The miraculous rebirth of Benjamin Netanyahu

TEL AVIV — They call him the Magician for a reason.

A year ago, Benjamin Netanyahu’s long career at the top of Israeli politics looked like it was over. His government’s catastrophic failure to prevent the Oct. 7 attacks meant the only thing keeping him in office as prime minister, amid surging public grief and anger, was the need for stability in an emergency.

Twelve months on, he has recovered his standing after ordering a series of audacious attacks on Iran-backed Hezbollah targets. The remote-detonating of thousands of pagers and the assassination of the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, stunned observers around the world and boosted his popularity at home.

With Iran openly joining the conflict, the question now is how much further Netanyahu will go in his quest to reshape the Middle East to Israel’s — and his own — advantage.

“He’s in a much better position to continue in power,” said Jerusalem-based Nimrod Goren, an Israeli academic and fellow at the Middle East Institute. Netanyahu has weathered a series of storms that threatened to blow his coalition apart — from whether to agree a ceasefire in Gaza to a political crisis over the longstanding army service exemption for Israel’s ultra-Orthodox youth, Goren said. “He’s managed to secure breathing space.”

Last year, Netanyahu had run out of road. The Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel by Hamas gunmen, widely seen as the worst security failure since the 1973 Yom Kippur war which ended the legendary Golda Meir’s career, consigned Netanyahu and his Likud party to record rock bottom ratings in the polls. Even his own officials feared he would soon be ousted.

A month after the attack, former Israeli PM Ehud Olmert described Netanyahu as “destroyed emotionally” because instead of living up to his own image as “Mr. Security” he had been exposed as “Mr. Bullshit.”

Even as recently as June, Defense Minister Benny Gantz, who had been seen as the man who might take over as PM, quit Netanyahu’s war cabinet and issued a blistering condemnation of his leadership. Netanyahu, Gantz said at the time, was putting his own personal political considerations ahead of a post-war strategy for Gaza.

But Gantz has now backed Israel’s aggressive strategy in the region. In an oped this week for the New York Times Gantz offered his full support for Netanyahu’s military operations in Lebanon. “In a post-Oct 7 reality, it is clear that Israel must — and the world should — be proactive and determined in the face of the threat the Iranian regime poses to Israel’s existence and the region’s future,” Gantz wrote. He urged other governments to follow Israel’s example and systematically degrade Iran’s proxies — Hezbollah and Yemen’s Houthis.

Since launching wider operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon there has been a steady improvement in the prime minister’s ratings and his party has now climbed back from record lows to lead national opinion polls. Dahlia Scheindlin, a pollster and analyst, said Israel’s increasingly aggressive action “at a regional level” has played a role in a rehabilitation that’s infuriating Netanyahu’s adversaries.

“For the first six months after Oct. 7 his support crashed,” she said. “His personal ratings in head-to-head questions about who’s best suited to be Prime Minister, he was lagging Benny Gantz by 20 points. But he’s been slowly and incrementally improving since April,” Scheindlin told POLITICO. That was when the Israel Defense Forces successfully targeted Gen. Mohammad Reza Zahedi, a senior commander in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Then Likud started polling in first place, the first time since last year’s Hamas attacks within weeks of the Israeli military killing the top commander of Hamas’ military wing, Mohammed Deif, and the Gaza militants’ political leader Ismail Haniyeh, in July. Netanyahu’s own polling numbers increased as well. When asked who is more fit to be prime minister, Netanyahu or National Unity leader Gantz, Bibi has edged consistently ahead of his rival.

Since the Hezbollah pagers attacks and Nasrallah’s assassination, support for Netanyahu’s party has continued to build incrementally, Scheindlin said. He has benefited from the recent return to the government coalition of Gideon Sa’ar, who quit the war cabinet in March. Sa’ar founded his own New Hope party in 2019 after unsuccessfully challenging Netanyahu for the Likud leadership and his return to the government boosts Bibi’s Knesset majority from 64 to 68. The Knesset has 120 seats in all.

Netanyahu’s political opponents are drawing comfort from the fact that Likud appears to be running short of the 35 seats it secured in the last election. Polls are showing his right-wing coalition would still struggle to command a Knesset majority.

The next election for the Israeli parliament or Knesset is due in October 2026. But Goren, the academic, said Israeli coalition governments usually don’t last until the end of their scheduled term so a vote is likely sooner.

Former Netanyahu election adviser Nadav Shtrauchler, told POLITICO he still doubts his former boss can win the next election. “He’s rising in the polls and he’s on a very good wave but this isn’t yet finished,” he said. “I don’t think people will forget Oct. 7.”

Shtrauchler knows elections — he was the Israeli leader’s campaign manager for the 2019 parliamentary elections, one of Netanyahu’s most surprising turnarounds in a long career full of stunning comebacks. So his words carry weight. But Bibi has defied predictions before. He was first nicknamed “Bibi the magician” in the 1990s, after beating Shimon Peres in elections held months after the assassination of then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

Few believed, too, that he could pull off a win in 2015 given talk of a possible criminal investigation into allegations of breach of trust, bribes and fraud. Still, Bibi pulled yet another rabbit out of his hat, and secured reelection by courting the Israeli far right and religious nationalists — a tactic he repeated in 2019. With his current polling recovery, opponents are wondering if he will somehow win again.