Netanyahu’s last hurrah?
As Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu addresses a joint session of Congress today, he will pride himself on being the first foreign leader to have been invited to that great hall four times. With everything that is going on in Israel, one wonders whether there will be a fifth time.
Indeed, the longest-serving Israeli prime minister faces unprecedented challenges. Without discounting his impressive political survival skills or the complicated structure of the Israeli governance system that makes removing him all the more difficult, the cumulative effect of those challenges is bound to reach its logical conclusion: his political demise.
For months now, in successive polls, over two-thirds of Israelis wish him gone from office; a third of his party loyalists choose to identify with other parties; and, were elections held now, his current coalition would no longer enjoy a Knesset majority.
Concurrently, Netanyahu has lost the political comfort zone, which he had carefully orchestrated for each of his five terms in office. Securing the parties to his left and right served him well in blaming one wing of his coalition for not yielding to the other. However, once the two former IDF chiefs of staff-turned-centrist-politicians (Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot) left the war cabinet, Netanyahu was left at the mercy of the most extreme elements of the Israeli political spectrum.
Those hardline annexationists, Jewish supremacists, self-proclaimed homophobes and xenophobes, and the ultra-Orthodox have all extracted a hard price in terms of promoting their respective sectoral agenda for refraining from bringing him down. Their conduct further galvanized public resentment just as it accelerated hostile international reaction, as exemplified by the recent International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling about the illegality of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Such a complex reality would have required unique political acrobatic skills to navigate under normal circumstances. However, nothing about the current circumstances is normal.
It is not normal for a prime minister to continue serving while his trial on three counts of corruption proceeds. It is even less normal given that on his watch, Israel suffered the most traumatic experience since its independence and many blame the disaster of October 7 not only on the IDF but also on Netanyahu’s long strategy of weakening Palestinian moderates while feeding the Hamas beast – with hundreds of millions of Qatari dollars and otherwise.
Moreover, Netanyahu’s refusal to heed the advice of Israeli and US security agencies regarding designing Israel’s Gaza end-game and exit strategy – which should have informed the war strategy from the outset – has resulted in the war continuing aimlessly, having accomplished only two of its three primary objectives: demolishing Hamas’ governance and its capacity to threaten Israel. The third, which to most Israelis should have been first – bringing home our remaining 120 hostages – has fallen victim to a variety of Netanyahu delay tactics.
The bottom line is beyond unthinkable: A majority of Israelis believe that the prime minister is preventing a hostages-for-ceasefire deal in order to serve his political clock. That clock has at least two hands: one that counts the days until the Knesset goes into a long summer recess, hindering a forced reshuffle or a vote for early elections. The other is counting the months until the US elections, with Netanyahu commonly suspected of secretly rooting for Trump and not-so-secretly investing in soothing the erratic Republican nominee’s lingering anger with him.
When drafting his speech to yesterday’s joint session of Congress, Netanyahu must have struggled with the need to balance this entire range of challenges, while being fully cognizant of another. Having mastered the art of verbal acrobatics to the point where various audiences could hear alternative realities in the same speech, all while leaving him room to walk away from any perceived commitment, that magic is gone.
Both at home and abroad, Bibi’s ability to swindle audiences has long given way to arousing their suspicion. Save for an ever-shrinking base of blind, if noisy, loyalists (commonly dubbed “Bibists”), most Israeli and world leaders see through his verbal gymnastics and take his word with a healthy dose of skepticism. With that in mind, one hopes that members of Congress find ways to prevent their respect for the office of the prime minister of Israel from being confused with an endorsement of the reckless policies of that office’s current holder.
Netanyahu’s various hosts in Washington will do well to consider that the legal, political, security, moral, and other undercurrents noted above – cumulatively spelling his political demise – are bound to reach their logical conclusion.
Alas, given Israel’s complicated parliamentary system, it is impossible to predict which of the commonly discussed scenarios of change will materialize; when it will come about; and how much damage will be done to Israel, US-Israel relations, and US interests until then.
That uncertainty notwithstanding, it seems safe to conclude that Netanyahu’s fourth address to the joint session as prime minister of Israel is his last.
The writer, a former special ambassador and policy adviser to the late prime minister Shimon Peres, is the Israel Fellow of the Israel Policy Forum (IPF), a member of the Executive Committee of Commanders for Israel’s Security (CIS), and a senior fellow at the Economic Cooperation Foundation (ECF).