Benjamin Netanyahu: Long-time premier's comeback in Israel

Benjamin Netanyahu is back. In Tuesday's parliamentary elections in Israel, his right-wing religious bloc secured 64 of the 120 seats in the Knesset.

The Likud party of the former prime minister and current opposition leader emerged as the strongest political force with some 32 seats in the November 1 election.

The Knesset had dissolved itself after the end of the eight-party governing alliance still in power in the summer of 2022. Tuesday's election was the fifth in three-and-a-half years.

The results are likely to please Netanyahu, who likes to see himself as a winner. "There is no place for the weak. The weak crumble, are slaughtered and are erased from history, while the strong, for good or for ill, survive," Netanyahu said in 2018.

One of his nicknames goes along with this attitude: "King Bibi". The story goes that he "inherited" the nickname "Bibi" from an older cousin of the same name. And the title of king, the strongman of Israel, appeals to Netanyahu ― he has been feeding this narrative for decades.

On the international stage, Netanyahu sought proximity to other strongmen and right-wing populists during his time as prime minister: From Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil to Viktor Orban in Hungary or former US President Donald Trump, who did him a great favor with the relocation of the US Embassy to Jerusalem and the termination of the nuclear agreement with Iran, and brought him political success with those actions as well.

Netanyahu also had a good relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin. In 2019, photos of the two together appeared on many of Netanyahu's election posters. In the current Ukraine war, Israel has limited itself to humanitarian aid to Ukraine. After it became known that Moscow likely received drones and missiles from Iran, the debate about arms deliveries to Ukraine flared up again in Israel. But Putin is not only a political friend of Netanyahu, he is also popular with large parts of the Israeli population.

Underestimated by his father

In his youth, Netanyahu was not yet seen as being among one of the strong, and as one of the winners. "He never got his father's recognition," filmmaker Dan Shadur said in a 2019 interview. Shadur has spent years studying Netanyahu. His documentary "King Bibi" was released in 2019.

Netanyahu is the second of three brothers, and his father, a professor of Jewish history and radical Zionist, saw Yonatan, the eldest, as the future leader of Israel ― not Benjamin. But Yonatan died in 1976 during a military operation in Entebbe, Uganda. He is considered a war hero in Israel today.

When Israel was ruled by a more left-leaning government in the 1960s and 1970s, the family felt neither understood nor at home and moved to the United States. Benjamin Netanyahu grew up in Pennsylvania and began working as a management consultant after graduation.

In the mid-1980s, Netanyahu became Israel's permanent representative to the United Nations ― an eloquent, sophisticated and well-read man who impressed with his charisma, humor and almost accent-free English. In 1988, he returned to Israel as a new type of politician.

Youngest prime minister in history

He entered Israeli parliament for the right-wing conservative Likud party and became deputy foreign minister. When Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, co-architect of the Oslo Peace Accords, was assassinated by a right-wing nationalist Jewish fanatic at a rally in Tel Aviv in 1995, violence between Israelis and Palestinians escalated. Netanyahu accused the succeeding prime minister, Shimon Peres, of failing to control the violence, and prevailed in the elections. In 1996, Netanyahu became prime minister for the first time, the youngest premier in the country's history.

By then he was married for the third time, to Sara, who was fined in 2019 for misuse of public funds. Corruption cases are also still pending against Benjamin Netanyahu himself. Should he become prime minister again, this could significantly improve his chances of avoiding a conviction or even imprisonment. He himself sees the investigations against him as a "witch hunt" by the media and left-wing forces.

In the 1999 election, Netanyahu was unable to defend his post. The right accused him of having compromised too much on the Oslo Peace Accords, and even back then, there were allegations of corruption against him.

Ten years later, Netanyahu fought his way back and celebrated his comeback as prime minister.

Short nod to the left...

His 2009 keynote speech at Bar-Ilan University was seen as a minor revolution: For the first ― and last ― time, Netanyahu, the hardliner, mentioned the possibility of a two-state solution with a demilitarized Palestinian state. But instead of making a real commitment to it in the years ahead, he moved further to the right.

The massive clashes with Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, contributed to this in the years that followed his tenure.

"They changed the attitude in Israel quite dramatically," Peter Lintl, an Israel expert at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik), told DW in a 2019 interview. "After the withdrawal from Gaza, the Israeli public's takeaway was: If we withdraw, we will be shelled."

For the majority of Israelis, he said, this meant that Israel could not withdraw from the West Bank. "That took the whole idea of a two-state solution off the table, especially for the right," Lintl said at the time.

... then back to the right

When Benjamin Netanyahu was re-elected in 2015, he formed a coalition of exclusively right-wing parties - the most right-wing government Israel has ever had.

Parties to the right of Likud have pushed Netanyahu further away from the center in recent years, Lintl said: "The fear of losing votes to right-wing parties has led Netanyahu to take right-wing positions."

Elections at ever-shorter intervals

In the April 2019 Knesset election, the Likud party became the strongest force and President Reuven Rivlin put Netanyahu in charge of forming a government. However, forming a majority is difficult in Israel due to the fragmented party landscape and the large number of parties in the Knesset. And even strongman Netanyahu failed to gather enough supporters to form a government.

So, in September 2019, another election was held. Again, no political camp won the required majority in parliament, again Netanyahu was tasked with forming a government ― and again he failed. In the subsequently scheduled elections in March 2020, his streak of failures came to an end: The Likud party logged an increase in votes and Netanyahu managed to form a government again.

But the electoral merry-go-round continued to spin. Because the governing coalition could not agree on a budget at the end of 2020, Israelis had to go to the polls again in March 2021. The Likud party again became the strongest force, but Netanyahu failed once again to form a government. Instead, Jair Lapid and Naftali Bennett formed the currently incumbent liberal government.

Five elections in three-and-a-half years have made it clear how difficult it is to forge a coalition from the many different directions in the Knesset. Whether Netanyahu's electoral success this time will be enough to make him prime minister again remains to be seen.

Editor's note: This profile was originally published in German on November 22, 2019. It has been translated and updated with current political developments.

Edited by: Richard Connor