It’s All Catching Up to Bibi Netanyahu
It’s All Catching Up to Bibi Netanyahu
Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is showing all the signs of heading for an early election, probably next spring. The leaders of coalition parties are already openly campaigning, Netanyahu’s Likud party is beginning to crack, senior military and civil-service figures are clashing openly with the prime minister, and Netanyahu remains broadly unpopular, despite overall public support for the war.
Ratcheting up the pressure even more, an old scandal returned to haunt the beleaguered leader yesterday: A state commission of inquiry accused him of putting Israel’s security at risk and harming the country’s foreign relations and economy by mishandling a submarine-procurement deal from 2009 to 2016. Netanyahu seemed to shrug off the commission as politically biased against him, but he has still to respond to the accusation.
Finally, earlier today, Israel’s supreme court declared the long-held draft exemption of ultra-Orthodox men as illegal and called on the government to either recruit them or enact a law relieving them from conscription. The ruling strains Netanyahu’s coalition of nationalist and religious parties, leaving the prime minister with a host of bad options.
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Netanyahu has defied Israeli political wisdom by keeping his job for this long after Hamas’s attack on October 7. He presided over the country’s worst-ever disaster and has since failed to defeat Hamas or Hezbollah or to bring back the remaining hostages from captivity in Gaza. He turned Israel into a pariah state, censured around the world for the mass killing of Palestinian civilians and the destruction of infrastructure. And yet, through it all, he retained the support of his political base and remained in power, defying many predictions. Now, however, the pressure is mounting on his cabinet, which may not last through the end of its official term, in October 2026.
The political turning point came on June 9, when Benny Gantz, the former defense chief and Netanyahu’s occasional rival and partner, left the wartime cabinet. Gantz is no dissident, and he did not leave office to lead the Saturday-night protest marches, which are growing despite a surge in police violence against them. Rather, he is the embodiment of establishment centrism, commanding the public-opinion polls by invoking little controversy—unlike Netanyahu, who is always on the prowl for a good melee. Gantz’s long-overdue departure broke the fragile semblance of unity around the war. Netanyahu’s coalition of 64 out of 120 Knesset members won’t collapse because of it, but without Gantz to kick around as the “defeatist,” the remaining partners will have a harder time hiding their disagreements.
[Read: Israel’s wartime government just collapsed. Does it matter?]
The war obviously dominates Israeli life at the moment. It clouds public morale with a deep sense of despair and hopelessness. But the public has been split over Netanyahu for years, through successive political crises and recurring, indecisive elections.
When Netanyahu returned to power in late 2022, the focus of the government he formed with far-right and ultra-Orthodox coalition partners was domestic. They sought to make Israel more autocratic and theocratic by shattering the independence and power of the institutions they viewed as hopelessly liberal: the judiciary, the military, and the mainstream media. A proposed judicial reform in January 2023 prompted the country’s largest-ever protest movement, whose ace card was reservist fighter pilots’ threat not to fly for a leader who acted like a dictator. Rather than compromising, Netanyahu doubled down. His defense minister, Yoav Gallant, and the military-intelligence agencies both warned the prime minister that a war might be imminent. He dismissed these alarms as politically charged.
Then came the October 7 massacre and the Israel Defense Forces’ failure to respond in time. Netanyahu rejected any responsibility, blaming the “refuseniks” of the protest movement as well as the military and intelligence chiefs, whom he accused of failing to prepare and not even waking him up when they intercepted last-minute warning signs. This is the vanilla version. Yair Netanyahu—the prime minister’s son and public alter ego—has voiced a more blatant conspiracy theory, accusing the brass of deliberately allowing Hamas to invade Israel in order to overthrow the government.
The prime minister’s critics acknowledged the intelligence and military failures but lay the overall responsibility at Netanyahu’s feet, pointing to his antebellum policy of tacitly supporting Hamas as a counterbalance to the Western-backed Palestinian Authority. The policy rested on a view, popular on the Israeli right, that a future Palestinian state was a graver threat than Hamas’s underground fortress. Even now, Netanyahu’s coalition has been cool toward diplomatic initiatives to end the war that are also designed to lead to the establishment of a Palestinian state, and his far-right partners in the government are lobbying to depopulate Gaza and build Jewish settlements there.
Netanyahu’s interest lies in continuing the fighting, because the far-right leaders he has empowered, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, have threatened to topple his government if the war ends. And Jewish public opinion in Israel still widely supports the achievement of the two conflicting war aims: defeating Hamas and rescuing the hostages. (The Arab community has, from day one, overwhelmingly supported a quick cease-fire and a prisoner deal.)
Israelis don’t watch the Gaza death-and-destruction footage aired around the world. They generally view the accusations of genocide and war crimes as expressions of anti-Semitism, and many are oblivious to Palestinian suffering. A plurality in Israel even supports waging a wider war in the north, despite the fact that Hezbollah missiles (and maybe even Iranian ones) can be expected to destroy Israeli cities and infrastructure. Netanyahu has so far rejected pleas to expand the war to the Lebanese front, but pressure is mounting to respond to Hezbollah’s provocations.
The general support for the war, as well as the lack of a credible rival suggesting an alternative policy, has allowed Netanyahu to stay in power despite lagging behind in public-opinion surveys (his position has improved recently, but the polls still anticipate the demise of the current coalition). And he has been able to reject the calls for an immediate hostage-for-cease-fire deal.
The bigger conundrum for Netanyahu’s coalition may still be ahead: whether to extend the draft to ultra-Orthodox youth, who are traditionally exempt from conscription so that they can pursue rabbinic study. Maintaining this exemption is a key demand of the ultra-Orthodox parties that have been Netanyahu’s loyal partners. And for decades, the exemption was convenient for liberals too, because it allowed less religious conscripts to avoid interacting in the barracks with the strictly Orthodox lifestyle.
[Read: Benjamin Netanyahu is Israel’s worst prime minister ever]
But now the war is straining Israel’s regular and reserve forces, and the absence of the Haredi youth from the front lines, military cemeteries, and hospitals is no longer accepted as it was before October 7. The supreme court ruled today that the blanket exemption lacks legal authority and that the military should issue draft orders to the rabbinical students rather than find some legal mechanism to keep things as they are. The otherwise nationalist and militarist “Bibists,” as followers of Netanyahu are sometimes called, have not justified allowing the Haredi young men to dodge conscription in wartime, and Gallant, the rebellious defense minister, voted against the exemption bill, leading the way for others in Likud to break ranks on this issue as the legislative process moves forward.
Any attempt to draft the ultra-Orthodox in earnest would spark a mass Haredi protest. Their parties would pull out of the government, causing it to collapse. But ignoring the anticipated court ruling and keeping the exemption would fuel anti-government protest, widen the cracks in the coalition, and play into the hands of Netanyahu’s right-wing adversaries, such as Naftali Bennett and Avigdor Lieberman, whose popularity has been growing.
The center-right voters who traditionally decide Israeli elections seem to be motivated by a combination of nationalism and leadership fatigue, which has only grown since October 7. Bennett, Lieberman, and even Gantz speak to these sentiments. They are just as militarist and nationalist as the incumbents, but they tend to work in tandem with the top brass and bureaucracy, and to be more attentive to Washington. So far, they lack a party and an agreed leader.
Netanyahu will probably make it to the end of the Knesset summer session, on July 28. But when the Knesset reconvenes in late October, survival could become much more difficult, even if, as the Bibists hope, Donald Trump defeats Joe Biden in the U.S. presidential election.
In times of political trouble, the tried-and-true Netanyahu trick is dismissing the Knesset and going to the polls before a serious contender can build power. But Netanyahu could also defy conventional wisdom, reach a cease-fire deal, and even cut a plea bargain to end his slow-moving corruption trial, leaving office undefeated and throwing the thankless job of postwar rebuilding to a successor. Unfortunately for Israel, he’s showing no sign of such a radical change.