The Free Press
The perennial eulogists of Benjamin Netanyahu’s career are having a banner week.
Though it lacks a constitution, Israel stands on the brink of what might otherwise be called a constitutional crisis sparked by Netanyahu’s firing of Ronen Bar, head of the Shin Bet national security agency—Israel’s equivalent to the FBI. The government has also begun the process of ousting Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara. Both she and Bar stand accused of unreasonably opposing the government’s decisions and of representing a left-wing “deep state.” Bar, in response, has charged Netanyahu with acting not in the state’s interests but out of political and personal considerations.
The actions against Bar and Baharav-Miara have sparked mass protests against what many Israelis view as an all-out assault on democracy by the Netanyahu government. Compounding the demonstrators’ anger is their claim that Netanyahu deliberately torpedoed the hostage negotiations with Hamas—some 59 people, 24 of whom are believed to be alive, remain in terrorist hands—in order to keep the war, which resumed seven days ago, going. The government, in turn, insists that the dismissals are entirely within its power and that Hamas, not Israel, rejected the hostage deal.
Prior to the October 7 pogrom, the conflict over the government’s attempt to deprive the Supreme Court of many, if not most, of its judicial powers had fiercely divided Israelis. Now, that same Supreme Court is set to decide on the legality of the government’s dismissal of the Shin Bet head and attorney general.
All of this is happening as the country enters its eighteenth month of war. Israelis are not only sending their sons and husbands to the front—they are also waking most nights at 4 a.m. from Houthi missiles.
Even for Netanyahu, who has survived a litany of disasters that would have sunk any other politician, the situation looks grim.
But betting on the permanent demise of Bibi has been a losing proposition. He is now both the longest-serving Israeli prime minister and the longest-serving democratically elected leader in the world. He could paper his office walls with his political obituaries.
So as yet another career-threatening crisis looms, it’s worth asking: How? What has enabled Netanyahu to weather successive scandals and the worst security failure in Israel’s history? How does he always come back?
I can venture some answers. As Israel’s ambassador to the United States from 2009 to 2013 and, from 2016–2019, as deputy minister in the Prime Minister’s office, I saw up close the source of Netanyahu’s political longevity.
They begin with the basics: body and mind. At 75, despite a recent emergency operation and a heart condition, Netanyahu remains beyond robust. Not even his youngest aides can keep up with him. “He’s not human,” I remember a bleary-eyed reporter crying to me after following the prime minister on a lightning visit to Europe and then straight into an all-night Knesset debate. Bibi stayed energetic and alert throughout. A former officer in Israel’s ultra-elite Sayeret Matkal unit—the IDF’s equivalent to Delta Force—he is still capable of commanding the assassination of Hezbollah head Hassan Nasrallah and then compellingly addressing the UN General Assembly, all within 24 hours and running on no sleep.
Bibi is not only physically hearty, he is exceptionally smart. He’s an MIT-educated economist who helped transform Israel from an agrarian backwater into a high-tech mecca. During a New York visit in 2012, I remember sitting in his hotel suite as he hosted former president Bill Clinton and listening to them banter with one another about the movement of international markets. As someone who had studied macroeconomics myself, I was astonished; it was like watching top tennis stars volleying.
He’s an omnivorous reader, unimpressed by Doris Kearns Goodwin (“Team of rivals?” he once remarked to me. “She should meet my cabinet.”) and Max Hastings (whom he called “an English-village variety antisemite.”). By contrast, he waxed effusively about the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant I gave him, and the speeches of Winston Churchill, several of which he knows by heart. “Give us the tools faster and we’ll finish the job faster,” he told a joint session of Congress in 2024, paraphrasing a line from Churchill’s 1941 call for U.S. arms to fight Nazi Germany. He is a gifted orator, in Hebrew and English, at a time when oratory is all but dead. I believe he is the only contemporary leader never to have used a teleprompter.
Add to these formidable personal qualities a résumé unequaled by his peers. Over the course of more than four decades, he has served as Israel’s chargé d’affaires in Washington, as ambassador to the UN, as minister of defense, finance, and foreign affairs, and now, for a total of 17 years, as prime minister. And, virtually alone among national leaders, he has built an international reputation. Most Americans might not be able to name the prime minister of Britain, the president of France, or the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, but a great many of them know the name Netanyahu.
His tenacity becomes more remarkable still in light of what many regard as his monumental flaws. Those I witnessed—a temper of Biblical proportions and his reliance on an impermeable bubble of advisers—are far less damning than those listed by others. “He’s a bad fucking guy,” former U.S. president Joe Biden remarked, according to Bob Woodward’s best-selling War.
Bibi’s critics at home are even harsher. Domestic detractors accuse Netanyahu of replacing the Likud’s highly principled old guard with thuggish yes-men. They damn him for capitulating to ultra-Orthodox demands for exemption from military service and to the right-wing whims of his wife and eldest son. He’s faced sensational trials—in which he has testified—over charges of fraud and bribery as well as allegations of influence-trading in exchange for favorable media coverage. Most recently, key members of his staff are being investigated for taking Qatari money—what the Israeli press has dubbed “Qatargate.”
His appointment of Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich to ministerial posts after entering office in December 2022 stirred enormous controversy: The two are seen as hard-right racists by many Israelis. That month, his government advanced a massive reform of Israel’s Supreme Court and judicial system that a significant segment of the country viewed as an antidemocratic coup. That effort prompted major national protests, lasting from January 2023 until the fall.
Netanyahu and his supporters countered that, on the contrary, the protesters were undermining Israeli democracy by weaponizing the judicial system against the government and trying to overturn its victory at the polls. They insist that the legal charges against him are baseless, as is the Qatargate scandal. Not unlike the American voters for Donald Trump, whose example he is often said to emulate, Bibi’s backers view him as a lone bulwark against a corrupt and elitist bureaucracy. They consider him the only Israeli leader strong enough to stand up to the Biden administration. When the president said “don’t” about invading Rafah and Lebanon, Bibi defiantly did.
But all of this controversy paled in comparison to that ignited by the catastrophe of October 7, 2023.
Hamas’s surprise assault, representing the largest single massacre of Jews since the Holocaust and a wholesale intelligence and military failure by the Israeli state, occurred entirely on Netanyahu’s watch.
The leaders of the IDF, the Shin Bet, and the Mossad have either apologized publicly or resigned for their failures. Not Bibi. He has rejected all culpability—even for ignoring his generals’ warnings of the damage caused by his judicial reforms to Israel’s resilience. Instead, he faulted the army for not passing on intelligence warnings of Hamas’s attacks, or even waking him before the butchery began that dawn. He has adamantly opposed the establishment of any independent inquest into the events of that day, insisting instead on a government investigation that is likely to be more lenient toward the government. And as he ducked blame for the defense echelon’s faults, he seized credit for all its achievements, from its spectacular James Bond–style operations against Hezbollah to the fall of the Assad regime in Syria.
Even prior to the current fracas, this approach met a decidedly mixed reception. Successive polls showed that a significant number of Israelis believe that he needlessly drew out negotiations with Hamas, allegedly sacrificing the hostages’ lives and endangering those of Israeli soldiers, to preserve his coalition and remain in power. He fired his own defense minister, Yoav Gallant, after he protested Bibi’s alleged foot-dragging. Meanwhile, other Israeli political cadres denounced Netanyahu for agreeing to a ceasefire in Gaza at all and failing to achieve “total victory” over Hamas. As he once lamented to me: “I’m caught between messianists. Messianists of the left and messianists of the right.”
By the summer of 2024, Netanyahu looked finished. The Israeli journalists who annually, for the past decade, had trumpeted that this would surely be Bibi’s last stand, for the first time seemed justified. He could not deliver on his twin pledges to defeat Hamas and rescue the hostages, could not realize his dream of concluding peace with the Saudis, could not complete his quest to prevent Iran from going nuclear. The campaign for ultra-Orthodox army service was dividing his coalition and threatening to bring it down. The judges wanted him in court each day, even as he was recovering from surgery. Four years of strained relations with the Biden administration were in danger of being followed by far more contentious ones under Kamala Harris.
Enter—deus ex machina—Donald Trump. Days before his inauguration, Trump’s team managed to achieve the first phase of a ceasefire-for-hostage-release deal in Gaza. Shortly after, Bibi became the first foreign leader to visit the Trump White House, where he listened, beaming, as Trump announced his plan for relocating the civilian population of Gaza and raising a resort on its ruins.
Now, even as the most recent polls show that most Israelis want new elections and different leaders, Bibi still scores high as the individual most qualified to be prime minister, beating out Benny Gantz and Opposition head Yair Lapid by huge margins. Were elections held today, Netanyahu would still have a significant chance of remaining prime minister.
Despite the controversies and the unending agony of October 7, he’s a leader of unsurpassed experience and communication skills, and a man capable of withstanding superhuman pressures both domestic and international.
But there is another, far more fundamental reason for Bibi’s survival, one that is widely underappreciated by both his opponents and fans. I think it is the real reason for his long-term success.
There are leaders in history: Biden, for example. And there are leaders of history, like Ronald Reagan. The latter believe that they have a transformative mission in the world, and Netanyahu is without question a member of that category. His faith in himself and his own capacities seems never to flag. Impelling him is a bedrock belief in his responsibility to preserve the Jewish state, a task which he alone among Israeli politicians can fulfill. “Don’t you know, Michael,” he once told me, “things are never as bad or as good as they seem.” To give in to the bad, to resign from office or surrender to gargantuan pressures, would mean acknowledging the failure of his entire life’s work—and quite possibly, in his view, the end of the Zionist project itself. Such self-belief has served again and again as an engine for enduring success. Look at Lincoln and Churchill. Look at Theodor Herzl, for that matter: If you will it, it is no dream.
This almost mystical quality is a central reason why I believe that, barring any unexpected coalition crisis, Netanyahu will probably remain in office until the October 2026 elections. While he may yet realize his dream of making peace with Saudi Arabia and his raison d’être of neutralizing the Iranian nuclear threat, he is certain to face relentless popular opposition. He no doubt hopes to remain in Trump’s good graces and that the president will continue to back Israel’s actions in Gaza.
Today, as the country faces unprecedented crises at home and at war, Bibi’s reputation as the ultimate long-distance runner of Israeli politics will be gravely challenged. His faith in his life’s mission could be shaken as never before. Still, if the past is any bellwether, he will once again prevail. His would-be eulogists will, yet another time, be proven wrong.
Michael Oren, formerly Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Knesset member, and deputy minister for diplomacy, is currently a fellow of Washington’s Wilson Center, the founder of the Israel Advocacy Group, and the author of the Substack Clarity.