This is Part 4 of our series on contemporary Israel by Ran Heilbrunn. Read Part 1 here, Part 2 here, and Part 3 here.
And yet—notwithstanding the opposition’s insistence on the utter unintelligibility of continued support for Netanyahu—there is another, more substantive explanation for his political career’s phoenix-like resurrection. In the lead-up to the election, opposition figures have been filling the airwaves with reminders of October 7, hoping to revive something of the widespread shock and anti-Netanyahu outrage of those early days. While repeated invocations of the catastrophe have energized the already convinced, their effect on the skeptical and undecided has been limited—perhaps counterproductive.
For time did not stop on October 7, and the more one emphasizes the depths of despair into which Israel descended that day, the longer appears the distance the country has traveled since. This distance seems greater still when one considers that Israel did not spend the past three years merely undoing the consequences of October 7. Rather, it has undertaken a massive transformation of Middle Eastern geopolitics, turning the regional balance of power on its head.
Israel did not spend the past three years merely undoing the consequences of October 7, but has undertaken a massive transformation of Middle Eastern geopolitics.
Doing so required not just hunting down and eliminating the architects and perpetrators of October ,7 but launching a multifront campaign against the entire “Axis of Resistance”. Although Hamas was the Axis member that managed to inflict the greatest damage on Israel, it was in many ways the junior partner. The military capabilities and arsenals of both Iran and Hezbollah were far, far greater, and it is arguably the devastating blows inflicted on these two forces—alongside the fall of the Assad regime—that constitute the more far-reaching strategic developments.
Moreover, as the war progressed, Netanyahu often appeared as the figure most determined to pursue the more ambitious and risk-laden course of action. At several decisive junctures, he insisted on pressing forward, while more centrist figures in politics, the media and the security establishment advocated greater caution and appeared more inclined to let American demands and international pressure shape Israel’s military strategy. As the campaign moved from Gaza to Lebanon, and eventually Iran, powerful voices at home and abroad repeatedly urged restraint, questioned the wisdom of further escalation, or sought to prevent Israel from taking the next step. These calls were often accompanied by dire, sometimes downright apocalyptic warnings.
In the immediate aftermath of October 7, military experts around the world warned that a ground invasion of Gaza could become a catastrophic mistake, sending Israeli soldiers straight into Hamas’s trap and entangling the IDF in a bloody quagmire. The Biden administration dispatched senior American military advisers to Israel to urge its leaders to avoid ground invasion.
The warnings concerning a full-scale confrontation with Hezbollah were even more terrifying. Predictions of as many as 15,000 Israeli civilian deaths circulated in the media and were amplified by opposition voices, appearing even in enormous advertisements covering the front pages of major Israeli newspapers. The prospect of a direct military confrontation with Iran raised fears higher still. Again and again, a broad chorus of journalists, politicians, and security experts warned Israelis that Netanyahu’s wartime decisions were leading the country to its doom. None of these apocalyptic scenarios materialized. Many IDF soldiers lost their lives in Gaza and Lebanon, but Israel’s military superiority in both theaters was overwhelming. Hezbollah and Iran, meanwhile, managed to disrupt civilian life across Israel and inflict considerable damage on its infrastructure, but each of these supposedly formidable enemies ultimately killed no more than several dozen Israeli civilians.
A broad chorus of journalists, politicians, and security experts warned Israelis that Netanyahu’s decisions were leading the country to its doom. None of these apocalyptic scenarios materialized.
In light of all this, Netanyahu can now appear to the Israeli public as the man who presided over the greatest catastrophe in the country’s history, but also as the man thanks to whom Israel managed to get back on its feet and achieve a spectacular, against-all-odds type of victory. He can remind Israelis, furthermore, that some of the war’s most consequential achievements— the killing of Sinwar, Nasrallah, and Ali Khamenei, the pager operation, and the historically unprecedented Israeli-American assault on the Iranian regime—might never have been achieved had he listened to the centrist opposition or succumbed to the pressures of the international community.
And those Israelis who remember the relentless attacks against him at virtually every stage of the war—who perhaps also remember the journalists and experts who filled the public sphere with horrified alarmism about the recklessness of his decisions, but somehow cannot recall any of those same people later accounting for their failed predictions—those Israelis, provided they do not belong to the segment of the citizenry for whom hatred of Netanyahu is a sacred principle, may find it difficult to deny that that some of Israel’s most spectacular military achievements were made possible thanks to Netanyahu’s ability to reject the advice of his opponents and critics.
What is the Israeli opposition, and what does it want?
The opposition finds itself in a difficult position. Due to its doctrine of portraying everything Netanyahu does as either a pernicious crime or a colossal mistake, it cannot acknowledge what seems like a straightforward observation: that in some fundamental military and strategic respects—in terms of the ability of its enemies to harm its citizens—Israel is now in a better position not merely than it was on October 7, but than it was on October 6. To acknowledge something so simple would be to concede that Netanyahu deserves some credit —a possibility that many in the opposition simply cannot countenance. Consequently, some have opted for outright denialism. Some of the few election banners displayed along Israeli highways read: “Gaza. Lebanon. Iran. Total Failure!” One wonders how damaged one’s political intuition must be to think it electorally wise to try to dissuade citizens from believing that their country’s security has improved now that enormous armies of Islamist terrorists intent on killing them have been pushed farther away from Israel’s borders and substantially weakened.
Israel is now in a better position not merely than it was on October 7, but than it was on October 6.
The more substantive case against Netanyahu focuses on domestic life and international relations, rather than regional geopolitics. For there can be little doubt that the past three years have radically intensified the destructive effects his rule has already had on social relations within Israel, while turning the country into a pariah state. This combination of profound domestic and international damage might very well prove to be the decisive factor that finally brings about his downfall. Thus, the election has pitted against each other two camps embodying peculiar constellations of the foreign and the domestic: an international, modern, liberal, and secular camp that sees itself, with considerable justification, as the last hope of halting Israel’s domestic disintegration; and a camp rooted in a more local and national sense of belonging, whose years in power have fostered extraordinary levels of social division and poisoned relations between government and citizens. Incidentally, this latter camp—the camp of the rooted but domestically destructive—is led by perhaps Israel’s most international politician: intellectually formidable, fluent in English, and seemingly perfectly at home on the global chessboard. More paradoxical still is the possibility that, over the past three years, it is precisely this confident international orientation that has enabled him to withstand immense pressure from abroad and prioritize Israel’s national-security interests.
Netanyahu’s almost unimaginable recovery rests, to my mind, on his ability to recognize the importance of a third, intermediary level that stands between the domestic and the global—the level of regional geopolitics. This is the level that the great American political scientist E. E. Schattschneider identified as every government’s “outside”. For Schattschneider, the outside of a government is not the world, the “international community”, or the “global village”. Rather, it is the neighborhood, the immediate environment: the territorial threshold that creates a point of contact and separation between the inside and outside of a body politic. This intermediary dimension, according to Schattschneider, plays a constitutive role in the emergence of government.
Netanyahu’s almost unimaginable recovery rests on his ability to recognize the importance of a third, intermediary level that stands between the domestic and the global—the level of regional geopolitics.
The essential fact of politics, he wrote, is that “the world consists of a hundred governments in a state of tension”, and that “every government is surrounded by many other governments”. In this view, the elemental dimension of politics lies in the relations between political communities and their immediate surroundings, and not, as much political philosophy tends to assume, in the internal relations between rulers and the ruled. To understand politics, we ought to see that “the impulse that makes governments comes from the outside”, and that this impulse, furthermore, is fundamentally defensive. The founding act of government is to separate an external field of tension from an internal zone of protection. As Schattschneider puts it: “Government is like an oyster, hard on the outside and soft on the inside”.
From this Schattschneiderian perspective, Netanyahu’s leadership over the past three years seems like an exercise in political common sense. He understood what our age of hyperglobalism and hyperindividualism may have forgotten—that the world does not consist of private persons floating around in a borderless universe, but is divided into distinct political units. He may have grasped, furthermore, that there are moments in the life of such a unit when everything depends on the hardness of its outside. The problem, however, is that this is not enough. A leader is responsible not only for the oyster’s shell, but also for its soft interior. He is also responsible for how it is perceived by the other oysters in the ocean. The best case for Netanyahu is that he has been remarkably effective in securing the existence of the Israeli oyster at one of its darkest and most existentially threatening moments. The best case against him is that he has made life inside that oyster feel like a nightmare.
