How Netanyahu Shifted Israel’s Overton Window and Who He Really Is

How Netanyahu Shifted Israel’s Overton Window — And What It Reveals About Who He Really Is

Political theorists use the term “Overton window” to describe the range of ideas that are considered acceptable in mainstream public debate. Inside the window are the positions politicians can safely support; outside it are the ideas we once called unthinkable. Over time, that window can move.

Under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s long and adaptable leadership, Israel’s Overton window has been slowly – and then very quickly – dragged toward a place that would have been unrecognizable to the state’s founders.

To build and preserve power, Netanyahu has pandered to the narrowest, most parochial constituencies, elevated extremists to positions of authority, and treated core institutions as bargaining chips in his own quest for survival. In the process, he has normalized policies that once stood outside Israel’s moral “north star”: being a Jewish and democratic state, anchored in the rule of law and a basic commitment to human dignity.

Many Israelis, including some who once voted for him, still cling to a hopeful counter-story: that Netanyahu is a fundamentally responsible, cautious guardian of Israel, forced by unprecedented circumstances – Iran, Hamas, judicial “overreach,” hostile media, a politicized legal system – to use harsh tools he doesn’t truly believe in. According to that story, somewhere inside is a different, better Bibi waiting to re-emerge once the storms pass.

That is a comforting fantasy.

The pattern of his choices over the last decade, and especially since his indictment, shows something else: what we are seeing now is his authentic political self. The shifting Overton window is not just something happening around him; it is the product of who he has chosen to be.

From fringe partners to core architecture

The clearest example is the systematic elevation of extremists from the margins to the center.

A generation ago, the idea that politicians with Kahanist roots like Itamar Ben-Gvir and ultra-nationalist ideologues like Bezalel Smotrich would oversee police, internal security, and civilian control over the West Bank would have been dismissed as dystopian fiction. Yet Netanyahu personally constructed the coalition that handed them these levers of power after the 2022 election.

Defenders say he “had no choice”: the math of the Knesset left him dependent on their parties, and any other coalition would have required concessions to centrist or Arab parties that his base would not tolerate. But the truth is simpler and less flattering.

When faced with a choice between:

• a broader, more moderate coalition that might constrain his personal legal maneuvering, or
• a narrow, radical coalition that would protect him and let him reshape the system,

Netanyahu chose the latter. Repeatedly.

That is not compulsion; that is preference.

Once admitted as “responsible partners,” these extremists drag the Overton window along with them. Talk of formal or creeping annexation, of erasing the Green Line in law and practice, of openly privileging Jewish rights over Palestinian rights between the river and the sea, moves from fringe slogans into cabinet agendas and coalition agreements.

The window does not move because history bullied Netanyahu into a corner. It moves because he keeps choosing the partners most willing to toss yesterday’s red lines into today’s coalition agreements.

Circumstances or character?

Netanyahu’s supporters often describe him as tragic hero: a brilliant statesman trapped in impossible circumstances – Iran’s nuclear program, fractured society, hostile international forums, a legal system “out to get him.” In this telling, his most extreme moves are reluctant self-defense.

But a different picture emerges when you trace the timeline of his actions:

• Long before October 7, he agreed to a conflict-of-interest arrangement precisely because his corruption trial made his involvement in judicial appointments and law enforcement inappropriate.
• Rather than respecting that boundary, he worked politically to undermine it, backing laws that made it harder to remove a sitting prime minister, and then personally intervening in judicial overhaul plans that directly affect the court hearing his case.
• He did not stumble into a coalition dependent on Smotrich and Ben-Gvir; he engineered it because it maximized his leverage and minimized the chances that anyone inside the government would push him to step aside during trial.
• This year, as criticism over the Gaza war and the hostage crisis mounted, his government moved to dismiss Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, who oversees his corruption case – an act widely seen as a direct attack on judicial independence and an effort to clear the path for further court-weakening legislation.

These are not the grim necessities of a reluctant leader. They are consistent with a long-standing pattern: when Netanyahu must choose between the health of Israel’s institutions and his own political and legal survival, he chooses himself.

We should stop pretending that, under the right conditions, a softer, more restrained Bibi will suddenly emerge to repair the damage. What we are seeing is who he really is.

Weaponizing the system against the system

The struggle over the judicial overhaul is the most vivid example of the Overton window in motion.

The original package – limiting judicial review, altering how judges are appointed, curbing the court’s ability to strike down “unreasonable” government decisions – was presented as a technical fix to an activist court. Critics across the legal, security, business, and tech communities described it bluntly as an attempted power grab that would neuter one of the few checks on a bare coalition majority.

Instead of stepping back, Netanyahu doubled down. He framed the battle as a war of “the people” against “elites,” cast his own conflict of interest as a manufactured narrative, and allowed his ministers to paint protesters as anarchists and traitors.

Again, some argue that October 7 changed everything – that war and trauma forced the government to centralize power and accept constraints on civil liberties and judicial oversight. But the judicial assault predates October 7; the October 7 failure and the Gaza war simply provided new justification to continue along the same path, this time wrapped in the language of national emergency.

What has shifted is the Overton window: it is no longer unthinkable for a sitting prime minister on trial to be personally involved in rewriting the rules of judicial review and in targeting the very legal officials scrutinizing him. It is debated as a legitimate option.

That normalization tells us less about Israel’s objective circumstances and more about Netanyahu’s own hierarchy of values.

Parochial interests as a governing philosophy

Netanyahu’s method of governance has long relied on building a pyramid of dependencies:

• Ultra-Orthodox parties receive expanded budgets, draft exemptions, and institutional autonomy, even as the unresolved question of Haredi conscription threatens both social cohesion and the IDF’s future manpower.
• Settler leaders are rewarded with unprecedented control over West Bank administration, blurring the line between the army and civilian control and solidifying de facto annexation.
• Far-right “law and order” ministers gain authority over police and internal security, enabling crackdowns that critics say disproportionately target Arab citizens and anti-government demonstrators.

Each deal is defended as a tactical necessity: “We need their votes, we need stability, we need to avoid a worse alternative.” Yet the cumulative effect is to train the political system to accept a new reality in which the state exists to serve the coalition’s survival, not the common good.

This is where the fantasy of the “better Bibi” is most seductive. It allows his admirers – and some reluctant supporters – to tell themselves that he is privately uncomfortable with the extremism he has unleashed, that he would prefer a more liberal, centrist Israel, but circumstances force him to govern this way “for now.”

But if, term after term, crisis after crisis, he always ends up choosing the same kind of deal with the same kind of partners at the same institutions’ expense, then we should believe the pattern, not the alibi.

A public that hasn’t fully moved

The good news is that while the government has shifted the Overton window, Israeli society has not marched in lockstep with it.

The 2023 mass protests against the judicial overhaul, the creative diaspora protest movements, and the ongoing anger over the government’s failures before and during October 7 all show a public that still feels the gap between Israel’s founding promises and its current direction.

Polls continue to show that a large majority of Israelis blame the government – and Netanyahu personally – for the October 7 disaster and distrust his leadership going forward.  That distrust is not only about operational failure; it is about the sense that the state’s basic compass has been tampered with.

People may disagree about borders, settlement blocs, and negotiation strategies, but many still recognize that something more fundamental is at stake: What kind of country are we becoming, and what are we willing to normalize to keep one man in power?

Reclaiming the window — and dropping the illusions

It is tempting to hope that the way out is simply a better version of Netanyahu himself – that if he can be nudged or pressured into restraint, the Overton window will glide back to a healthier place and the damage will be contained.

But personalizing the solution around an imaginary “good Bibi” is just the mirror image of personalizing the problem around a mythic “indispensable Bibi.” Both keep us captive to a story in which our future depends on his inner transformation.

The more realistic – and more demanding – answer is this:

• We must judge Netanyahu by his consistent actions, not by the better intentions his supporters attribute to him.
• We must stop treating his survival needs as equivalent to Israel’s survival needs.
• And we must re-center our politics around institutions and principles that will outlast any one leader: an independent judiciary, accountable executive power, genuine equality under the law, and a serious grapple with what it means to be both Jewish and democratic in practice, not only in slogans.

The Overton window is not simply a fact we must live with. It is the sum of what we, as a society, are prepared to tolerate or to refuse.

Netanyahu has shown us his authentic self. The question is whether we will keep adjusting our moral eyesight to fit his silhouette – or whether we will move the window back toward the north star that guided Israel at its birth, even if that means finally letting go of the man who helped drag it off course.