyahu’s weathering of all storms was surprising, as Israel’s year-long war in Gaza drags on, and fighting on fronts from Lebanon to Yemen has sharply escalated in the past week.
On the world stage Netanyahu – and Israel by association – has appeared scorned and isolated. The Israeli prime minister was forced to bring his own chorus of noisy admirers to cheer him from the gallery at the UN general assembly last week, shortly before the Nasrallah killing, as many diplomats walked out.
Inside Israel, a majority still believe he should resign, not least for the security failings that led to 7 October. Yet Netanyahu clings on, paradoxically by gaming the very mechanisms of Israel’s coalition system that have undone previous governments, including Netanyahu’s own.
If the polling shows anything, it is less a resounding vote in his favour and rather a failure of Israel’s opposition to capitalise on his unpopularity. Dahlia Scheindlin, a political analyst and polling expert, separates the story of Netanyahu’s political survival into several discrete phases.
“First, he’s still here because there’s no legal mechanism for going into elections – no matter how badly people feel regarding the government – if the government doesn’t fall.
“In the early days after 7 October a lot of people didn’t want to have elections in the middle of a severe defensive war.
“Then we had a second phase of no serious opposition despite serious levels of distrust. The third phase, around March-April time, saw a return of significant protests but that is also around the time we began to see the regional escalation with Iran kick off. And that’s also when you start to see his revival in surveys.”
Even those who wrote off Netanyahu in the weeks after the 7 October attack, including his longtime bitter critic, the former prime minister Ehud Olmert, have been forced to reassess his durability. Speaking to Politico last November, Olmert painted him as fatally diminished.
“[Netanyahu] has shrunk. He’s destroyed emotionally … [He] has been working all his life on the false pretence that he is Mr Security.”
Today, Olmert credits the fact that Netanyahu is still in office to his complete investment in his own survival, staking everything – personal and Israel’s institutions – on that effort.
“Netanyahu has been an exceptional performer,” he said. “There is no substance, no depth, no real political vision… It’s a performance.
“The thing is, because he has nothing else to sell, what he sells to an unlimited degree is incitement and polarisation. He is brilliant at knowing how to manipulate divisions to strengthen his political base.”
However, Olmert says Netanyahu would still struggle in any elections, falling short of the required governing coalition threshold of 61 out of 120 Knesset seats.
“Throughout this year there has not been a single poll where his coalition received more than 52 seats as against 64 he has now. The problem is that opposition is also divided. It doesn’t have a single personality who has the kind of presence that could create a difference.
“I don’t see one person who has a fire burning in chest, threatening to erupt [and] who will sweep it up. They are all decent people. But they are all too restrained to have the language to confront the poison machine’s operations.”
For Yossi Mekelberg, an associate fellow on the Middle East programme at Chatham House, Netanyahu continues to benefit from the fact that Israel is in the midst of a conflict – even as he is still blamed for its genesis.
“There is a combination of issues from the beginning including the convention in Israel that you don’t replace a prime minister in wartime.”
Mekelberg also sees Netanyahu benefiting from a lack of opposition within Likud and more widely.
“The opposition is weak and there is none within Likud. It’s the Bibi party. There is no comparable situation to British politics where someone can say: ‘Thank you very much but now you are a burden.’”
The dynamics of Netanyahu’s current coalition, Israel’s most right-wing ever, has made it unusually stable. The position of far-right figures like Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who are opposed to any deal that would lead to a ceasefire in Gaza, has allowed Netanyahu to avoid US pressure for a ceasefire and prolong the war. That in turn has kicked the prospect of elections ever further down the road.
And despite noises from the far right that they could quit the coalition, analysts see no real evidence to back the threat.
“There’s no alternative for the far right. [They] think this is their time. And Netanyahu legitimised them,” Mekelberg said.
Last week, in a long-expected move, Netanyahu brought back into the cabinet his Likud rival Gideon Saar and his faction, expanding the coalition in a move designed to undermine the leverage of the far-right parties and act as a foil to Gallant, his key rival.
Scheindlin said that without a government collapse, there are now two potential outcomes: the government goes to a full term or Shas, one of the major ultra-orthodox parties, pulls out of the coalition and forms a new government with the opposition without new elections being called.
Militating against that, however, is that Israel is entering a phase of high intensity conflict against Hezbollah.
None of which makes the future trajectory of either Israeli politics or Netanyahu any more predictable in the immediate term, not least as Israeli governments have often fallen because of issues away from the main agenda of the day.
“It’s not only a question [of Netanyahu’s] will to survive,” added Mekelberg. “It’s about the survival of Israel as we knew it.
“It is not that Israel is going to go away. It’s whether it’s the same Israel, that’s the worry. You see how society is changing, how the values of its democratic system are compromised and values undermined.”
Peter Beaumont is a senior international reporter
