Netanyahu: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

If we ever wondered what happens when a leader treats a nation like a personal brand, a coalition like a cap table, and accountability like an app update postponed because it might break things, we need only look at Israel.

Startup Nation was meant as a metaphor. A country is not a startup. Startups optimize for survival, states must optimize for legitimacy. Startups can ship imperfect products and patch later, states cannot move fast and break things because what breaks is often social cohesion, democratic trust, and national security.

For years, Benjamin Netanyahu has governed like a political founder, brilliant at staying in control, unmatched at messaging, relentlessly focused on coalition math, and increasingly indifferent to the maintenance of the underlying system. The result has been a slow accumulation of institutional debt with norms weakened, trust depleted, and risks deferred.

With elections expected in 2026, Israelis have a right, an obligation really, to evaluate Netanyahu’s record with clear eyes. That evaluation should not be an exercise in anti-Bibi mania, nor should it be a loyalty oath. It should be what democracies do, weigh achievements, measure failures, and decide whether the leader who brought the country to where it is can credibly lead it toward better days.

It has not been all bad. In fact, that is part of the tragedy. The same political talent and strategic intelligence that produced real accomplishments also enabled avoidance, delay, and denial when costs mounted.

The Good

It would be dishonest to deny that Israel’s economic transformation over the last quarter-century was shaped, in meaningful ways, by policies Netanyahu designed and championed. As finance minister, he pushed tax cuts, privatization, and austerity-style reforms that helped liberalize parts of the economy and reinforced Israel’s global, investment-friendly posture.

As prime minister he led Israel into the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), boosted defense exports, initiated economic ties with India and parts of Asia, and developed the country’s natural gas infrastructure. During COVID, Netanyahu’s government moved quickly on vaccines, including a deal with Pfizer that put Israel near the front of the line, an operational success that saved lives and shortened national disruption.

He should also be credited with creating the National Cyber Directorate, Israel’s cyber posture and ecosystem through national-level coordination that helped cement Israel’s reputation as a cybersecurity powerhouse.In foreign relations, Netanyahu can be credited with being the global voice of opposition to Iran, acting diligently to keep Iran’s nuclear program on the international agenda even as other countries preferred to look the other way. And perhaps above all else we must acknowledge his leadership in negotiating and signing The Abraham Accords, normalizing relations with United Arab Emirates and Bahrain and opening the Gulf to diplomatic, economic, and security cooperation.

Taken together, these achievements explain his enduring support. They also explain the particular pain of the last few years, as we have witnessed a leader capable of real statecraft choosing, again and again, to prioritize personal political survival over national repair. Netanyahu served as prime minister from June 1996 to July 1999 and from March 2009 to June 2021 and returned again in December 2022. Since that return, something shifted, not in his skills, but in his governing purpose. The center of gravity became him. Bibi decided his leadership was more important to Jewish history than unity, democracy, and security.

The Bad

Netanyahu built a brand around one defining promise, security. That brand collapsed on the morning of October 7, 2023. Just as Golda Meir is permanently associated with the trauma of the Yom Kippur War, Netanyahu will be linked to the Hamas surprise attack, because what happened was not only a battlefield failure, but intelligence, preparedness, and strategic failures, all of which unfolded on his watch. Responsibility for October 7 will be widely shared across the military, intelligence, political leadership. But there is no escaping the basic principle of governance – the prime minister does not get to outsource accountability for the defining catastrophe of his tenure.

The error now most apparent is that Netanyahu pursued a Palestinian strategy that achieved neither peace nor durable control. Netanyahu’s approach to the Palestinian arena has often aimed at managing rather than resolving by maintaining fragmentation, delaying hard choices, and preserving short term quiet. In Gaza, a strategy that tolerated Hamas rule was justified as a way to weaken the Palestinian Authority  but did not prevent escalation and war. To the contrary, it brough Israel to October 7.

The map of Judea and Samaria, once amenable to division with settlement blocs close to the green line, has become a complicated  maze of Jewish communities deep into the east. One can argue, as many do, that these moves were rooted in security logic and historical claims. But the core indictment is not that Netanyahu strengthened Israel’s presence in the territories, but that he did so without building a coherent endgame that addresses the long term consequences of Israeli control, including international isolation, permanent friction, internal division, and a perpetual cycle of violence that undermines the very security the strategy purported to enhance.

Even after October 7, when many Israelis believe a Palestinian state is off the table for a generation, most still recognize that some eventual accommodation, however distant, however redesigned, will be required. Netanyahu’s signature failure is that he expanded facts on the ground while leaving Israel with fewer political exits and no credible plan for what comes next. In both Gaza and the West Bank, the test is results and Netanyahu’s strategies did not deliver what they promised.

Beyond miscalculations and missteps on the Palestinian issue, on the domestic front Netanyahu’s coalition continues advancing policies around Haredi exemption from military service at a moment when the IDF has warned it needs manpower urgently. Whatever one’s view of religious study and national contribution, the political timing is corrosive. Coming off the Gaza War that saw 1,152 Israeli security personal killed and over 20,000 troops wounded, it signals that some Israelis are asked to pay in blood while others are protected by coalition agreements. That is not only a manpower problem, but also a legitimacy problem. Armies are sustained by shared obligation. When that collapses, the fight continues, but the society frays.

Israelis remember stretches of relative quiet during earlier Netanyahu years. But in retrospect, much of that quiet now looks less like stability and more like postponement, pauses during which Israel’s enemies built capacity, refined plans, and waited. The south was invaded and Israeli communities were overrun for hours. In the north, the Galilee was evacuated and large areas remained disrupted for extended periods. These are not isolated incidents, they are symptoms of a deeper strategic failure by a nation that believed it could indefinitely manage threats without paying the price of decisive accountability, coherent strategy, and internal unity

There is a particularly sad irony here. Policies designed to extend sovereignty and deterrence ended up diminishing sovereignty where it matters most, the ability to protect citizens in their homes.

The Ugly

Bad policies are one thing, but this recent round of Netanyahu rule has also introduced the ugly to Israeli politics in ways that even veterans of the brutal Israeli political scene were surprised to witness.

Long before Trump came to smash political norms in the United States, Netanyahu was slaying scared cows in Israel. Not only did he break the socialist hold on the economy and introduce American style politicking, but he also broke the mold of the Israeli leader willing to live a modest lifestyle in service of their people. Netanyahu (and Barak and Olmert) marks a type of leader in Israel that unlike Ben-Gurion, Golda, Begin and Shamir, have material ambitions alongside their desire to govern. This could be the root not only of his alleged corruption but also his willingness to disassemble democracy in order to remain in power.

The corruption charges against Netanyahu – now expanding to the ever disgraceful Qatargate – have eroded trust and led Netanyahu to a series of anti-democratic actions like pressuring, closing or boycotting media outlets and seeking changes to the nation’s independent judiciary. The changes Netanyahu seeks to introduce to the selection of judges falls outside the Israeli consensus and is viewed by many as a power grab and an assault on the democratic foundations of the state. The need for such changes were betrayed by Netanyahu himself when, in a letter formally requesting a pardon from President Herzog, the prime minister offered, in exchange for the pardon, to discontinue judiciary reform. Netanyahu’s confidence has so blinded him that he openly admits to dividing the nation, diverting security attention, and threatening democracy not in pursuit of a better Israel, but as acts of political retribution.

Perhaps the most acrimonious part of Netanyahu’s legacy (after Oct. 7) is the way in which he has divided Israel into two irreconcilable camps and stoked a visceral aggression one to the other. There may have been clues to this tendency prior to the Rabin assassination, for which the Israeli left has never forgiven him, but even that tragic event did not convince him that fostering division among Israelis is playing with fire. Netanyahu has normalized calling other Israelis the enemy for disagreeing with him, a disservice to the nation, and a complete negation of Jewish history.

This certainty that only he can lead the Jewish nation led to Netanyahu slaying the most sacred cow of all, inviting Kahanists into the ruling government coalition. He actually did more than just allow them into the coalition, he awarded them key portfolios from which they have been able to influence how dissent is tolerated, how funds are allocated, and how the war in Gaza was conducted. These ministers have eroded Israel’s standing internationally and deeply damaged the fragile left-right balance that allows Israel to be the loud, dynamic, inventive society it has become. Netanyahu was always willing to play politics, invent new ministries to appease potential coalition partners, and bow to small party demands if his coalition was at risk. Normalizing the far right, who present a vision of Israel radically different from what the consensus will allow will also forever stain his legacy.

Finally, while his uncontested political skills have enabled him to shift blame and delay judgement, there is ultimately no way for Netanyahu to escape responsibility for events that occurred on his watch. His efforts to replace the type of national commission of inquiry that has always been used in Israel to investigate institutional failures – Agranat (1973), Kahan (1982), Landau (1987), Shamgar (1995), Or (2000), Naor-Berliner (2021), Grunis (2022) – for a government selected, government controlled commission that could allow Netanyahu to escape accountability.

The scope of the blame is just starting to be fully understood, with initial indications pointing to faulty assumptions regarding Hamas’ intentions and Israel’s defensive capabilities, misguided policies to keep Hamas in power in Gaza (to preserve the PA-Hamas rivalry), failure to properly secure the Gaza border and protect Israeli citizens, an inability or lack of willingness to stifle radical voices within his government, a decision making process that intermingled state interests and personal political ambitions, the ignoring of military buildups on Israel’s  borders, and empowering Israel’s enemies (like Qatar) by surrendering to convenience over caution.

A Fateful Decision

As Israelis are so often able to do, there is a biblical parable from which they can draw lessons as they head to the polls in 2026. Like King Saul, Netanyahu has allowed his initial successes to turn into certainty, insecurity, and obsession. Like Saul he has become preoccupied not with the nation, but with threats to his rule and spends more energy hunting rivals rather than he does governing, losing the moral authority that made leadership possible.

The tragedy of Bibi,  like Saul, is not that he lacked talent. It is that he could not relinquish control, could not accept limits, and could not repent, until the ending came as catastrophe. The moral pattern from Saul’s era is recognizable today, when a leader begins to treat the state as an extension of himself, the country pays in unity, legitimacy, and safety.

With elections expected in 2026, Israelis have a chance to choose something difficult and healthy – accountability over tribalism, repair over revenge, and governance over brand management. The goal is not humiliation, but a future in which no leader, left or right, can place himself above the institutions that keep a diverse, loud, brilliant society from tearing itself apart.

Israel does not need a brand. It needs a prime minister.