The problem, in short, is that there might be no one who stands ready to replace Israel’s deeply unpopular prime minister.
After Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israel, vigils and demonstrations broke out in Tel Aviv, mourning the dead and demanding the return of the hostages. One popular photo showed a lone woman with a hand-drawn sign that proposed a trade: Bibi for the Hostages. Remarkably few Israelis would, in those early days of the war, have objected to such a trade. Bibi—Benjamin Netanyahu—was prime minister during the worst sneak-attack against Israel in the country’s history, and the disgust at his government’s failure was universal. A survey recently found that only 4 percent of Jewish Israelis ranked him as the most reliable of Israeli public figures. His overall approval rating recently clocked in at 27 percent, which for a wartime leader is desperately low, comparable to what a politician gets when (as Selina Meyer put it in Veep) “running on a platform of higher taxes and episiotomies.”
So why is Netanyahu still in office—and why do I keep meeting people who think he’ll still be there for a long time to come? Even Israelis who despise him, and would give him to Hamas gratis, acknowledge that it would be senseless for him to step down in the middle of a war. Once it’s over, he’ll have his political reckoning—and although I suspect he will no longer be prime minister in a year’s time, betting against Netanyahu’s survival is like betting against the house. He might be too shameless to step down, and too entrenched to be forced into retirement. The problem, in short, is that there might be no one who both stands ready to replace Netanyahu and can command the confidence of enough Israelis to form a government.
Netanyahu had, up until Hamas’s attack, governed from the far right, positioning himself as the leader of a coalition of security-minded hawks, the ultra-Orthodox, and settler groups openly intent on Judaizing the West Bank by expelling its Arab population. These supporters’ current skepticism of Netanyahu is not due to the fundamental orientation of his government, but to his obvious failure to protect Jews. October 7 did not discredit the right wing. It did discredit Netanyahu.
Yair Rosenberg: The end of Netanyahu
And now observe how aggressively Netanyahu has moved to regain the confidence of this base. His government has overseen a violent invasion of Gaza and a reinvigorated conquest of the West Bank. And Netanyahu personally has flattered the sensibilities of the religious by likening the conflict not only to the Israeli war of independence but also to the attack of the Amalekites, which was genocidally avenged by the early Hebrew prophets and kings.
Yair Lapid, the Israeli-opposition leader, said yesterday that Netanyahu should step down in favor of “another Likud prime minister.” That suggestion presumes the existence of a fellow right-winger capable of the job. Netanyahu has secured his position by surrounding himself with fanatics and extremists, who make him look like a safe choice by comparison. His minister of heritage, Amichai Eliyahu, suggested in a radio interview that he was open to nuking Gaza using the atomic weapons that Israeli officials are not supposed even to acknowledge possessing. His fellow Likud Knesset member, and erstwhile information minister, Gilat Distel, posted on social media that the time had come to “erase all of Gaza from the face of the Earth.” And his national-security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, argued that those who celebrate Hamas’s attack should be “destroyed” just like Hamas itself. That sounds like a declaration of war against most of the Arab world, much of the population of France and the United Kingdom, and a not insubstantial fraction of Columbia University’s student body. Netanyahu mildly rebuked some of the homicidal maniacs who made these comments—he suspended Eliyahu from attending certain meetings—and remained silent before others.
In his own comments, Netanyahu has been bellicose yet strategic. When he stated recently that he intended for Israel to have security responsibility for Gaza for “an indefinite period,” and that the Palestinian Authority would not be part of that future arrangement, he was telling Israelis that the war would not be in vain, that it would not reach an end state from which a new attack could grow. And he was rebuffing the Biden administration’s suggestions that Israel plan for an exit from Gaza. Yet compared with the threat of planetary erasure, his phrasing was downright diplomatic. It is a rare skill to be able to appease (or even please) madmen while not sounding mad oneself. Whatever Netanyahu’s faults—and they include presiding over the biggest debacle in Israeli history—he can speak with precision, knitting and unknitting coalitions, and manage foreign affairs.
And while Netanyahu retains the political skills he had before October 7, the other politicians on the Israeli scene retain all their flaws. Who can take the mantle? Maybe no one. Netanyahu’s cabinet is conspicuously short on experienced, steady hands in whom the fate of a country can be placed. The most prominent figures, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, are ideologues. “This cabinet is so incompetent,” the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman recently said, “I would not let them be waiters at my grandson’s bar mitzvah, let alone run this kind of complex war.”
Netanyahu lured former Israel Defense Forces General Benny Gantz into a unity government, for the purpose of prosecuting the war with a broader base. Gantz shows none of the extremist and chauvinist tendencies that energize Netanyahu’s core backers. As defense minister in 2021, he invited Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to his home, an unthinkable act of hospitality for anyone in the current government. He has the centrist qualities notorious for generating only sober, nodding support, rather than the screaming-in-the-streets enthusiasm a new leader might need. Moreover, he has, as one diplomat put it to me recently, “the political acumen of a gherkin.” Although he can join a coalition, he may not be able to wrest control of it. His popularity spiked after the invasion, but so far, during this period of political cease-fire in Israeli politics, he has not been able to capitalize on that.
As for the Israeli left, well, something tells me this is not the season for a movement identified with the twin ideas that Palestinians are human and that Israeli Jews’ security fears are overwrought. On the center-left, there is Lapid, the opposition leader. Netanyahu’s rearguard action against Lapid has taken several forms, including the attempted destruction of any possibility that Lapid could implement his more measured policies even if he won power.
Anne Applebaum: Netanyahu’s attack on democracy left Israel unprepared
Lapid proposes the Palestinian Authority as an interim government in Gaza; Netanyahu shoots the idea down like an errant Qassam missile. Lapid supports a two-state solution. Netanyahu encourages settlement construction in the West Bank to hinder Israeli disentanglement from a future Palestinian state. This process is not a new one, just accelerated since October 7. If Lapid (and others to Netanyahu’s left) campaign on policies that right-wing governments keep rendering moot, they begin to look pathetic, and incapable of leading Israel into a future they were evidently powerless to control.
Before the war, the standard critique of Netanyahu was that he had gutted his government, removed his possible rivals, and replaced them with nobodies and ideologues. That criticism seems obviously correct in retrospect—and by all evidence, Israelis are looking at him witheringly, for having prioritized his own political survival over the capable administration of his country. But because he cannot be traded for hostages, to get rid of him, they will have to trade him for some other politician. I still think that that will happen. But trade him for whom, exactly? In the absence of a clear answer to this question, the chance remains that Israel will be stuck with him.
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