The end effectively came last week, when Benny Gantz resigned and pulled his National Unity alliance out of the emergency government, exasperated by Netanyahu’s refusal to draw up a plan for the aftermath of the war. He was then joined by Gadi Eisenkot, the most moderate of the five members of the body. Netanyahu, presiding over a council that could no longer plausibly claim to represent a unified Knesset, was forced to pull the plug.

The problem here isn’t hard to glean. Gantz and Eisenkot were two of the more moderate voices in the coalition (and indeed contemporary Israeli politics). More than this, they are, unlike Netanyahu, both proper military men. Ganz is a former Chief of the General Staff; Eisenkot is a former Head of IDF Northern Command. Their resignation is a loss both to Israel’s military campaign and to its politics.

It was Gantz and Eisenkot who insisted a war cabinet be set up before they agreed to join Netanyahu’s emergency government in late 2023. Their rationale was twofold. First, the country needed to come together in a moment of national crisis; and second, they wanted to, as far as possible, sideline national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, a couple of bloviating extremists with little military understanding or interest beyond constantly urging a more aggressive approach and rejecting any concessions for the release of the hostages. Over the past six months, these malignant cranks have spent much of their airtime arguing for the reestablishment of Israeli settlements in Gaza.

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The breakdown of the cabinet is, in certain regards, a microcosm of the problems facing Israel. For a start, the state’s ludicrous parliamentary system of almost pure proportional representation means that every single Israeli government is a coalition. This, in turn, means they almost always contain minor parties populated with various loons who are elevated to the role of kingmakers. It also means that governments tend not to see out their full terms. This is a legacy of Israel’s socialist beginnings; and it was perhaps the most egregious error David Ben Gurion, Israel’s founder, ever made. The results are plain 80 years later. Netanyahu feverishly needs both Ben-Gvir and Smotrich to keep his coalition together — especially now. He has no choice but to take account of their various religious and political pathologies. Without them, he’s out.

Perhaps the second greatest mistake Ben Gurion ever made was to exempt the Orthodox Jewish Israelis from military service. He did this because, back then, there were relatively few of them (they made up around 5% of the population). They didn’t have to serve or pay tax, because they fulfilled their duty by “praying for the state”. Obviously, Ben Gurion knew this was nonsense, but it was the easiest way to keep them on side. The problem is: when you don’t have to pay taxes, and indeed get a host of benefits for doing essentially nothing, you tend to have a lot of children (as the Orthodox do anyway), especially when you get benefits for every child. There are now expected to be two million Haredis by 2033.

In early June, as the Supreme Court heard arguments that the exemptions are unlawful, dozens of Haredis blocked roads in protest. The tensions around this issue cannot be underestimated. At the turn of the century, I flew to Israel to take part in a debating competition when I was Chairman of Debating at the Inner Temple during an ill-advised (and ill-fated) foray into law. Inner Temple were the reigning champions and, with my debate partner Michael (a Northerner who had lived in Israel for 20 years), I had to bring the oversized trophy. For this, I purchased extra legroom seats on the El Al flight so we could rest the trophy securely in front of us. After dozing off for a while, I awoke to find the space occupied by two Haredis davening (praying). As they rocked back and forth, a look of disgust passed across Michael’s face. “Fuck off!” he roared. “Michael, you can’t speak to them like that,” I whispered, mortified. “Fuck ‘em — freeloaders,” he retorted. “And pay some fucking tax!” he bellowed at their retreating figures.

These issues have dominated Israeli politics for decades. Now, they threaten to unravel it. Netanyahu is a masterful politician, but, more than this, he is an old man desperate to stay in power. All his political skills are now devoted to this; winning the war is a secondary priority. He knows that when all this is finally done, the official enquiry will come and, as prime minister, he will not be able to escape blame.

With the more reasonable and more military experienced voices now gone, the prognosis for the sanity and pragmatism of Israeli government decision-making does not look good. Israel is engaged in a war in which its avowed and overarching objective — the total elimination of Hamas — has already failed. It had recent success in rescuing four hostages in operation “Seeds of Summer”, an extraordinary military operation involving its special forces. But the effect is ultimately limited. Especially given, as an IDF official admitted to me in Tel Aviv, there is a belief that many of the hostages are now dead. 

With no military solution likely, only a political one remains — to the degree that any “solution” to all this is possible, which I suspect it is not. The best that can be hoped for is a cease of hostilities and some kind of governmental transition to ensure that a terror group like Hamas cannot govern Gaza again. The problem is that there is now a nexus of interests at the centre of Israeli politics that is less interested in compromise. And pragmatism and compromise will always have to come from Israel because, even though Hamas started all this, Israel is a democratic state, and Hamas is a bolus of psychopathic thugs.

At several points since Hamas’s attack, I’ve returned to the words of a fellow Middle East analyst who, over a beer in a Jerusalem bar, summed up the Israel-Palestinian conflict to me in a single sentence. Looking more exhausted than anything else, he replied: “I think the technical term for all this is irretrievably fucked.”

“Kahanism Won” was the shocking headline of yesterday’s editorial in the liberal Haaretz newspaper. If that is the case, Israel is in more trouble than I ever thought possible. Born in the US, Meir Kahane was a radical orthodox rabbi and founder of the Israeli Kach party. He was convicted in America for manufacturing explosives. In Israel, he was convicted for the attempt to blow up the Libyan Embassy in Brussels, and arrested dozens of times for inciting violence against Palestinians. He saw himself as a modern-day Maccabee, railing against the assimilation of Israeli Jews into Western secular culture. His followers re-formed the first-century assassin group, the Sicarii, and targeted Left-wing Israeli politicians.

Kahane was elected to the Knesset in 1984. When he would get up to speak, other Jewish members would walk out en masse. In the 1988 elections, Kahane was barred from standing on the grounds of his “incitement to racism”. Two years later, Kahane was himself assassinated in New York, but his poisonous legacy lived on. Yigal Amir, the man who assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin 27 years ago, as he was making peace with Palestinians, is considered one of Kahane’s disciples.

So for Haaretz to claim “Kahanism won” is a warning from history: something far more dangerous than Bibi has emerged from these elections. Kahane’s party is no longer. But its grandchild, Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Strength) has clearly done well, as have Right-wing religious parties such as Shas — both of which Bibi will have to rely on if he is to become Prime Minister. All this at a time when Israeli society is more divided than ever before. And not just between Jews and Arabs, but between Israeli Jews themselves. Tel Aviv is a modern European city, with a strong Barcelona vibe. This is the land of the Toyota Prius. Most of the restaurants are not Kosher. You can buy bacon in the market. The nightlife and fashion are sexy and relaxed.

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But in most places outside Tel Aviv, the feel is very different. In the religious areas, in the poor parts of the country (especially in the South), in the settlements — this is where the Right and the far-Right have their base. From the perspective of Tel Aviv, the ultra-orthodox feel like an 18th-century throwback. “Penguinim” is the commonly-whispered secular pejorative for their black clothing. The ultra-orthodox do not fight in the army and often have no regular paid employment. They are exempted in order to study Torah. And they have many children, which, of course, is shifting the electoral demographic. So there is resentment from those whose children are sent to Gaza to fight (and die) and who pay taxes to support a religious lifestyle they do not understand.

I spoke to friends and family in Tel Aviv yesterday morning. They are in despair: the place they once knew and loved — the place their grandparents built — is disappearing before their eyes. “What sort of a country are we leaving to our children?” one said to me, holding back the tears. Many want to leave, as my wife indeed has left, but don’t know where to go.

Yet from the perspective of the ultra-orthodox, the Jews of Tel Aviv are not really Jews. Or rather, they are Jews officially (because they have Jewish mothers), but they do not behave as Jews should. Mostly, the ultra-orthodox do not have much of a view about the secular parts of Tel Aviv because they have not been there, despite the fact that a Heredi community like Bnei Brak (the fifth-most densely populated city in the world) is just a couple of kilometres away.

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One Israeli friend recently told me that he met a young boy in a park in Bnei Brak who had never heard of the Holocaust. I found this almost impossible to believe. But what is absolutely true is how little different parts of Israeli society talk to, still less understand, each other. They don’t even speak the same language — both literally and figuratively. When my wife and I watched Shtisel together on the telly, I was astonished to find that I, having a smattering of German, understood more of the Yiddish than she did.

But it’s not just the secular and the religious that don’t mix. This is a country that has also been butchered by Bibi’s extreme version of free-market capitalism. Caesarea, on the coast, where Bibi has a house, has the only golf club in Israel and extraordinary gated mansions set in large, well-policed and leafy streets. The vineyards of the Galilee find many takers — myself included, I confess — for wines the price of which would make the farmers of Burgundy blush with embarrassment.

Elsewhere, the poverty is crippling. In the South, where the rich won’t live because it is too close to the rockets from Gaza, there is little work and conditions are often crowded and unsanitary. Around the old bus station in Tel Aviv, immigrants from Africa live in dirt and squalor, with elderly ladies selling their bodies out of street-side booths for a few shekels. They don’t pass by these places when they take Christians on a tour of the Holy Land.

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You don’t need to mention the occupation to describe Israel as a divided society. The Shas party has a point when they defend the Sephardic (Arabic Jewish) community against the inherent sense of cultural superiority of the Ashkenazi former Europeans. Religious and secular, rich and poor, with Jews from all over the world: this is one of the most diverse, if not to say divided, societies on Earth. That is what makes it such an exciting place to be, but also one of the most fragile.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Kahanist leader of Jewish Strength, openly advocates violence against Palestinians. And he is only 46, with growing popularity and potentially a long future in politics. I am not a citizen of Israel, though my wife and children are. I look at the country with the gaze of an outsider, albeit an adopted one. But I love the place. And yet today, I fear for its future more than ever.

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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In 26 years of campaigning, he hasn’t changed. He still strides masterfully across the stage, whipping up a cheering crowd. The carefully calibrated stump speech, its messages pre-tested with focus groups, still sounds like it just occurred to him on the spot. This has been a long campaign — officially four months since the Knesset was dissolved — but for him it began the moment the Bennett-Lapid government was sworn in on 13 June 2021 and another Knesset member had to tap him on the shoulder to remind him to vacate the Prime Minister’s seat on the Knesset floor. He will be the oldest member of the next Knesset but is still brimming with energy.

Any politician running for national office must be equipped with an over-sized ego and the self-belief that makes them think they can take decisions affecting the lives of millions. Netanyahu has an infinite supply of both. He is fueled by a sense of destiny, built up by being the son of a historian, the austere and dogmatic Professor Benzion Netanyahu, who saw the Jewish past, present and future as a never-ending struggle for survival in a bleak antisemitic world.

His opponents fight election campaigns. He is fighting every day of his life for the very existence of the Jewish people. His personal fate and that of the nation are one and he will never give up fighting, just like his father who continued his research almost until his death at 102. If he fails to win a majority tomorrow, he will try again. And again.

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Such political irrepressibility is unrivalled by any contemporary politician, except perhaps Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi. Just like Bibi, “Il Cavaliere” (“The Knight”) has won, lost, and come back again despite those pesky Leftists prosecutors trying to pin corruption cases on him. In Netanyahu’s autobiography, there is a telling anecdote of a meeting between him and Berlusconi:

“So, Bibi,” he asked me, “how many television stations do you have?” “Israel has three stations,” I answered.

“No, I mean how many of them work for you?” asked Silvio, who owned Italy’s largest media empire.

“None,” I said. “Actually, all of them work against me.”

“So how can you win elections with both hands tied behind your back?” he asked, bewildered.

“The hard way,” I said.

Berlusconi entered politics at an older age, after accumulating a private fortune and building his own media empire. Not having what Netanyahu has called “my own media” still rankles him. He is convinced that were it not for Israel’s independent-minded press, he would never have lost a single election. After all, if Israelis had a clear view of him, they would have realised how essential his leadership is and how laughable any of his so-called rivals are. It is the media who is the real opposition and who egged on a weak Attorney General to press charges against him. Central to those charges is the claim that he used his position to bribe media owners to change their coverage of him. And central to his defence is the insistence that he was merely trying to level the playing field.

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Netanyahu knows what Berlusconi and Donald Trump also understand instinctively. To triumph against the odds and then prepare the way for constant comebacks, winning elections is not enough. You must rebuild the political, social and media landscape in your image. The first stage must be a total revamp of your own party. Netanyahu achieved that by pushing out all his Likud rivals and flooding the membership with fanatical loyalists. Similarly, Trump pushed the GOP to its worst nature while Berlusconi formed his own, tailor-made Forza Italia and People of Freedom parties. As we saw in Britain just last week, politicians like Boris Johnson who fail to remake their parties rarely manage to make comebacks.

At 86, Berlusconi is unlikely to ever make it back into office again, but if it were not for his restructuring of post-war Italian politics, Giorgia Meloni would not be prime minister today. Neither is Trump’s return in 2024 at all certain, but his angry and polarised American politics will remain. And if Netanyahu loses on tomorrow night, his opponent will still be governing a country deeply divided between those who cling to Bibi’s staunchly nationalistic identity of Jewish survivalism, and those who prefer a much vaguer sense of secular Israeli citizenship. Whatever the result, Israel will remain Netanyahu’s for years to come.

Israel has emerged from a year of strict restrictions and, after a huge wave of Covid-19 cases at the beginning of the year, exacerbated by the spread of the more infectious B.1.1.7 UK variant, things are now almost back to normal — in large part due to the most successful vaccination programme in the world.

One man who can justly claim credit for Israel’s vaccine success is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who secured enough doses from Pfizer to vaccinate Israel’s entire population. Netanyahu reportedly called Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla 30 times until they agreed to make Israel the “world’s lab”, the global poster child for how mass vaccination can beat the coronavirus. So far, all signs are that it’s working.

Yet as polls open around the country, there are two competing narratives hanging over today’s election. One is the story of Netanyahu, “King Bibi”: the ultimate survivor at the height of his power who is approaching his thirteenth continuous year of his second period in office, having beaten the record of Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion. Despite multiple attempts to oust him, he remains in the PM’s residence on Jerusalem’s Balfour Street.

According to this account, the man nicknamed “the magician” surely has a trick up his sleeve. Netanyahu, after all, has in the last year signed “normalisation deals” with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, and begun peace talks with Sudan, ushering in a new era of Israeli-Arab cooperation. His relationship with Donald Trump, meanwhile, brought the US embassy to Jerusalem and Western recognition of Israel’s Golan Heights annexation. And then came his vaccine success, the envy of the world, rounding off Israel’s most peaceful and prosperous decade. Surely, goes this story, he’s going to storm to a romping victory today.

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But there’s another, far less optimistic, narrative underscoring this election; one which warns that as Israel holds its fourth general election in just two years, Netanyahu is in deep trouble. For despite his vaccine success, the polls suggest his Likud party will lose several seats, leaving him unable to form a government. Even in the best scenario, he looks set to just about scrape together an unstable coalition with a majority of one seat, making him the hostage of every Knesset member and their whims.

At the same time, this second narrative points out, let’s not forget that Netanyahu remains on trial for bribery and corruption (the trial was suspended for the election, or he’d be facing witness testimony now), and faces an uncertain future and possible prison term if convicted. Moreover, a planned election in the Palestinian Authority in May threatens to elevate Hamas and destabilise the West Bank and Gaza. And in America, with Trump out of office, President Biden is ready to re-enter the Iran deal, an accord that Netanyahu worked hard to sabotage. Now he’s being forced into another election after failing to pass a Budget. “King Bibi”, this narrative suggests, has never been so besieged.

But which of these narratives is true? The truth, I suspect, contains elements of both. Few doubt that Netanyahu’s key political skill lies in his ability to make surprising political moves that alter the playing field. Whenever things look bad, Bibi always finds a way to come out on top.

When, for example, the Likud party won fewer seats than challenger Benny Gantz’s Blue and White party in September 2019, Netanyahu forced the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament, to dissolve itself before Gantz could be asked by the President to form a government. Then, in the election that followed, Netanyahu was able to convince Gantz to join a crisis coalition to fight the coronavirus, with the promise of a rotating premiership that nobody believed would ever come to pass. The move split Blue and White in half.

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In this election, Netanyahu’s shrewd realpolitik has seen him campaigning for Arab votes, even visiting Arab towns and promising direct flights from Israel to Mecca (just as soon as there’s a peace deal with the Saudis, of course). It marks a dramatic change from his anti-Arab campaigning of recent years; his party passed a Nation State Act that downgraded the status of the Arabic language and filmed undercover footage in Israeli Arab polling stations to suggest voter fraud. Could this be just another ploy to see him retain power?

Whatever the truth, the reality is that Netanyahu’s position remains insecure. Israel’s election polls are notoriously inaccurate, but Likud will still be watching them with unease; the result, whatever it is, is going to be close. Several parties are on the cusp of the four-seat threshold, and if one or more of them drops below it, the coalition calculus shifts. Pollster Camil Fuchs believes that there could be 15 seats’s worth of undecided voters (there are just 120 seats in the Knesset), certainly enough to swing the election one way or another.

So how did Netanyahu find himself in such an uncertain position? Partly, he’s still damaged by the pandemic. On the face of it, that sounds faintly ridiculous, given that he has overseen the most successful vaccination programme in the world. But the truth is that, by and large, his initial Covid response — typified by strict restrictions — was deeply unpopular. Unlike in many other countries, no Israeli political party supported tougher national coronavirus restrictions. Even as infections soared and deaths rose, politicians on all sides pushed for a relaxation. And this was mirrored in the wider public: one poll in January suggested that just 24% of Israelis supported the Government’s measures.

Nationwide criticism was further inflamed by Netanyahu’s apparent capitulation to pressure from Ultra-Orthodox parties, which led to large parts of the Jewish religious education system remaining open while other schools were closed. Enforcement of lockdown rules in Ultra-Orthodox towns was almost non-existent, despite the extremely high Covid rates in those communities. At times, it felt like the whole country was being forced to suffer lockdowns except for the Ultra-Orthodox areas.

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Yet most damaging, perhaps, was the revelation last year that Netanyahu flouted the strict nationwide lockdown he imposed, hosting his son at a Passover seder while the rest of the country celebrated alone. The sense of hypocrisy and injustice cut through far more than the political criticisms levied at him.

But more generally, a palpable sense of weariness has taken hold. Twelve years is a long time to be Prime Minister, especially when they’re marked by the Prime Minister being put on trial. In Israel — where, like so many countries, the old labels of Left and Right feel well-worn — politics today isn’t really about anything other than Netanyahu or Not Netanyahu. No doubt that’s partly why Likud has stopped publishing a manifesto altogether. The manifesto is Netanyahu, and shouldn’t that be enough?

Judging by a number of last-minute campaign stutters, that remains to be seen. Opposition canvassers have been beaten by Netanyahu supporters and required hospitalisation, while several last-minute election stunts have also fallen through; Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla cancelled his planned trip to Israel, and the United Arab Emirates objected to an election-eve Netanyahu visit to Abu Dhabi.

Yet for all this, Netanyahu retains one major advantage. As the incumbent, he stays Prime Minister until a new government is seated. If his rivals are unable to form a coalition to replace him, which seems likely, then Israel will head to a fifth election in the autumn, likely delaying his corruption trial further and giving him yet another chance to win.

Can the ultimate survivor pull off his most audacious win of all, building another coalition that can both keep him in office and, perhaps even legislate to stop his trial? Election Days are certainly Netanyahu’s speciality, but I’m not convinced. Either way, whatever the result of today’s election, it will probably be some time until we learn if Netanyahu has managed to triumph yet again.

Yehuda is too young to vote — the voting age here is 18 — but he was deeply invested in the outcome of this week’s election, which Netanyahu went on to win. Handing out the mock ballot slips was more than a stunt, it was an act of devotion to the prime minister who has been in power for more than half of his life.

“There’s no one like Bibi,” he said, using Netanyahu’s nickname. “The Likud is like family and friends.”

Yehuda’s enthusiasm isn’t unusual. It’s part of a significant trend in Israel: young people love Netanyahu. And they most probably played a significant role in his reelection. Though we don’t yet know the breakdown of election results by age, a pre-election poll revealed Netanyahu’s popularity with young and first-time voters.

The survey, by the Israel Democracy Institute, showed that 65% of Israelis between the ages of 18-24 preferred Netanyahu while just 17% wanted his rival Benny Gantz. Among Israelis over 65, Gantz was much more popular — 53% preferred him, while 35% wanted Netanyahu.

Broadly speaking, Jewish Israeli youth like Netanyahu because they tend to be Right wing, the dominant ideology in Israel. Here, as opposed to Europe, the Right-Left divide is not related to social issues and economics but to security, defense, and the peace process.

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More than half of the population, according to Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute, would identify itself as being on the Right. Among religious Jews, a growing sector of the population given the high birth rates in the orthodox communities, that tendency is even more prevalent.

“Keeping in mind that first-time voters are greatly influenced by their family and home environment,” said Plesner, “and given the disproportionate demographic growth of the ultra-Orthodox population, the logical conclusion is that the current rightward trends are expected to continue.”

But religious demographics are only part of the explanation. These young voters are a generation of sceptics when it comes to the idea of peace between Israelis and Palestinians. They support Netanyahu because they believe his message that Israel must live by the sword. “The hope or yearning for peace is foreign to them,” said Plesner.

They were born in the late 1990s or very early 2000s, in the wake of the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at the hands of a Jewish extremist who opposed territorial compromise with the Palestinians. They were raised in the shadow of the bloody Second Intifada, and were just starting school when Israel evacuated Jewish settlements from the Gaza Strip in 2005. They have lived through three wars between Israel and Hamas in Gaza — in 2008-2009, in 2012, and in 2014. And now most of them are in the Israeli army, with many enforcing a 52-year-long military occupation.

On Election Day in Har Homa, a Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem, a 20-year-old named Roni was sitting at a table inside a polling station in an elementary school. She is a soldier in the Israeli military’s home front command and had spent the day helping with the ballot. She had already cast her first ever vote. Her pick? Netanyahu.

Roni said she didn’t care that Netanyahu was facing corruption charges in several cases, pending a hearing. She was impressed by his diplomacy, and especially his close relationship with Donald Trump. Like many Israelis, she was also voting on security. “The security we have had in the past decade is the best we have ever had,” she said.

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Roni lives in Maale Adumim, another settlement in the West Bank. A few days before the poll, Netanyahu promised that he would annex these settlements if he were reelected. It was an idea that resonated with her, even though she conceded it would be “problematic” – since most countries reject Israel’s occupation. Netanyahu is “the only one that would be able to do it,” she said.

In her view, peace between Israelis and Palestinians is impossible. “I don’t think there is ever going to be peace,” she said. “We both want the same thing. We want Jerusalem, they want Jerusalem. They want to have a country but they want it on our land. It is like two babies wanting the same candy. One will get it one, one won’t. We got it.” Sharing the land is not an option. “I think that would be a disgrace for the soldiers that died protecting the country,” she said, “the soldiers’ blood that was shed all over Jerusalem, all over the West Bank, all over the country.”

Nor does she believe that the Palestinians will give up their fight even if a compromise is reached.

Israel’s youth weren’t always so Right wing. Roby Nathanson is the director of the Macro Center for Political Economics in Israel, which polls the attitudes of Israeli youth every six years. When the survey began, in 1998, its respondents were the “generation of peace”, he said. But attitudes shifted to the Right over the years as the peace process floundered.

A critical point was the Israeli evacuation of settlements from Gaza in 2005, which was followed by repeated wars between Israel and Hamas. There are many reasons for this turn of events — Israel’s siege, Hamas’s militancy, and other regional developments — but many bought a simple story, believing that Israel gave up land and got rockets in return.

In the 2010 survey, the first one following the Gaza withdrawal, Nathanson said he noticed more extreme attitudes from the youth than ever before.  “We identified racist opinions among the youngsters,” he said. “We were very astonished about these positions.”

Today, these opinions are no longer surprising. In the 2016 survey, the most recent one, 40% of Jewish teenagers (15-18) and 44% of Jewish young people (21-24) said they “think that Arab citizens of Israel should be prohibited from being elected to the Knesset”.

According to Nathanson, Netanyahu is particularly appealing to first-time voters because his party invests in their development. Bibi may be notorious for elbowing out competitors within his own party, but in the lower ranks of Likud, young people feel encouraged to take on leadership positions. The populist party “gives many young leaders opportunities to grow into politics and be leaders of the future”.

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Nathanson contrasts this with Likud’s historic alternative, Labor, which is more calcified when it comes to growing the next generation of leaders. Labor are set for a historically low six seats in this election, compared to Likud’s projected 35. One of Labor’s few young stars, Stav Shaffir, did not come from within the party but was courted by it after leading a social justice protest movement in 2011.

It all marks a radical shift away from the Left’s vision of Israel – one that upholds human rights, the justice system, and works toward a negotiated solution with the Palestinians. “If you look at it statistically, the perspective for the secular, liberal, open-minded democratic society is not very rosy,” Nathanson says.

Instead, the future looks bright for the Right’s ideal: an Israel which prioritises the Jewish identity of the country over its democratic one, to the detriment, according to critics, of religious pluralism, the welfare of Israel’s Arab Palestinian minority, and the two-state solution. With demographics on his side, Netanyahu will be steering the country down this path for some time to come.

It’s a scene of late winter Mediterranean idyll, but to hear Lifshitz tell it, darkness looms on the horizon. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is running for a fifth term in office, defiantly continuing his campaign in the face of pending indictments in several corruption cases. Should Netanyahu win, it will spell in Lifshitz’s view a “catastrophe for Israeli democracy.”

That’s why Lifshitz is voting for Benny Gantz. The former chief of the Israel Defence Forces, Gantz burst onto the political scene in late December. He has no political experience. But that hasn’t stopped Netanyahu-weary Israelis like Lifshitz from investing their hopes in him.

“The necessary thing is to replace Bibi,” Lifshitz says, using Netanyahu’s nickname. “I would say no matter who, but the one who can do it is Gantz.”

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Up and down Rothschild Boulevard, the heart of Israel’s most liberal city, Gantz supporters are easy to find. And most have the same reason for backing him.

“He has a chance of replacing Bibi,” says Noam Ahituv, a 43-year-old web programmer who was smoking a cigarette on the street.

“He’s just not Bibi,” echoes Lihi Ben Arie, a 36-year-old product manager sitting on a bench with two friends, one of whom piped up with another reason to vote for the tall, blue-eyed candidate: “He’s hot!”

For the past decade, Netanyahu has had a virtual lock on power. After first serving as prime minister from 1996 to 1999, he was again elected in 2009 and has maintained the position ever since. Today, there’s no figure more divisive in Israeli politics than Netanyahu.

To his supporters, he is Israel’s peerless statesman and protector, defending the country from, on any given day, journalists, Leftists, Israel’s Arab citizens, and the attorney general who seeks his indictment. To his detractors, he is a crook leading the country into a moral abyss, in which maintaining the status quo comes at the expense of Israel’s democratic institutions, its standing in the free world, and the country’s ability to make peace with the Palestinians.

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And yet up until recently, Netanyahu’s continued rule seemed like a foregone conclusion to most in Israel. With no credible alternative on the horizon, Netanyahu banked on an easy win when, in December, he called for early elections.

Back then, Israel’s attorney general had not yet announced his plan to indict Netanyahu in several corruption cases. By winning yet another election, Netanyahu reasoned, he would thwart the potential charges by renewing the lease on his leadership.

But then along came Gantz.

Israelis recognise Gantz from his tenure as IDF chief between 2011 to 2015, in particular his leadership during Israel’s 2014 military operation in Gaza, Operation Protective Edge. In January, Gantz kicked off his campaign with a speech that took aim at Netanyahu, comparing his administration to a “French royal house” and promising to return the Israeli government to the people.

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Next Gantz merged his party, Israel Resilience, with two other parties to form the Blue and White alliance, a centrist mega party named for the colours of Israel’s flag. If elected, Gantz plans to serve two and a half years as prime minister before switching with Yair Lapid, his Blue and White co-head.

Blue and White made a strong showing in polls after Israel’s attorney general announced his intention on February 28 to indict Netanyahu in three different corruption cases, pending a hearing. But now the race is narrowing. Blue and White still outpaces Netanyahu’s Likud in the April 9 election, but by a slim margin. In Israel’s electoral system, the head of the party that wins the most seats is given the first chance to assemble a coalition out of a majority of parliament seats. As of now, it remains unclear whether Blue and White will be able to convince enough smaller parties to form a government.

In an election that is ultimately a referendum on Netanyahu’s fitness to rule, the most attractive thing about Gantz, as Lifshitz and his fellow citizens soaking up the sun on Rothschild Boulevard show, is that he’s not Netanyahu. The second most attractive thing is his military background.

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In a country where service is mandatory for the majority of citizens, Gantz’s army pedigree projects an image of strength to the security-obsessed public. It’s an image that he has heavily campaigned on. In early video advertisements, he bragged about killing terrorists and showed footage of the vast destruction of the Gaza Strip during the 2014 Israel-Gaza war. (In fact, Gantz is facing legal action for his conduct during that war; a Dutch-Palestinian is suing Gantz and another ex-general for the bombing of his family home in Gaza, which killed six relatives. A Dutch court is deciding whether to hear the case.)

For Michael Freedman, a 39-year-old British immigrant to Israel, Gantz’s security credentials are one part of the reason he is “90%” sure that he will vote for Blue and White. “I know Gantz only from the media and from his performance as chief of staff, but he seems to be a genuinely safe pair of hands,” he says, standing in the lobby of a Tel Aviv hall after an event featuring Gantz’s Blue and White co-leader Lapid.

Gantz “ran Israel’s largest and most prestigious institution, I would argue,” Freedman continues. “Does that qualify him to be prime minister? I don’t know but you have to take the candidates you have. Bibi’s current behaviour absolutely disqualifies him from any public offices. [Gantz] is the alternative we have, let’s hope he’s as good a prime minister as he was chief of staff.”

To Freedman, this election is as high stakes as it gets. “This is really a battle for the soul of what Israel is supposed to be,” in terms of the country’s approach to rule of law, democracy, and the validity of the courts. Netanyahu, he says, is undermining them all.

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Predictably, Netanyahu’s line against Gantz is that his former military chief is a Leftist. He even claimed that Gantz attended a ceremony honouring Hamas militants killed in the 2014 war. Israel’s liberal newspaper Haaretz fact-checked the assertion and found that the event in question was actually an Israeli peace event near the Gaza border, calling for reconciliation between the two sides.

Gantz is hardly Left. Along with Lapid, he is campaigning with two other military men, former defence minister Moshe Yaalon and former IDF chief of staff Gabi Ashkenazi. Yaalon is an outspoken supporter of the settlement movement. The Blue and White party’s platform is an ideological medley, with nods to security, religious pluralism, and equality, but with a diplomatic program that no Palestinian government would accept. (For one, it claims Jerusalem, where Palestinians hope to build a capital, for Israel alone.)

“It is a kind of supermarket party,” says Ofer Kenig, a researcher with the Israel Democracy Institute.

According to Dr. Dahlia Scheindlin, a political pollster, part of Gantz’s test will be whether he can reach Israelis disillusioned with Netanyahu on the moderate Right.

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In Jerusalem, Amir Elfassy is taking such an ideological leap, although he started from a more extreme position than many would-be Gantz voters. The 34-year-old owner of the Butke bar, Elfassy previously voted for the ultra-nationalist Jewish Home party, which calls for Israel to annex parts of the territory Palestinians claim for a state.

Now he’s with Gantz’s Blue and White.

“It is the first time I’m not voting Right,” he says, standing inside the bar, a small brown box of a building in Jerusalem’s First Station, a commercial strip in a converted Ottoman-era train station.

Elfassy’s political shift is idiosyncratic. He used to align himself with the hardline rhetoric of the Right. As a former soldier, his first encounter with Arabs was on the other side of his gun. But since moving to Jerusalem and opening a bar, he has made friends with Arabs. He even has Arab employees, like “my little brother Muhammad,” he says, gesturing to a skinny young man with a pony tail, Muhammad Zaghal, who is rolling a spliff on the bar top.

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Now Elfassy has a “live and let live” attitude — albeit one that has its limits. It’s not like he’d approve of his daughter dating an Arab, he says. He knows Gantz agrees with that approach. “Benny Gantz has these ideas at the top of his mind, and security.”

And what about Zaghal? Unlike most Jerusalem Palestinians, he has Israeli citizenship, which means he has the right to vote in national elections. At 21 years old, this will be his first.

Packing leaves into a cigarette paper, he says he’s not sure yet if he will vote. “I don’t really like politics.”

But among many Israelis, politics is addictive these days. With about a month to go until the election, Israelis are glued to their smart phones, following every minute development ahead of April 9, when their country might face its biggest political upheaval in years.

It all depends on whether a centrist general turned politician can convince the country to take a chance and buck the status quo.