The king of political comebacks. Gil Cohen-Magen/AFP/Getty Images

Even before he became Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, at the age of 43, was already being called “yesterday’s man” by the Israeli media. Just five months after being elected leader of Likud, Israel’s main Right-wing party, interviewers were asking him to his face: “Are you a political failure?”
It was August 1993 and the Labour government led by Yitzhak Rabin had just signed a peace agreement with Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organisation, promising a fresh outlook and a “new Middle East”. Netanyahu, with his grim predictions of bloodshed and Israel’s gradual destruction by the Palestinians’ “salami tactics”, barely made it into the backpages.
But as the Oslo Process descended into chaos, with Palestinians carrying out suicide attacks in Israeli cities and a Jewish settler massacring Muslims at prayer in Hebron, Netanyahu gradually regained his footing in the polls. In November 1995, the assassination of Rabin by a Right-wing extremist caused his popularity to plunge again, as many blamed him for inciting violence. Lagging 25 points behind Labour, many in Likud favoured replacing him as leader, but Netanyahu quashed any opposition. He flew to America, hired a Republican attack-dog strategist, and fought a ferocious campaign depicting himself as the man to bring “a secure peace”. He deployed thousands of volunteers in the streets with signs reading “Netanyahu is good for the Jews”. In six months, he turned his fortunes around, and in May 1996 beat Rabin’s successor with a sliver of the vote.
Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, is invariably described as a political winner. But he has suffered plenty of defeats. He lost power after his disastrous first term in 1999. Then in 2003, he was beaten in the Likud leadership election by Ariel Sharon, whom he had mistakenly taken for an aged caretaker who would easily be swept aside. When he finally regained the leadership in 2006, Likud suffered its worst result in half a century. What marks him as a politician is not his string of victories, but his enduring ability to come back and bury his opponents after everyone has counted him out.
After four decades in public life, at the age of 73, Netanyahu is on the brink of yet another comeback. Tomorrow, he will lead Likud for the 11th time in a parliamentary election, the last four of which ended in a virtual tie between the bloc of parties supporting him and those who refused to serve under a prime minister indicted for fraud and bribery. In June 2021, the opposition parties managed to come together in a bizarre coalition of nationalists, centrists, Left-wingers and conservative-Islamists, cobbled together by columnist and chat-show host Yair Lapid, which finally ejected Netanyahu from the prime minister’s office. But that coalition was never going to last. Sixteen months later, for the fourth time in his career, Netanyahu is once again the leader of the opposition taking on an incumbent: the architect of his most recent downfall, Prime Minister Lapid.
The polls have him just about breaking even, with the pro-Netanyahu bloc on 60 seats, one short of a majority in the 120-seat Knesset. But no one bets on the polls when it comes to Bibi. I began my career as a trainee reporter covering Netanyahu’s first run for prime minister in 1996 and have reported on every campaign of his since. Last week, I went to see one of his last rallies in Maale Adumim, a large suburb-settlement to the east of Jerusalem with 40,000 residents, where Likud won 48% of the vote last year. The turnout was disappointing: no more than 300 people, many of them children. Israelis, no matter where they lean politically, are tired of elections. Netanyahu isn’t.
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