Zack Beauchamp on political divisiveness in Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu's precarious political standing

Israel was hugely polarized prior to the war.  This really all started with Netanyahu getting indicted on corruption charges, very very serious charges related to, among other things, tampering with the freedom of the Israeli press.  So Netanyahu, who is indicted - he's currently on trial right now, though I don't think the trial is proceeding during the war - and that basically led to a political crisis where the country was divided evenly between people who wanted Netanyahu to stay in office and his bitter opponents.  And so it led to something like four or five elections in a very number of years.  And eventually, after all of this political turmoil, he ends up losing power in 2021, he's out for a year and then he comes back in 2022 on this very very narrow coalition that represents basically the extreme right of Israeli society on the whole.  And it means his Likud Party, which is mostly a vehicle for his own ambitions, the radical right settler faction (religious Zionism) and two ultra-Orthodox parties, which primarily care about the interests of their own community.  But they were polarized against the center and the left of Israeli society who believes that Netanyahu is an existential threat to Israeli democracy.  

And matters got a lot worse when earlier in 2023 he tried to push through an overhaul to Israel's court system.  And this overhaul, basically what it brought the courts under political control really really really freaked out most Israelis.  It was widly unpopular.  It already led to him taking a major political hit.  I mean we're talking it spawning the largest political protest movement in Israel's history.  We went on for months and months and months of street protests, sometimes paralyzing major cities.  

This a huge deal and then you layer on top of that the worst security failure in Israel's history, the October 7 attack, and substantial evidence that he's personally responsible for it, and all of a sudden the polarized logjam almost breaks.  People are really angry at Netanyahu, including people who had voted for him in four or five elections.  There's not much room for him to improve his political situation from beforehand, because the people who hate him hate him even more.  Really it's [un]likely - unless the war goes super well and it looks really easy for Israel, which I seriously doubt... - that he'll be able to do much to improve his political standing.

[...]

What I will say about his rhetoric in general is he's trying to appeal, often in Hebrew, to a very very particular and extreme base and I think your label "authoritarian" is accurate.  Right now Netanyahu really really is, I think at this point, unquestionable an authoritarian figure.  The problem is that he's facing a society that's realized that.  And so he's trying to figure out, really desparately scrambling, to secure his own political position and to stay out of jail.  Those are his primary objectives.  And so a lot of the criticism inside Israel has oriented his confusion of the state with his own personal well-being and welfare, and it's hard to deny that claim if you look at what he's done and you look at the way he's talked...  I would read everything that Netanyahu does through the lens of what is he doing to secure his political future?  And I think that's very very dangerous - that's putting it mildly - in the context of a really bloody war.

~ Zack Beauchamp, senior correspondent, Vox, "Netanyahu's 'PSYCHOTIC' Tweet Deleted As GROWING COALITION of Israelis Push To DUMP PM," The Hill, 4:30 mark,