Riding high on the wave of Israeli successes against Iran, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has launched a campaign to rehabilitate his battered legacy at home – with his potential reelection in mind.
Like any good campaign, it includes high-profile stops with powerful optics, and Mr. Netanyahu’s schedule has been packed with them – most recently Monday’s White House dinner with President Donald Trump.
But it has also included a burst of interactions with the Israeli public, something he has assiduously all but avoided since Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7, 2023, the deadliest day in Israeli history.
Why We Wrote This
Benjamin Netanyahu has long sold himself to the Israeli public as “Mr. Security.” Hamas’ devastating Oct. 7 attack, for which the Israeli leader has not taken responsibility, stained his record. Now he’s hoping the war with Iran has rehabilitated his image.
“I don’t think the prime minister made up his mind to go to an earlier election,” says Shmuel Rosner, a political commentator and a senior fellow at The Jewish People Policy Institute, a Jerusalem think tank. “He’s still considering his options. But just in case, he also started a campaign to improve his chances of winning.” The next scheduled national election is in October 2026.
Mr. Netanyahu, a master of political survival, is the longest-serving prime minister in Israeli history – over 17 years total – and arguably the most controversial. The military debacle of Oct. 7, for which he has not taken responsibility and for which he has refused to order a state commission of inquiry, is something he apparently hopes might be overshadowed by his decision last month to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. It unleashed a 12-day war with Israel’s arch foe that came to an abrupt truce following an American backup strike on three key Iranian nuclear sites.
“Netanyahu believes that his victory over Iran is going to erase Oct. 7,” says Gayil Talshir, a Hebrew University political science lecturer. “In his reconstructed post-Iran narrative, he is ‘Mr. Security’ for undermining the nuclear threat from Iran.”
Last week Mr. Netanyahu met with survivors of the Oct. 7 attack in the southern city of Ofakim and lit candles for those killed there that day. He also made his first visit to Kibbutz Nir Oz, which was left to defend itself against the Hamas attack and where one in four residents were either killed or taken hostage. Several are still held in Gaza.
Mr. Netanyahu promised kibbutz members that Israel would save all remaining hostages and rebuild the community. Many of those same members are among those who have charged him with abandoning not just their kibbutz and the hostages, but their families and the country as a whole.
A first step to winning any election is going to mean securing the semblance of a decisive end to the Gaza war, Mr. Rosner says.
“One might argue that Israel lost the war in Gaza on Oct. 7, and no victory in Gaza could overcome the pain and the suffering of Oct. 7,” he says. Mr. Netanyahu “needs to conclude the war in Gaza in a reasonable, respectable, at least half-successful way to highlight all the other achievements Israel [has] had.”
A poll conducted shortly after the Israel-Iran ceasefire showed Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud party gaining four seats in parliament if elections were to be held now. The poll also showed that for the first time this year, the public selected Mr. Netanyahu as their top choice for prime minister.
There are three camps of voters today in Israel, Mr. Rosner says: those who are solidly opposed to Mr. Netanyahu; his fierce loyalists; and those who blame him at least partially for the Oct. 7 debacle and will not forgive him nor forget, but will vote for him anyway because they still view him as the strongest candidate.
Edward Eliav of the central Israeli town of Yehud falls into this third camp. He had voted for Mr. Netanyahu in the past before decamping for the opposition in recent elections. But now, he’d return to supporting Mr. Netanyahu “because of everything he did for our security.”
He cited not just the war in Iran, but the ongoing Gaza war and Israel’s severe degrading of Hezbollah last fall in Lebanon in a series of well-coordinated attacks.
On Tuesday Mr. Trump and Mr. Netanyahu met for the second day in a row, but this time without cameras or public statements. Mr. Netanyahu reportedly is under heavy pressure from the Trump administration to reach a definitive hostages-for-ceasefire deal in Gaza, where in recent weeks hundreds more Palestinians have been reported killed in heavy Israeli airstrikes and civilian suffering has reached new extremes.
Standing in the way of such a deal is a key war aim laid out by Mr. Netanyahu’s hard-right government: that Hamas cannot remain in power after the war’s end.
In the Israeli media Tuesday, reports of significant progress toward a deal with Hamas were overshadowed by collective mourning for five army soldiers killed overnight by a roadside bomb in Gaza. Their deaths brought the toll of Israeli soldiers killed in the nation’s longest war to 888. Wednesday night the army announced the death of an additional soldier in a separate incident.
“What happens in Washington doesn’t matter,” says Ayelet Hashahar Saydoff, a founder of the movement “Mothers on the Frontline,” made up of combat soldiers’ parents like her who are calling for an end to the war. “We need our children out of Gaza.”
The successes that Mr. Netanyahu claims are not his, she says, referring to him by his nickname. “The successes are of the army and the pilots, and the people know this,” she says. “Israel will not forgive Bibi.”
