By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Israelis were glued to their screens on October 13. The cease-fire in Gaza had just taken effect, the last 20 Israeli hostages had returned from Hamas captivity, and U.S. President Donald Trump—who masterminded the peace deal—was addressing the Knesset. “This is not only the end of a war,” Trump declared, “this is the end of an age of terror and death, and the beginning of the age of faith and hope.”

Sitting in the audience was Trump’s host, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The president made sure to thank him. “I want to express my gratitude to a man of exceptional courage and patriotism,” he said. He asked the prime minister to rise. Netanyahu did, then nodded and grinned. It was a remarkable moment. When Hamas carried out the worst-ever attack in Israel’s history on October 7, 2023, killing 1,200 civilians and soldiers and kidnapping 251 people, few analysts expected that Netanyahu would still be in power two years on, let alone be showered with praise by an American president. The last prime minister to govern Israel when it suffered a surprise attack, Golda Meir, stepped down shortly after. But Netanyahu denied any responsibility and refused to bow out. Instead, he blamed the failure to anticipate and repel the assault squarely on the military and intelligence services. He blocked an inquiry. And to keep his government intact, he dragged out the subsequent conflict despite mounting domestic fatigue and international pressure.

As Trump, who forced Netanyahu to halt the war, sang his praises from the Knesset podium, the prime minister was busy plotting his next fight: Israel’s upcoming elections. Israelis are due to go to the polls in October 2026, and the contest could end up happening as early as June. And Netanyahu has vowed to run and win again. To do so, he is trying to spin the war as a grand victory, castigating his critics as enemies within. Most of all, he has restarted his effort to turn the country into an autocracy by stripping the judiciary of its independence and turning the political system, the military, the intelligence services, and the civil servants more generally into his stooges—as well as trying to control the media through new regulation.

The country’s next election will be a national referendum on Netanyahu’s rule, as all Israeli elections have been since he returned to power in 2009. (He led the country from 1996 to 1999.) At first, that might seem to bode poorly for the prime minister. Netanyahu, after all, was not only in office when Israel was attacked on October 7—he failed to deliver the “total victory” over Hamas that he pledged, despite his claims to the contrary, and remains haunted by a string of criminal scandals. But despite all that, and despite lagging in the polls, Netanyahu could well win again. The prime minister has a large, loyal base of supporters. His foes, by contrast, can agree on little other than their hatred of him. Even if Netanyahu can’t win outright, he may be able to stop the opposition from establishing a working majority. The result would be a caretaker government that he can dominate, much as he has in the past.

 

He Who Governs

To call Netanyahu polarizing is an understatement. To supporters, he is a savior: their frontline fighter in a cultural war that divides Israel’s Jewish society. He has worked to replace an old elite that was secular, liberal, and Western-oriented with a new one that is conservative, religious, and unashamed to express nationalistic views and pass laws that discriminate against non-Jews. To his opponents, by contrast, he is a deeply corrupt demagogue who will stop at nothing to gain and keep power, including by making cynical use of class grievances. In this view, his true goals, even during the war, have nothing to do with national security. They are to fuel his cult of personality, eliminate his criminal charges, and keep himself in office. His key motivation, in other words, is not saving Israel but saving himself.

This divide preceded Netanyahu’s rule, defining Israel’s political battles for decades. But in recent years, it has grown more intense and the stakes have risen. In November 2022, Netanyahu’s coalition secured a solid majority (by Israeli standards) of 64 out of 120 seats in Parliament, allowing the prime minister to push ahead with his most controversial policies. He wasted no time in doing so. Relying on the country’s far-right parties, the new government declared that “the Jewish people have an exclusive and indisputable right to all areas of the land of Israel”—including the occupied West Bank. This means denying any rights to the Palestinians, who could only watch in frustration as Israel pushed forward with an unprecedented campaign of land-grabbing and settlement expansion.

Most Jewish Israelis, however, had little concern for the Palestinians, let alone the peace process. Instead, they were much more worried about the crisis unfolding in their midst. In January 2023, Netanyahu’s government introduced laws that would usurp the independence of Israel’s Supreme Court and attorney general—the custodians of civil liberties in a country that lacks a formal constitution. Nominally sold by Netanyahu as “a much-needed reform to strengthen governability,” these laws were really designed to build an autocratic theocracy that he would lead. The legal system, after all, was not only prosecuting the prime minister for corruption. For decades, it protected the rights of Israel’s Arab minority, guaranteed religious freedoms, LGBTQ rights, and a free press—all anathemas of Israel’s right-wing and Orthodox politicians, who sought more power and resources for West Bank settlers and rabbinical institutions. The Supreme Court has, of course, also done much to help the settlers. Across the Green Line that divides pre-1967 Israel from its Palestinian territories, the judiciary has largely built a legal shield around the subjugation of Palestinians and settlement expansion. But here and there, it has interfered with the settler project, serving as a constant reminder of international humanitarian law and its obligations.

These so-called judicial reforms were Netanyahu’s most daring effort to win the cultural war, and they were met with Israel’s strongest-ever protest movement. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets. Thousands of military reservists declared that they would refuse to serve until the legislation was withdrawn. But the prime minister plowed ahead until October 7 forced him to suspend the bills and form a broader war cabinet. Even then, Netanyahu did not position himself as a national healer. Instead, as the Israel Defense Forces fought on several fronts and Israel faced severe criticism abroad, he busied himself hunting for scapegoats. He targeted, in particular, Israel’s national security establishment—traditionally the most influential force in public life and a bastion of resistance to Netanyahu. Pointing to the October 7 failure, the prime minister purged security and intelligence chiefs who had challenged him. Netanyahu, for example, pushed Ronen Bar, the head of the Shin Bet, out of his job after Bar testified that the prime minister had asked him to target antigovernment protesters as if they were terrorists. He replaced him with David Zini, a former general and self-declared “messianic Jew” who had grown up at the far-right religious fringe of West Bank settlements.

 

Enemy of My Enemy

Netanyahu’s autocratic drive has eroded his support. Since the judicial laws were introduced, independent public opinion polls have consistently shown his coalition, led by his Likud Party, failing to achieve a majority. Channel 12 polling tells the story: in May 2023, Netanyahu’s coalition had support that would have won it 52 seats of the 120 seats in Knesset. In December 2023, a few months after the attacks, that number plummeted to 44. But it rebounded to 52 after Israel assassinated Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in 2024, and remains at that level today.

But the coalition’s visible unpopularity does not translate into an obvious electoral defeat given the chaotic nature of Israel’s political system, in which victory is as much about preventing alternative coalitions from forming as it is about protecting one’s own. And Netanyahu enters the 2026 campaign with several advantages. Incumbency, for example, gives him control over state affairs such as war, budgets, and taxes, which means he can launch another round of hostilities with Hamas, Hezbollah, or Iran and postpone the election, or bribe voters with tax cuts and budgetary favors. Israel’s economy has proved resilient despite the high costs of war and the growing threat of international boycotts, with the shekel outperforming its prewar levels and the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange breaking records. The prime minister also benefits from a base that is united behind his leadership. They share a common vision: Jewish supremacy over the Palestinians; a greater Israel that includes the West Bank, perhaps Gaza, and perhaps parts of Syria; and outright opposition to a Palestinian state. They loathe any institution that places checks and balances on government power.

Netanyahu’s opposition, by contrast, is divided. The various parties that sit outside his government may all dislike Netanyahu’s personality and power grabs. But they are otherwise all over the political spectrum. Some of them support the prime minister’s nationalistic agenda, whereas others abhor it. Most of them refuse to work with Israel’s two Arab parties, even though those parties are predicted to win ten seats—without which the opposition falls short of a 61-seat majority. And Israel’s Jewish opposition has preemptively ceded ground to Netanyahu when it comes to the recent war. Yair Golan, a former general who united the relics of Israel’s Zionist left under the Democrats party, has dared to criticize Israel’s conduct in Gaza as “a state killing babies as a hobby.” But even he will not stand all out against the conflict or show compassion toward the battered Palestinians. He supports a two-state solution, but only in the distant future.

The prime minister may thus be able to build support by pointing to the war. His aggressive style of fighting, after all, found wide support among the country’s Jewish majority. Mainstream opinion viewed the devastation of Gaza—the killing of more than 68,000 Palestinians, razing of entire cities and villages, and preparations for mass expulsions—as justified responses to Hamas’s atrocities. Global criticism of Israel’s indiscriminate use of force, accusations of genocide, and the portrayal of Netanyahu as a mass murderer on an epic scale were presented to Israelis as mere expressions of anti-Semitism.

Israel’s offensives outside Gaza were even more popular. Defeating Lebanon’s Hezbollah, including killing Nasrallah, and bombing Iran’s facilities in June (with Trump sending American warplanes to assist) were widely seen by Israelis as historic victories over the country’s most threatening foes. Here, too, the opposition was wholeheartedly supportive. The only debate was over who deserves the accolades—the prime minister who ordered the strikes or the pilots and intelligence operatives who carried them out.

The only issue that divided public opinion during the war was the plight of Israeli hostages in Gaza. During the second year of the conflict, most Israelis favored a cease-fire that would bring them home, and Netanyahu faced mass protests led by hostage families. But driven by his two far-right coalition leaders, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, Netanyahu opted to escalate the fight instead. His allies smeared the hostage families leading the demonstrations as enemy collaborators. The last hostages came back only when Trump imposed the cease-fire and Israeli hostage–Palestinian prisoner exchange deal on Netanyahu.

Still, for the prime minister, this was a good outcome. By accepting the deal, he delivered on the two key demands of the protesters: ending the war and getting the hostages back. By blaming Trump for the settlement, he avoided the wrath of his hard-line partners. Netanyahu sails through political controversies by playing heads and tails simultaneously. The same prime minister who exaggerates his power is also fine with being portrayed as the patsy of more influential actors. He doesn’t care if he appears strong or weak, as long as he can keep his seat.

 

Coalition of the Willing

Netanyahu’s most formidable opponent is former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who, from June 2021 to June 2022, interrupted Netanyahu’s 15-year reign. Bennett is ambitious, goal-oriented, and not marred by accusations of personal corruption. A successful tech entrepreneur and former special ops officer who wears a yarmulke, Bennett blends two dominant strains of contemporary Israeli culture: religious nationalism and secular materialism. He understands firsthand that the key to power in Israel’s multiparty system is switching sides and tempting defectors. Netanyahu mastered this tactic, buying the support of rivals by offering them ministerial titles. In fact, Bennett served in Netanyahu’s cabinet from 2013 to 2020, becoming the defense minister and outflanking the prime minister from the right. But in 2021, Bennett outmaneuvered his former boss, crossed the aisle, and forged an unprecedented coalition with the centrist leader Yair Lapid, two leftist parties, and even a socially conservative Arab party. This opportunism won him power.

This “change” government collapsed after a year, paving the way for Netanyahu’s vengeful return. But its emergence showed that Bennett knows how to bridge societal rifts and bring together right and left, Jew and Arab, religious and secular. His slogan for the coming election could be “Netanyahu divides, I unite.”

Right now, the polls give Bennett a decent chance of winning. But his path is hardly clear. For starters, Bennett—who stepped down from Parliament after his year as prime minister—only recently announced that he was running. He has not yet built a political team, let alone brought Israel’s factious opposition leaders (who have yet to agree to a group photograph) together. And he will go only so far this time: like most of Parliament’s existing opposition leaders, he has pledged not to include an Arab party in his coalition.

He has also effectively ruled out a coalition with Israel’s other most polarizing, and fastest-growing, demographic—ultra-Orthodox Jews. Unlike with Arab parties, however, excluding the ultra-Orthodox might be a politically savvy move. The demographic offers Bennett a wedge issue that could break Netanyahu’s coalition apart: conscription. For decades, ultra-Orthodox rabbinical students have enjoyed a blanket exemption from the draft, which their leaders are keen to protect. But in 2023, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that it was illegal, ordering the government to draw up legislation that would ensure equality among military-age youth. At first, the military was not eager to draft scores of teenage boys who lacked a basic education in math and English, demanded a special diet, strict Torah lessons, and distance from servicewomen. But October 7, which resulted in thousands of casualties and extended service for conscripts and reservists, changed perceptions. The rest of Israeli society grew furious that their youth had to serve while the ultra-Orthodox did not. The anger was most intense among religious nationalists, who serve while still observing Orthodox lifestyles—often on the frontlines and sometimes for most of their careers.

Finding a compromise that will satisfy both ultra-Orthodox rabbis and the law of the land has proved impossible so far, creating headaches for Netanyahu. The prime minister’s coalition is built on his alliance with both ultra-Orthodox and nationalist Orthodox parties. The ultra-Orthodox parties left the Netanyahu government in July to push the prime minister into finding a workaround to the court’s decision. But the ultra-Orthodox still clearly prefer Netanyahu to Bennett and his secular partners, and so they have not brought his government down. Religious nationalist voters are more likely to jump ship, and Bennett has tempted them by promising “an alliance of the serving.” Still, many of them also prefer the current prime minister’s raw nationalism over his competitor’s cooperation with the center left, who are less enthusiastic about West Bank settlements.

 

Full-Speed Ahead

While Bennett puts together his campaign, and with the war over (or at least on pause), Netanyahu has resumed his efforts to make Israel an autocracy. The government has restarted its judicial upheaval, scoring its biggest public victory so far by taking down the military’s chief legal officer, General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi. Tomer-Yerushalmi is hardly a paradigm of virtue: she repeatedly looked the other way as the armed forces were accused of war crimes. But when she prosecuted a team of reservists for torturing a prisoner from Gaza, she drew the rage of the government’s supporters. Eventually, she was caught and arrested for leaking a video of the abuse and then covering up and lying about releasing the video. Tomer-Yerushalmi was then arrested, and Netanyahu’s team has used her story to portray the judiciary as a collection of traitors who must be purged. Netanyahu has also announced support for executing terrorists, a core demand of Israel’s far right, and has revived his attempts to sack Israel’s attorney general, Gali Baharav-Miara. As the country’s top prosecutor, Baharav-Miara enjoys wide powers outside political control, which has allowed her to continue prosecuting the prime minister. Meanwhile, the government is advancing its theocratic authoritarianism through legislation, introducing a bill to give it more control over the media and a bill that would expand the powers of the rabbinical courts.

The fate of these efforts may determine what happens to the scandals involving both Netanyahu and his inner circle. In addition to his ongoing trial for three corruption charges, Jonathan Urich, Israel Einhorn, and Eli Feldstein—the spin masters who shaped Netanyahu’s political messaging—are under criminal investigation for being on the payroll of both the prime minister and Qatar (the sponsor of Hamas) before and during the recent war. The prime minister’s agreement to have Qatar fund Hamas in the years before October 7 has further fueled this controversy. The appointment of Zini to head the Shin Bet is widely seen as a maneuver to shut the case down, as well as another way to try getting rid of Baharav-Miara. The country’s national police have already been deeply politicized by its minister, Ben-Gvir.

Police brutality and war fatigue have dulled protests. Still, given this parade of controversies, it can be hard to understand why Israelis might want to return Netanyahu to power even if the criminal cases go away, particularly after October 7. But the prime minister’s supporters see the investigations into him as a deep-state plot to prevent Israel from transforming into the Jewish theocracy they want. In this way, they are not all that different from Trump’s most ardent voters. The two leaders use similar playbooks. And in a country where U.S. support is paramount, Netanyahu has Trump’s endorsement. Trump has even decried the trials against Netanyahu as a witch hunt, much as he decried his own. During his Knesset remarks, the U.S. president called on Israel’s president to pardon the prime minister.

Netanyahu thus had every reason to smile as Trump spoke, even as he prepared for the newest and toughest battle of his career. Winning reelection may be tougher than battling Hamas. But this is a familiar fight for Netanyahu—Israel’s consummate survivor. He can emerge victorious.

 

 

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