Manipulator, Not Statesman: A Reckoning with Netanyahu’s Israel
Benjamin Netanyahu has served longer as prime minister than anyone in Israel’s history. Longevity, however, is not statesmanship.
A statesman leads his or her people toward a vision, a unifying message of hope, with the courage to spend political capital on a moral clarity that reaches well beyond the politics of the moment. Few in Israel’s short life as a modern state have earned the title, and some arrived at it from controversial beginnings. Menachem Begin traded Sinai for peace. Yitzhak Rabin took Arafat’s hand. Even Ariel Sharon, in his final years in office, broke with his own party to leave Gaza. Each rose above the political fray and will be remembered as a statesman.
But not Bibi Netanyahu.
Netanyahu’s career since the mid-1990s is a study in survival above all else and at any cost.
When Naftali Bennett assembled an unprecedented coalition, spanning right to left and including an Arab party for the first time, Netanyahu set out to break it. With the help of two useful idiots, Idit Silman and Nir Orbach, Bennett’s government fell within a year. It was a masterful maneuver, and a revealing one: the skill of a tactician, not a statesman. Statesmen spend political capital. Netanyahu hoards it.
Nearly three years after the October 7 massacre, the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, and with Israel still at war, Netanyahu remains prime minister. He is sustained by an unholy coalition with Itamar Ben-Gvir, convicted of incitement to racism and support for a terrorist organization, and by Orthodox Haredi parties bought with a figure the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI) puts at 14.9 billion shekels annually in coalition allocations that can only be described as political bribes. That is how Netanyahu ensured his survival and has blocked a State Commission of Inquiry that 75% of Israelis support. Beni Begin, son of Menachem Begin, put it bluntly in recent remarks confronting Netanyahu’s repeated attempts to rewrite history and dodge any responsibility for October 7: “You paralyzed and also lied?”
Netanyahu has nothing left to offer but fear and division. The pattern goes back three decades, from the 1995 rallies where crowds branded Yitzhak Rabin a traitor while Netanyahu stood by and said nothing, to the systematic spread of a conspiracy theory accusing Yair Golan, a political rival and by all accounts one of the heroes of that awful day, of having advance knowledge of October 7. When the truth threatens him, Netanyahu does what he does best. He lies.
Israel’s upcoming elections are arguably the most consequential elections in the young state’s history. No hyperbole.
This is not hypothetical. It is already happening. The current coalition government led by Netanyahu has pushed judicial overhaul bills through the final weeks before dissolution and passed a media law handing the government greater control over broadcasters. A government that does this while facing an election will do far worse when it doesn’t have to. One of the direct and most critical consequences of this government’s draconian policies led to 1,370 doctors leaving Israel between 2023 and 2025 according to a Tel Aviv University study.
If Netanyahu’s bloc wins enough seats to govern, expect the radical overhaul that began in January 2023 to be finished: a weakened Supreme Court, hollowed-out judicial oversight, and a government with unprecedented power. Expect more muzzling of the press and of those who oppose it. Expect billions more for institutions whose students are exempt from the army while the burden of work, taxation, and service in the IDF falls on a shrinking segment of the population. Expect Israel’s best doctors and engineers to keep leaving Israel.
And expect Ben-Gvir, heir to Meir Kahane’s outlawed Kach movement, to grow bolder. In May he celebrated his birthday with a cake decorated with a noose. Those appalling images made the headlines worldwide. Netanyahu will say he holds Ben-Gvir in check. But Netanyahu is not his prisoner; he built the cage himself. All this while Israel’s image on the world stage takes further blows, accelerating its isolation and demonization.
Israel’s Declaration of Independence promised: “It will be based on the ideas of liberty, justice, and peace taught by the Hebrew Prophets. It will uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens, without distinction of race, creed, or sex. It will guarantee full freedom of worship, education and culture.”
So the question is for every Zionist in the world: Is this the Israel you cherish? Is this the country we once called a beacon of democracy in the Middle East?
The results of October 27 will determine the character of Israel for generations. Israel deserves better than a leader who has mastered the art of surviving in office.
It deserves courts and a press free enough to hold power accountable, not a government that spent its final months in office weakening both. It deserves a country where the burden of military service, taxes, and productive work is carried by all Israelis, not shifted onto a shrinking few while billions of shekels subsidize those exempt from serving. And it deserves a return to the ideals its founders promised: liberty, equality, and a place among nations, rather than growing isolation from them.
None of this is Israel’s problem alone. In a Western world where Jew-hatred is rising in the open, what Israelis decide on October 27 will be felt by every Jew, Israeli or not.
Israel does not need a manipulator motivated by self preservation. It needs a statesman.
