Benjamin Netanyahu is Israel’s most electorally successful — and longest-serving — prime minister. He has overseen Israel’s greatest internal security failure and a genocide in Gaza, yet clung on to power. Now, as he heads to his 13th parliamentary election, Netanyahu is relying on an old strategy that he has deployed for years, critics say — responding to accusations that might normally end a political career with deflections, subterfuge and claims of victimhood. In the last few days, a story carried by the Israeli daily Haaretz, claiming that the United Arab Emirates had given Netanyahu advance warning of the Hamas-led attack of 2023, has been met not with reflection, but with legal action, counter-accusations and claims of “foreign interference” in Israel’s elections.
A week earlier, Netanyahu oversaw the launch of a political likening himself to a bullied child. In the video, a child is portrayed who – it is revealed – is being picked on by anti-Netanyahu classmates, with signs of “anyone but Bibi”, referring to Israel’s prime minister and leader of the right-wing Likud party. Netanyahu has been prime minister for 18 years across three separate periods and has been widely acknowledged as a key player in shifting Israeli politics to the right. But despite this, he has still been eager to use populist discourses to portray himself as fighting the establishment as a perpetual victim of the system.
Israeli political psychologist Neta Oren from George Mason University told Al Jazeera that self-victimisation is an important part of Netanyahu’s playbook, and this is continuing into his next election campaign. “For years, he has presented himself as the representative of ‘the people’ against the elite. Populism works especially well from the opposition, but what happens when you are the longest-serving prime minister in Israel’s history?” she said. “Netanyahu’s solution has been to blame his failures on other forces — particularly the ‘deep state’ — and to portray himself as their victim, just as he portrays his supporters as victims of the old elite. “This can make him appear weak or ineffective as a leader, but the sense of victimhood among his base, and their animosity toward the old elite, is so strong that this framing can still be an effective political tool for maintaining their support.” Recently, Netanyahu has appeared to compete with the country’s far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir for the legacy of the far-right Zionist militia Irgun, which was contained once the first Israeli government, led by David Ben-Gurion, came to power in 1949. Rival news conferences have been held by the two Israeli party leaders to commemorate the “oppression” of the militia, which was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Palestinian civilians and British soldiers during the Palestinian Mandate period. These tactics appear drawn from the same political playbook as those used by populist politicians across the world: to ally themselves with those who feel opposed to the state and distance themselves from their previous scandals.
Earlier this month, Netanyahu attempted to deflect blame for his alleged failures ahead of and during the Hamas-led attacks on October 7, 2023, claiming that “defence officials” had deliberately chosen not to wake him during the first hours of an attack that he would otherwise have contained. His wife Sara Netanyahu appeared to go further, suggesting to the pro-government Channel 14 last month that opposition leader and former General Yair Golan’s reaction to the assault — when he woke up and drove directly to the site of the attack — suggested that he must have known of Hamas’s plans in advance. Such methods have been used by other politicians, such as United States President Donald Trump, Hungary’s Viktor Orban and India’s Narendra Modi. But Netanyahu’s use of victimisation by the “establishment” goes back further to around when former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995, claiming that Israel’s left had forgotten what it meant to be Jewish.
Analysts describe Netanyahu’s particular brand of populism as intended for a specifically Israeli audience and a shared sense of Zionist and Jewish identity among his party’s Likud base. Similarly, many of Likud’s supporters are Mizrahi, drawn from migrants from across the Middle East and North Africa and typically come from lower-income backgrounds. They are attuned through experience as seeing themselves opposed to the Ashkenazi European establishment in Israel, something Netanyahu has been eager to feed on. Dani Filc, a professor at Ben Gurion University and author of the book Hegemony and Populism in Israel, said that Netanyahu’s claim to victimhood is a common feature in populist narratives. “Populism builds on a victimised people … His acting out of victimhood echoes with the fact that many Likud supporters have a collective memory of being excluded and sometimes oppressed by the mainly Ashkenazi establishment, and also plays with Jewish collective memory as victims,” he told Al Jazeera.
This discourse has dominated Netanyahu’s repeated confrontations with the judiciary and media since 2023. Both Netanyahu’s 2020 corruption trial and his judicial overhaul have been cast by the Israeli right-wing not as legal or constitutional processes, but as a battle against a so-called unelected “deep state”, with its members, they claim, including the media and judiciary. Daniel Bar-Tal, professor of psychology at Tel Aviv University, said this narrative has allowed him to distance himself from government failures. “Netanyahu desires the status of victim,” Bar-Tal told Al Jazeera. “He blames the deep state that he built, the officers that he nominated … just to be clean and not responsible. To be a victim has many advantages.
You can be a perpetrator, you can disengage from ethical norms, and so on.”
