The Israeli assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah last week made a lot of Israelis happy—but probably no one quite as much as Benjamin Netanyahu.
His joy marks a sudden reversal after the most difficult year in his political career. Try as he did, he could not remove the stain of the failure to prevent Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre. Meanwhile, Israel was enduring months of indecisive warfare with Hezbollah and an ongoing hostage ordeal in Gaza. Polls showed the public had little confidence in the prime minister’s ability to lead the country. Other polls predicted that his religious-right coalition would lose power in a new election.
The Israeli assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah last week made a lot of Israelis happy—but probably no one quite as much as Benjamin Netanyahu.
His joy marks a sudden reversal after the most difficult year in his political career. Try as he did, he could not remove the stain of the failure to prevent Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre. Meanwhile, Israel was enduring months of indecisive warfare with Hezbollah and an ongoing hostage ordeal in Gaza. Polls showed the public had little confidence in the prime minister’s ability to lead the country. Other polls predicted that his religious-right coalition would lose power in a new election.
But starting with the dramatic attack on Hezbollah pagers on Sept. 17 and climaxing with Friday’s assassination of Nasrallah, Netanyahu has been able to assume his old mantle of Mr. Security—the leader who, like no other, can keep Israel’s enemies at bay, a modern-day Winston Churchill. If the triumphs of the past two weeks aren’t the “total victory” that the prime minister has been promising, they add up to a military and intelligence achievement of perhaps historic dimensions. Together with a little-noticed event two days after the assassination, when New Hope party leader Gideon Sa’ar agreed to join the coalition and boost its parliamentary majority, Netanyahu looks more securely in power than he has at any time in the past year. Yet the politics of Oct. 7 may very well frustrate his ambitions, and here is why.
Over the past several days, the prime minister has understandably been gloating over the death of Nasrallah. What is more interesting is how he gloats. “I came to the conclusion that the powerful blows that the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] has been landing on Hezbollah in recent days were not enough. … Therefore, I gave the directive,” is how he framed the event, followed by a thank you for the army and Mossad intelligence agency for fulfilling his orders. The phrasing was not just another case of an elected leader hogging credit. For Netanyahu, it was part of a war he and his far-right allies have been waging against the army. He wasn’t going to let the army and intelligence agencies become the heroes of the day.
The origins of the war with the army go back to the judicial reform that the Netanyahu government unveiled in January 2023, just days after it took office. Ostensibly a plan to democratize the judicial system, in actuality it was the centerpiece of a campaign by the government’s extreme-right and populist components to subordinate the police, prosecution, and courts to their political needs and remake Israeli society into an illiberal democracy. Oddly enough, the army was perceived by the government as opposing the reform plan. That was a huge exaggeration, but the fact is many in the most elite units vowed to fight the judicial reform by refusing to volunteer for reserve duty. Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi’s response was reflective of how many members of the Netanyahu coalition felt: “The people of Israel will manage without you, and you can go to hell.”
By the time Hamas staged its attack, the judicial reform drive had largely collapsed, but the war provided new opportunities to advance the far-right agenda. The settlers exploited it to step up their campaign of violence against Palestinians, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich secured control over civilian affairs in the West Bank, and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir tightened his grip on the police. Coalition leaders across the board lit into the defense establishment as weak and defeatist; on the extreme, some suggested that the army brass had connived to allow the Hamas massacre in order to bring down Netanyahu.
Netanyahu’s aim was to deflect blame for Oct. 7 away from himself, but the far right had bigger aims, namely to wrest control of what it regarded as another bastion of the left-leaning establishment. Traumatized by its failures on Oct. 7 (which the defense leadership has acknowledged, in contrast to Israel’s political leaders) and preoccupied with fighting a war, the defense establishment didn’t fight back.
The campaign by Netanyahu and his allies mostly failed. Trust in the army sagged as the war with Hamas dragged on, with confidence in the IDF senior command slumping from 75 percent in March to 43 percent in July, according to a Jewish People Policy Institute survey. But the same poll showed that confidence in the government was much lower, dropping from 35 to 26 percent in the same period. Meanwhile, other polls showed that Israelis wanted early elections and that if they were held today, the Netanyahu coalition would lose power.
Today, the prime minister is basking in the glow of the triumphs over Hezbollah, but the light itself emanates from the defense establishment—Mossad and the IDF and in particular the air force and intelligence units, many of whose members spearheaded the anti-judicial reform protests. Indeed, a majority of the reservists in the F-15 squadron that carried out the attack on the Hezbollah headquarters were among the anti-reform protesters. At the time, the right had called for their dismissal. Moreover, the operations against Hezbollah were the fruit of 16 years of intense intelligence work, most of it done when opposition leaders Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot were the IDF chiefs of staff. In short, the accusations against the defense establishment as ineffectual and incompetent look emptier than ever.
Where ineffectuality and incompetence are in evidence is in the actions of Israel’s civilian leadership. It wasted its first year in power on a bungled judicial reform. In the wake of the Oct. 7 massacre, it failed to come to the aid of the affected communities, leaving it to ad hoc volunteer groups. Over the course of the war, Netanyahu has allowed relations with the United States to deteriorate and has turned Gaza into a no-man’s-land and place of perpetual war by refusing to consider any governance arrangements. More than 100 hostages taken by Hamas a year ago remain in Gaza.
But the government’s signal failure is the economy, which has not recovered from the events of Oct. 7. A long war was inevitably going to take a toll on the economy, which is one reason why Israel has historically refrained from becoming entangled in one. But Smotrich has only made things worse. Rather than designing a wartime budget, he chose to shower funds on Jewish settlers in the West Bank and on the ultra-Orthodox. The economy shrank 0.2 percent after inflation in the second quarter, and the decline would have been steeper if the state hadn’t been handing out money to civilian evacuees and army reservists. Moody’s last week cut Israel’s credit rating for a second time this year from A2 to Baa1 and said further cuts are likely. Israel’s fiscal metrics are not only rapidly deteriorating, Moody’s said, but “the significant escalation in geopolitical risk also points to diminished quality of Israel’s institutions and governance.” And this week, S&P also lowered Israel’s rating to A from A+.
It is too early to say how the events of the second half of September will affect the political equation in Israel. The only reliable poll to have been released since Nasrallah’s assassination showed a bump for Netanyahu’s Likud party—but it was at the expense of Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit party, meaning the balance of power between the coalition and opposition remains unchanged so far. In any case, the war with Hezbollah isn’t over. The ground incursion into Lebanon that began on Monday may boomerang amid heavy casualties, and Iran’s missile attack on Tuesday may bring untold consequences.
What might enable the political survival of Netanyahu and his coalition isn’t Nasrallah’s death but Sa’ar. By joining the coalition, he has strengthened its parliamentary majority by four seats, to 68 in the 120-seat legislature. The coalition may yet be brought down before the next scheduled election in October 2026 by the unresolved controversy over drafting the ultra-Orthodox. But for now, despite its immense unpopularity and abysmal record, it may just hang on.
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