Netanyahu’s Very Useful War
Benjamin Netanyahu has spent the better part of two decades perfecting the art of the political escape. Just when his career appears to be buried under the weight of indictments, or his coalition fatally fractured, he reappears, seemingly unscathed, with a new lease on power. Today, as Israel finds itself locked in a multifront war with Iran and its proxies, Netanyahu is once again attempting his favorite trick: transmuting a national existential crisis into a personal political lifeline.
Take the prime minister’s perennial quest to call off his corruption trial. Netanyahu has been in the dock for bribery, fraud, and breach of trust since 2020. During that time, he has attempted to intimidate and disempower Israel’s judiciary and pressured Isaac Herzog, the country’s president, to grant him a pardon. Last week, thanks to the Iran war, that push got some backup from none other than Donald Trump. “I don’t want anything on Bibi’s mind other than fighting against Iran,” the U.S. president told Axios, calling Herzog a “disgrace” for letting the trial continue. “Every day I talk to Bibi about the war. I want him to focus on the war and not on the fucking court case.” Trump is not known for his attention to the minutiae of the internal politics of foreign countries, but one can guess where he has been hearing repeatedly about the trial.
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Netanyahu is using the war to shore up his shaky grip on Israel’s domestic politics as well. By law, the prime minister’s coalition needs to pass a budget by the end of this month in order to avert mandatory new elections. For a time, Netayahu seemed likely to miss this deadline. The reason: The ultra-Orthodox parties, which hold 18 of the coalition’s 64 seats, refused to back the budget unless the prime minister passed legislation officially exempting yeshiva students from military service.
Most Israelis are subject to a mandatory draft, but the ultra-Orthodox—or Haredi—are not. This arrangement, the result of historical horse-trading for Haredi political backing, was unpopular in peacetime. It became intolerable during wartime, as Israelis watched their sons and daughters fight and fall in armed conflicts while Haredi life continued as usual. Today, some 70 percent of Jewish Israelis oppose the ultra-Orthodox exemption, and the supreme court has ruled that the government must end it. The Haredi ultimatum has put Netanyahu in a bind. Either he can placate his ultra-Orthodox allies and infuriate most voters, or he can placate most voters and infuriate the ultra-Orthodox. The war, however, has bought him some time. “Is it possible to wage a war without a budget?” one ultra-Orthodox politician said, reportedly explaining why his faction would be supporting the measure, at least for now.
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Finally, Netanyahu’s allies have begun suggesting to journalists that the premier might call early elections if the military campaign against Iran ends well. Their hope is that fresh wartime gains will overshadow Netanyahu’s liabilities, such as the Haredi exemption—the prime minister is still ultimately committed to preserving it—and his government’s failure to prevent the October 7 attacks.
If all of this sounds premature, bordering on hubristic, that’s because it is. Netanyahu is a consummate tactician and excels at leveraging unforeseen circumstances to bolster his political position. But there is good reason to think that this time, his gambits may fail. To begin with, despite public pressure from Trump, President Herzog has not acquiesced to Netanyahu’s demand for a pardon. “Anyone who thinks that a gun to the head and external threats will influence the president to deviate from the proper administration of the law does not know the people involved and has no idea what he is talking about,” Michael Herzog, the president’s brother and Israel’s former ambassador to the United States, said. Last week, Israel’s Justice Ministry reportedly concluded that Netanyahu’s request for a pardon did not meet the criteria for granting one and should therefore be rejected.
The Haredi issue is also not going away. Indeed, the ultra-Orthodox exemption is likely to upset voters more than ever now that Israel is fighting a war on two fronts—against the regime in Iran and its proxy Hezbollah in Lebanon. Last week, many Israelis erupted in outrage as 90 yeshiva students flew to Poland to visit the grave of a famous rabbi, while their non-Haredi counterparts were being called up to the front. Even if the ultra-Orthodox don’t capsize Netanyahu’s current coalition with their highly unpopular political demands, those demands may prevent the coalition from returning to power in the next election.
Likewise, whether the Iran war will alter the electoral map in Netanyahu’s favor is far from clear. Most Israelis back the conflict at the moment, viewing it as necessary to secure the future of their state against an eliminationist foe. But Israeli voters were not born yesterday, and their views of Netanyahu and his hard-right coalition have been remarkably stable since 2023. Most polls have consistently shown that Israelis do not trust Netanyahu and that support for his government has collapsed. These numbers have not been improved by military feats such as the decapitation of Hezbollah in 2024 and the 12-day war against Iran last year. And those conflicts at least had defined end points with decisive Israeli victories, such as the killing of the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and the bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites. The current war provides far less cause for Israeli optimism.
“Ending these kinds of operations is much harder than starting them,” Netanyahu wrote in his 2022 memoir. Yet today, he has embroiled his country in two such open-ended engagements—not counting the continuing skirmishes along the Gaza cease-fire line. With Trump already signaling a potential retreat in Iran, and the Islamic Republic still in power and showing that it can successfully hold the world’s energy supply hostage, the endgame for Israel remains an enigma. If Netanyahu winds up trapped in the very sort of conflict he once warned against, he will have given new meaning to the phrase self-fulfilling prophecy.