Netanyahu stakes his re-election on the promise of another war with Iran and opposition to Arab parties

In October 2023, as the initial shock of Hamas’s attack was giving way to the realization that it had been the greatest security failure in Israel’s seven decades of statehood, few believed that Benjamin Netanyahu would still be prime minister three years later. Fewer still thought that a country used to broad coalitions and early elections — having gone to the polls on average every 2.4 years between 1996 and the last election in 2022 — would complete a full parliamentary term this time. And fewer still imagined both things happening at once: that after four years of controversy and war, Netanyahu would enter the final stretch of the election campaign, with Israelis due to vote on Tuesday, less popular and less supported than before, yet still with a realistic chance of remaining in power. “I will not surrender,” reads one campaign poster bearing his image.

Netanyahu’s party, Likud, currently holds 32 seats and commands a parliamentary majority with the support of its ultranationalist and ultra-Orthodox allies. Today, however, the picture looks far bleaker. Most polls give Likud between 19 and 20 of the Knesset’s 120 seats. It is the party’s worst polling performance since 2006, when its then leader, Ariel Sharon, broke away to form Kadima amid disagreements over the unilateral withdrawal of settlers and troops from Gaza the previous year.

According to the average of the most reliable polls, the coalition parties are well short of a majority, hovering at around 50 seats. And the likely election winner, former army chief Gadi Eisenkot, has firmly ruled out a national unity government after days of speculation.

But the bloc of Jewish parties opposed to Netanyahu also falls short of a governing majority without the support of the two Arab lists. “It’s very difficult to know what’s going to happen, but Netanyahu is in a weaker position than Eisenkot,” said Tal Schneider, diplomatic and political correspondent for The Times of Israel, during a panel discussion organized by the think tank International Crisis Group. Eisenkot at least has the option of negotiating some form of support from the Arab parties, “but Netanyahu has nowhere to maneuver,” she added.

Netanyahu, however, is a survivor. Every time he has been written off as politically finished, he has managed to stage a comeback. As he did in 2021, when — already under indictment in three corruption and influence-peddling cases — he was ousted by a broad alliance of parties. It took him just a year and a half to return triumphantly to power.

Now, however, he is haunted by a stain on his record. The leader whose political success has long rested on his image as a strongman who would never compromise Israel’s security was in office on the deadliest day in the country’s history: Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023, which left more than 1,200 people dead and saw over 250 taken hostage.

“In any other democratic country, the prime minister probably would not have survived more than a few months after a failure of that magnitude. Much less three years,” said Yossi Mekelberg, professor of international relations at Regent’s University London, on a panel at the British think tank Chatham House, where he is an associate analyst for the Middle East and North Africa program.

Mekelberg argues that the attack, and the fact that “all fronts remain open” three years later, should be central issues in the election campaign.

Failure

That is not what is happening, however. Not even after weeks of revelations about warnings regarding Hamas’s intentions that Netanyahu failed to pass on or adequately assess. Yaakov Katz, an analyst at the Jewish People Policy Institute in Jerusalem and former editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post, explains it this way: “The opposition has largely failed to make this election about substantive political issues,” such as political responsibility for October 7, the conscription of the ultra-Orthodox, inequality, or Israel’s growing diplomatic isolation. “It’s as if, even at his weakest moment, Netanyahu is still able to pull the strings and be the director and screenwriter of what will be discussed.”

Katz points to another strength. On Tuesday, Israelis will head to the polls with largely the same question in mind as in previous elections: Am I for Netanyahu or against Netanyahu? “And,” he stresses, “when deliberation centers on that question, Netanyahu tends to win. When it’s about him, about his personality, he usually comes out victorious.”

For now, the prime minister has managed to turn what many regard as a clear strategic failure into a campaign asset: launching two military campaigns against Iran, alongside the world’s leading military power, the United States, only to emerge with a more emboldened Tehran, an unresolved conflict and daily skirmishes in the Strait of Hormuz.

Day after day, he presents himself as the only leader willing and capable of “finishing the job” if re-elected. By that, he means toppling the regime in Tehran, in contrast to an opposition he portrays as timid and lacking resolve. The argument has gained particular traction over the past two weeks, after one of the opposition leaders, Yair Golan of The Democrats party, described the assassination of Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, at the outset of the war last February as a “mistake” because the country is now ruled by “even more extremist and violent individuals.”

U.S. President Donald Trump reinforced Netanyahu’s narrative on Sunday by becoming the first U.S. president to publicly endorse a candidate in an Israeli election. Trump suggested that the United States would not set out to “finish the job” in Iran if Israelis elected “the wrong Leader, which would be anyone other than Bibi,” using Netanyahu’s nickname.

The prime minister has also been working to rewrite the narrative of October 7. Not only by portraying it as the opening chapter of a kind of redemptive war across the Middle East, extending from Gaza to Iran and encompassing Lebanon, Yemen, the West Bank, Syria and Iraq, but also by openly promoting the conspiracy theory that a “deep state” — a term he usually uses to include military commanders, members of the judiciary and critical journalists — acted against him that day.

His main line of defense is that security officials chose not to wake him in the early hours of the attack because they feared he would order a response that could have changed everything. Last month, his wife Sara advanced an even more conspiratorial claim, suggesting that Golan, a decorated former military officer who won widespread admiration for rushing toward the Gaza border on October 7, must have known about the plans in advance because he was “dressed and ready” while “others knew nothing, including the prime minister.”

Netanyahu is also drawing on another potent electoral asset: racism. He has used it in previous campaigns, but this time the focus is on exploiting the widespread opposition among Jewish Israelis to bringing Arab parties into government. Those parties represent Israel’s roughly two million Palestinian citizens, about one-fifth of the population.

Using artificial intelligence, Likud has inserted Arab lawmakers into campaign videos featuring Eisenkot, while a voice-over warns that a “dangerous left-wing government” would leave Israelis vulnerable. Rather than confronting that narrative, the opposition has largely accepted its premises, either ruling out cooperation with Arab parties or resorting to ambiguous language that has not gone unnoticed by Likud.

The result is that the opposition ends up talking defensively about the issues Netanyahu wants at the center of the campaign, while simultaneously tying its own hands ahead of the coalition negotiations it will almost certainly need after the election.

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