The Case for Another Netanyahu Term
Why Israel’s next chapter needs the experience to defend, negotiate and rebuild
If Israel’s sovereignty is to mean more than the right to deliver an eloquent explanation of why somebody else must replenish its ammunition, then its next government will have to concern itself with the less theatrical foundations of national power: production, investment, scientific education and the capacity to withstand pressure from abroad. A country may possess an excellent argument for its own survival and still discover that arguments cannot intercept missiles. Somewhere, somebody must manufacture the interceptor.
Here is a case for re-electing Benjamin Netanyahu that begins at the Treasury rather than the podium.
As finance minister between 2003 and 2005; Netanyahu pursued economic reforms involving public expenditure, taxation, privatisation and financial competition. These measures were contentious, and their social costs deserve examination; the subsequent recovery also owed much to circumstances beyond any minister’s control. Nevertheless, he demonstrated a willingness to challenge entrenched economic arrangements when preserving them was the easier political occupation. The International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) contemporary assessment recorded a substantial programme of structural reform alongside the emerging recovery.
The political significance extends beyond economics. A state that cannot finance its responsibilities will eventually have those responsibilities interpreted for it by its creditors, suppliers or benefactors. For Israel, prosperity is part of the machinery of independence. Netanyahu’s economic outlook supplies a coherent starting point for a government determined to enlarge the country’s freedom of action.
His claim should be judged by his ability to unite economic reform, strategic judgement and diplomacy to make Israel harder to coerce. Defence cannot be funded by revelation, nor are exports merely a civilian diversion.
Israel should expand domestic capacity in critical munitions and components, maintain adequate reserves and diversify supplies where complete self-sufficiency would be ruinously expensive. Autarky is an excellent way to manufacture inferior goods at patriotic prices. Strategic resilience requires the more discriminating business of identifying which dependencies can be tolerated and which could become a foreign veto during an emergency.
Netanyahu’s experience across economic government, diplomacy and security gives him a credible claim to direct that effort. The relevant qualification is his familiarity with the competing demands: what the military requires, what the economy can sustain and what foreign partners might agree to produce jointly.
His diplomatic relationships should serve this larger project. Cooperation with the United States should encompass research, production and supply arrangements. European and Asian partnerships should widen access to investment and markets. Regional diplomacy should pursue energy, water, transport and technology projects whose benefits give participating governments a material interest in their continuation. Such arrangements will not abolish hostility. They can make cooperation profitable enough to acquire defenders.
This would give another Netanyahu term a specific purpose: turn diplomatic access into productive capacity, and productive capacity into greater national independence.
Whatever verdict one reaches on Netanyahu’s political longevity, his strategic importance cannot be assessed as though the recent wars had consisted merely of speeches delivered over somebody else’s achievements: under his premiership, Israeli forces killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, shattered much of Hezbollah’s senior command and carried the confrontation directly into Iran, striking military leadership, air defences and nuclear infrastructure. These were substantial operational successes, even if their conversion into lasting security remains unfinished.
Netanyahu’s claim to another term rests partly on that difficult balance: the leader who must answer for the catastrophe of October 7 also presided over operations that demonstrated the vulnerability of adversaries who had invested heavily in Israel’s vulnerability. His standing as a consequential wartime leader is therefore inseparable from the next strategic task—using military advantage and diplomatic access to obtain arrangements more durable than the interval between two wars. Battlefield success creates an opportunity, and statesmanship must collect on it.
For a people who carried the idea of home for centuries, sovereignty must mean being able to build there without wondering who will burn it down. I favour another Netanyahu term because his experience can help secure that freedom. Let its achievement be measured in orchards planted, homes rebuilt and children whose names we learn through their lives, never through a list of the dead.
