Netanyahu Fights for His Job — After Losing His War

He promised to remake the region by toppling Iran. That gamble collapsed, and now, with an election looming, the reckoning has arrived at home

For the first time in 53 years, a governing coalition in the occupied territories has served a full term. Benjamin Netanyahu would like that fact to be his epitaph in reverse — proof, as he tells it, that he alone can manage crisis and hold a government together. But the coalition reached the legally mandated election date of 27 October not because it triumphed, but because it survived; and survival, the polls suggest, is no longer something the Israeli public is inclined to reward. To understand why Netanyahu now fights for his political life, it helps to begin not with the ballot box but with the war he was certain he would win.

The gamble that failed

Earlier this year, Netanyahu staked everything on the belief that Iran’s government could be brought down. According to a post-mortem by Michael Hausertov in Haaretz, that conviction was less a strategy than a fixation — a textbook case of confirmation bias, in which every intelligence breakthrough and every contact with an opposition figure was treated as confirmation, and every warning about the slim odds, the perilous transition, and the danger of what might follow was waved away.

The decision, the account argues, was personalised to the point of recklessness. A choice of enormous strategic weight was reduced to one man’s vision and never subjected to the institutional scrutiny it demanded. Mechanisms for objection were thin; the lessons of Lebanon, Gaza and Afghanistan went unlearned; and officials who harboured doubts kept them to themselves rather than confront the prime minister or obstruct the course he had set.

At the heart of it lay a fundamental misreading of the enemy. The plan assumed the Iranian system was brittle — liable to fracture, to collapse inward, or to be swept away by a popular uprising once the pressure of war was applied. It was not. Israeli intelligence had, over years, built networks and achieved real penetration inside Iran, and mistook that operational success for the power to remake a state. But possessing tools of infiltration is not the same as possessing the ability to topple a government, and the distinction proved fatal. There was no coherent vision for what would follow, no legitimate alternative leadership, no plan for the transition, and no contingency for the possibility that something more radical might rise from the wreckage. The whole edifice rested on a chain of fragile, sequential assumptions, so that when one link broke, the entire design failed with it. Intelligence assessment, which ought to have stress-tested the plan and named its risks, instead bent to the political current, inflating the signs of success and muting the warnings.

The regime Netanyahu promised to erase is still standing. He is the one now facing removal.

The reckoning at home

That failure has not stayed abroad. It has followed him into an election campaign, where the polls tell a story sharply at odds with his narrative of steady hands. According to Le Figaro, Netanyahu’s standing has clearly slipped against his rivals — most strikingly against former army chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot, who has emerged as the frontrunner for prime minister, with his party projected to outpoll Likud in the Knesset. His opponents continue to hold him politically responsible for the failures of 7 October and press for an independent commission of inquiry into the decisions made before and after the attack — an inquiry he has no interest in seeing convened.

None of this guarantees his defeat. The opposition’s path to a governing majority runs through a camp united by little beyond the desire to end the Netanyahu era — a coalition of figures and parties whose disagreements on almost everything else could yet prove harder to bridge than the arithmetic suggests. Netanyahu’s bloc, for all his personal unpopularity, remains the more cohesive. Its right-wing and religious partners chose to ride out the full term after concluding that early elections would serve them no better, and so the alliance held — despite real friction, above all over the perennial question of conscription.

That question has only sharpened. As the Knesset’s term ended, Netanyahu moved to placate his ultra-Orthodox allies, pushing measures to ease pressure on draft evaders and to grant Torah study special legal standing — precisely as years of war and the depletion of reserve forces have fuelled demands for a fairer sharing of the military burden. It is a telling bind: the coalition that survived a full term did so by protecting the very inequities the war made hardest to defend.

A public that moved right

There is a deeper current here that should temper any expectation of a liberal turn. Since 7 October, the Israeli public has, if anything, shifted rightward. A segment of voters has moved toward harder positions, a large share has held its previous ground, and only a small minority sits closer to the left. The security shock reinforced the politics of fear and identity rather than dissolving them — which is why the campaign is being fought largely on the right’s terms, and why even Netanyahu’s challengers are, for the most part, figures of the security establishment rather than its critics.

The Arab parties, meanwhile, remain a substantial bloc by seat count yet are excluded from nearly every serious scenario for forming the next government, their influence further blunted by the failure so far to unify their lists. Whatever change 27 October brings, it is unlikely to come from that quarter.

The narrowing horizon

Netanyahu’s wager was that a war to remake the region would secure his place in it. Instead, the war failed on its own terms, the region was not remade, and the man who promised transformation now campaigns on the far humbler claim of mere survival. Even if he clings on — through the opposition’s disunity, his bloc’s cohesion, and a public still moving his way on security — it will be a diminished victory, won not on the strength of his grand design but despite its collapse. The prime minister who set out to change another country’s system of government may yet keep his own job. He will not do it as the strategist he imagined himself to be, but as a politician fighting, at the last, simply to stay.

This piece draws on reporting by Haaretz and Le Figaro. The analysis and conclusions are the author’s own.