Israel’s Iron Prime Minister

At home, the left sees him as cynical, conniving and corrupt; while the right sees him as tired, weak and unambitious. Abroad, he is almost universally loathed and distrusted. And yet no one can deny his Machiavellian mastery of the dirty game of politics, domestic and international.

Modern history has produced only two figures who fit this description. The first is Germany’s Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. The second is Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. For Bibi – his nickname and the title of his recent autobiography – read Bibismarck.

Netanyahu has been Prime Minister for almost 14 of the past 15 years, not quite the 19 years Bismarck served as German chancellor. For nearly a decade, whether Bibi should stay or go was the central question of Israeli politics. Between 2018 and 2022, Israel held five elections in which one of the rallying cries of the opposition was ‘Just not Bibi’. In August last year, Israel was racked by anti-Netanyahu protests that drew hundreds of thousands to the streets, including almost every member of the country’s cultural and even military elite. The surprise attack of 7 October was seemingly the final nail in Netanyahu’s political coffin.

Yet there Bibi still sits in his office in Jerusalem: still Prime Minister. As the anniversary of 7 October approaches, he is again ahead in the polls.

And no wonder. Hamas has largely been vanquished in Gaza, its remaining fighters confined to tunnels under a heap of rubble. More impressively, Israel has conducted arguably the most successful clandestine operation of the 21st century, maiming around 3,000 Hezbollah operatives with explosive pagers. And it is waging a war in all but name in Lebanon, attacking more than 5,000 targets in the past month and eliminating 16 of Hezbollah’s most senior operatives.