Binyamin Netanyahu will be leading the Likud Party in a general election for the 12th time this year. He is already Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, having spent a total of over 18 years in office. If he wins, he could become the longest-serving leader of any democracy since the second world war.
The election date has yet to be set, but speaking to The Economist in a filmed interview for “The Insider” on January 8th in Jerusalem, Israel’s prime minister was very much in campaign mode. One focus is his quest for another term. “As long as I believe that I can secure Israel’s future, to which I’ve devoted my life, both as a soldier and as a politician, as a statesman, then I’ll do so,” he says. Yet in most polls his coalition of nationalist and religious parties is well short of a majority.
Mr Netanyahu is also determined to restore his country’s international standing. Israel has emerged from the two years of war in Gaza with a gravely tarnished global image: not just among its habitual critics but also among many of its former supporters in the West, shocked by the destruction of much of Gaza and the deaths of over 70,000 Palestinians.
Watch: A conversation with Binyamin Netanyahu
“I’d like to do everything I can to fight the propaganda war waged against us,” he says. “Basically, we’ve been using cavalry against f-35s, because they’ve flooded the social networks with the fake bots and many other things.” One early move, he says, could be for Israel to give up the subsidies from the United States that it uses to buy American arms.
Mr Netanyahu built his political career on his swashbuckling speeches and interviews with the international media, going back to his days as ambassador to the UN in the 1980s. That reflects his belief that the way for Israel to influence governments is by winning the battle for public opinion. It is a battle Israel is losing.
The prime minister complains that Israel has been subject to unreasonable scrutiny. “I doubt that Churchill could pursue World War Two if people saw what happened there,” he says. “You’re holding this democracy, this beleaguered democracy, to an impossible standard.”
He also blames prejudice against Jews. “In the Middle Ages we were poisoning the wells, we were spreading vermin, we were slaughtering Christian children for the Passover festival using their blood…The vilifications that were delivered on Jewish people are now delivered on to Jewish state.”
He expects the ceasefire in Gaza to help. “The minute the intense fighting stops,” he says, “then the focus of international media and the horrible reporting, often absolutely false reporting that takes place there—the ease with which propaganda takes over facts, or fact checking—that dissipates.”
Mr Netanyahu will also seek to remove potential friction between Israel and its chief ally, America. In the interview the prime minister revealed that he is not seeking the full renewal of the ten-year American military assistance package, which currently stands at $3.8bn annually and needs renegotiating in 2028. For the first time in public, he talked about tapering American aid to zero over ten years. He insisted that he “will continue to fight for the allegiance of the American people”. However, President Donald Trump famously dislikes handing over money, and parts of his maga movement are increasingly critical of Israel.
Last, Mr Netanyahu believes that he can persuade Western voters that they misunderstand the nature of the struggle Israel is waging. “There is a huge battle today between the forces of civilisation, the forces of modernity,” he says. “Very fanatic forces…want to take us back to the early Middle Ages and do so with a violence that is unimaginable. You’ve seen these pictures of people cutting open the chest of an enemy, these Islamists, tearing out the heart. The person is still alive and eating the heart.” The reality, he argues, is that “Israel is defending itself, but in so doing, we’re defending Western civilisation.”
Those are strong claims, but Mr Netanyahu has been using such arguments for decades, which may make them less effective. In addition, while there is some truth to them, they are less powerful when set against the horrors endured by the Palestinians inside Gaza.
To further complicate the prime minister’s task, his message abroad will sometimes run into his election campaign at home. For example, settlement expansion in the West Bank has risen sharply during his term, as has settler violence. Members of his government are calling for annexation.
Yet, asked whether this is an area of disagreement with Mr Trump and Israel’s potential Arab partners, Mr Netanyahu deflects. Mr Trump has in the past been willing to contemplate annexation, he says. And, as for Arab leaders, he predicts an expansion of the Abraham accords. “In private conversations, you want the truth? I mean beyond the regular things? Many of them don’t give a hoot,” he says. “They don’t care about the Palestinian issue. They care about its effect on the street.”
In the election Mr Netanyahu will also face questions about the economy and the role of Israel’s growing ultra-Orthodox community. The economy has recovered from the war remarkably well, to a large degree thanks to continuing foreign investment in the Israeli tech sector and strong demand for Israeli weapons systems, especially from rapidly re-arming Europe.
Israel’s technological edge relies on a small, talented and mobile part of its 10m population, who are mainly from the secular and centrist parts of Israeli society, which are opposed to the current government. Mr Netanyahu brushes off the reports of an incipient brain drain as “ridiculous”. But others, including Naftali Bennett, his main challenger in the election, warn that the threat is real and dangerous.
By contrast, Israel’s ultra-Orthodox parties are Mr Netanyahu’s political allies. Their voters receive excessive social benefits, even though many of them refuse to enlist for military service in a time of war. Many ultra-Orthodox men do not work.
Asked about their role, he argues that ultra-Orthodox women do work and says that he will pass a law encouraging men to serve in the army. He wants to “enable the recruitment of this community”, he says, “but at the same time enable the select few to study the Torah.” That is likely to please nobody—being too much for the ultra-Orthodox and too little for everyone else.
How much time the prime minister has to dedicate to his two campaigns, for re-election and to restore Israel’s international reputation, will be partly determined by events in Iran, where mass protests are threatening to engulf the Islamic regime. For years Mr Netanyahu has called for international action against Iran. During the 12-day war that Israel and America waged on Iran last June, he flirted with regime change. Only last week in a meeting with Mr Trump he secured a public commitment from the president to join Israel in more strikes if Iran moves to rebuild its nuclear programme and continues building ballistic missiles.
Speaking to The Economist, however, Mr Netanyahu was surprisingly reticent about both Iran and Mr Trump. “It may be a moment where the people of Iran take charge of their own destiny,” he observes. “Revolutions are best done from within.” He neither endorsed nor rejected Mr Trump’s threats to act against the regime if it continues gunning down protesters.
His sudden restraint may be a response to warnings of Israeli intelligence officials in recent days that Iran may “miscalculate” and launch an attack on Israel in an attempt to divert the anger of its own people. “I’ll tell you one definite time when we would resume our military activities,” he says. “If Iran attacks us, which they might, then there will be horrible consequences for Iran. That’s definite. Everything else, I think we should see what is happening inside Iran.”
Hanging over both campaigns is the devastating Hamas attack in October 2023. International sympathy for Israel depends on people understanding that it was the greatest trauma in the country’s history. At home the election is likely to be a referendum on whether voters hold Mr Netanyahu responsible for what befell them.
Asked about how Israel was caught unawares, Mr Netanyahu says he is ready to answer questions to an inquiry which he has yet to set up. However, he avoids using the word “responsibility” and is quick to spread the blame to the intelligence services and the rest of his cabinet. The failure of October 7th was indeed a collective one. However, a man who has run a country for so long will find it hard to claim credit for all its successes while avoiding blame for its catastrophes.
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