Netanyahu’s future is hanging by a thread this week, and he knows it

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By the end of the week, if all goes according to plan, Israel will have a new state budget for the first time in over three years.

For Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and his government, it will be the biggest milestone they’ve reached since being sworn in back in June. It will make it much harder for the opposition to bring down the government, but also for the government, with its internal contradictions, to bring itself down.

While he will try to fight the budget vote every step of the way, Benjamin Netanyahu is already privately conceding defeat. Ten days ago, he said in a public appearance that “Likud will be back; it may take two weeks or three and a half years, but we’ll be back.” The second option sounded much more convincing, if that.

Netanyahu has an empty schedule. Gone are the cabinet committees, the briefings with security chiefs, the meetings with visiting heads of state and all the other trappings of office. He is surrounded by a much smaller team of advisers – mainly failed Likud hacks and toadies. And now, after wild promises of the Bennett government falling “very soon,” he has to contemplate these drastically reduced circumstances becoming permanent.

What can Netanyahu do under such circumstances? Assuming his attempts to find a secret defector among the governing coalition to foil the budget vote at the last hurdle come to naught, he still has three courses of action, though none of them are working very well for him right now.

The first is to try to dominate the media agenda with issues that damage the government’s credibility. He used to be the master of this particular tactic, but is finding it increasingly difficult to dictate to the media now he no longer has the prime minister’s bully pulpit.

He lectures his party members on the need to “bypass” the traditional media by using the social networks. In fairness, Netanyahu was an early adopter of all things digital, but everyone does that nowadays and he hardly has much of an advantage.

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Back in his previous stints as leader of the opposition, there were at least major wedge issues for Netanyahu to exploit: the controversial Oslo Accords back in the 1990s against Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres; and from 2006 he could attack the Olmert government for its mismanagement of the Second Lebanon War. But in his third term as opposition leader, Netanyahu has yet to find any such issue, especially as the fourth COVID-19 wave has dissipated without the need for a lockdown.

A Netanyahu supporter sporting a pro-Bibi T-shirt proclaiming “We will be back soon,” in Mahaneh Yehuda last week.Ohad Zwigenberg

He is trying to use the funds allocated in the new budget for the development of Arab communities, calling them “the Abbas tax.” But the fact that he himself offered very similar sums to United Arab List leader Mansour Abbas in their coalition negotiations, just five months ago, blunts those barbs.

Netanyahu’s second course of action is to belittle Bennett and keep up the notion that he remains Israel’s only legitimate prime minister. He boycotted events with Bennett and ignored him in those he did attend. He made sure that those around him continue to call him “prime minister,” even though in Israel, unlike the United States, you don’t keep the top title once you’re out of office. And he still has his photo taken with guests from overseas in formal settings.

However, the mock premier show is beginning to wear thin and now seems risible even to some of his supporters. It’s all very well holding grand events with other former political heavyweights, like Mike Pompeo, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. But when Bennett is at the same time hosting German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who made a point of not meeting Netanyahu during her visit, it looks as pathetic as it indeed is.

As a last resort, Netanyahu is trying to preserve the notion that “most of the nation” continues to support him and yearns for his return.

Last week, he told Likud’s Knesset faction that upon leaving his hairdresser in Talpiot that morning, the “entire neighborhood” had come out, tearfully surrounding him and calling upon him to fight back. Soon after, a video emerged of what had actually happened: it consisted of Netanyahu and three rather bemused passersby.

Nonplussed, he rushed out to Mahaneh Yehuda, a reliable Likud stronghold, so he could be filmed live with an actual crowd cheering him as he bought a falafel.

On Thursday, he drove all the way to Beit She’an in the north to take part in the inauguration of a new tourism center. Finally, a podium and a public befitting a prime minister, with flowers on the dais and flags spread out behind him. But then the local mayor, Jackie Levy, made the mistake of calling him “former prime minister.” The crowd heckled as Netanyahu sat there stone-faced. “It’s true today, but not true tomorrow,” Levy said, forlornly trying to extricate himself.

Former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaking at a ceremony in Beit She’an last Thursday.Amir Levy

Biggest failure

Netanyahu’s biggest failure as a politician is in building his camp of supporters. It is a curious failure of character for such an intelligent person. But Netanyahu’s intelligence is coupled with a sense of paranoia, stoked by his family members, that not only demands complete loyalty but also sees any personal initiative, ambition or success of those around him as signs of untrustworthiness and incipient independence and plotting.

It goes back to the start of his first term as prime minister when nearly his entire campaign team were not offered jobs in the new government, and has continued for the past quarter of a century. His inability to trust his most capable lieutenants for long or retain their services is the reason he ultimately lost power. The government that replaced him this year could never have existed without the support of a long list of his former aides and advisers.

It’s not hard to imagine the 72-year-old Netanyahu, at the height of his powers as an elder statesman, captaining a cabinet of talented ministers including Bennett, Gideon Sa’ar, Avigdor Lieberman, Zeev Elkin and Ayelet Shaked, as well as others who were prepared to be his political allies such as Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz. They are all now ministers in a government that has one unifying raison d’etre gluing its unlikely pieces together: the burning desire to replace him and keep him from ever returning to office.

Instead of a team of ministers who were to be the next generation of Likud’s leadership, Netanyahu is now surrounded by a glum group of aging ex-ministers who are coming to terms with the prospect of never attaining high office again, and a bunch of younger lawmakers who are trying to outdo each other and prove their own loyalty to the beloved leader by screaming “Fraud!” at Bennett whenever the prime minister gets up to speak in the Knesset.

Outside of parliament, a few dozen “Bibistim” are willing to turn up to “rallies” organized by his office against the leaders of the coalition. They are marshalled by anonymous, low-level activists like Hani Zarka and Orly Lev. These are the type of people Netanyahu would normally brush aside without thinking, if they weren’t the only ones prepared to turn out for him and keep the myth alive of “the street” being with Netanyahu.

Zarka and Lev are rewarded with visits to Netanyahu’s Knesset office. In one recent photograph there of Zarka, along with her husband and Sara Netanyahu, the former prime minister’s desperate eyes behind his face mask said it all. He would have preferred to be anywhere else in the world.

Former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu greeting supporters in Beit She’an last Thursday.Amir Levy

An intact Jerusalem sky

Every passing day in which Netanyahu is no longer prime minister erodes his standing. He invested so much of his energy over the past 12 years in convincing Israelis that literally no one else could do the job. But every day that now passes, they’re getting used to the fact that there are actually others who can.

Four and a half months have elapsed, and the sky has yet to fall on Jerusalem. Bennett is sitting in his old office. Bennett is flying to Washington to meet President Joe Biden in the White House and to Sochi to confer with President Vladimir Putin. Bennett is right now representing Israel at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow and will be back in time to, probably, pass a new state budget by the end of the week.

Life continues as normal and while Bennett is hardly popular, Israelis – even many of those who previously voted for Likud – are enjoying the sense of normalcy. Despite trying as hard as he can, Netanyahu is finding it very difficult to disturb that.

Once the budget passes, Netanyahu will have to make a series of crucial decisions. Does he respond to the leadership challenge of former Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein and allow a Likud primary to take place? He will probably win by a landslide, but then what? Resign himself to another three years of Knesset drudgery in the opposition, all while his corruption trial slowly but surely grinds on in the background at Jerusalem District Court and as his legal bills continue to mount?

Does he take the unorthodox path of resigning from the Knesset while remaining Likud leader, thereby allowing himself to start making money from cushy speaking gigs abroad and lucrative directorships and consultancies? If so, who will remain Likud’s caretaker parliamentary leader, and can that person be trusted not to get any ideas about the top job? And will the remaining big beasts in Likud not grow too restive in his absence?

Unless something unexpected happens to disrupt the budget vote, by the end of this week there will be no good options left for Netanyahu.