When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stepped onto the podium last Monday evening and announced a delay in the legislation embodying the reform of Israel’s judicial system, he looked pale, tired, and worn down. While he spoke of "the judgment of Solomon" and the desire "to prevent a rupture in the Jewish people", it was hard not to wonder where his energy had gone, where the charismatic rhetorician, who regularly managed to hypnotize so many even if they were not his supporters, had disappeared to. What had happened to the gifted speaker dubbed "King Bibi" by Time Magazine in 2012? His dramatic announcement, which Israel had awaited for hours, and was supposed to douse the coals of the protest that had smoldered here for three months, was delivered almost perfunctorily.
"Netanyahu usually fills the space, and appears open, very upright, not inward looking and certainly not shrinking," says Kave Shafran, author of the bestseller "Master of Influence: Benjamin Netanyahu’s 10 Secrets of Power, Rhetoric & Charisma", and a coach to ministers and company managers on public appearances. "The movements that characterize him express emphasis, exemplification, specificity. They were there this time too, but at this press conference he kept repeating the movement in which he clasped his fingers tightly together and held them over his stomach. Such a repeated movement, especially when it is not characteristic of him, is indicative of the way he feels, that he is holding everything inside. In that sense you can see that he is hurt and angry. It says that Netanyahu is not at his best.
"Netanyahu also always knows the key sentence and the headline that will emerge from a speech, and he practices it and delivers it in to the best possible effect. Here, it was ‘I am delaying the legislation’, and he presented in a very unbelievable way. He also mixed up his words, wore a light blue suit against a light blue background, and ended with his gaze averted. All these things presented him as a sort of wounded animal opposite the television cameras."
All that can be dismissed as the result of frantic days and nights under extreme pressure and without sleep, but it would seem that there is much more behind it, that something in the "King Bibi" image has cracked, and that the cracks did not begin with that speech.
Over the past few months, from the election to the formation of the government, putting out fires started by minsters, and the mass protests that culminated in a general strike in response to the firing of Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant, Netanyahu’s image has undergone a process that is hard to ignore.
"Bibi has methods and techniques that make him an outstanding speaker," says Shafran. "That’s a dramatic tool for a leader, and it’s the secret of his power. ‘I have the gift of the gab’ he once said of himself. His underlying message for half a century, as a man and politician, that we are under attack and he safeguards our lives, always worked for him.
"But now it doesn’t work anymore. Reality has changed, the government has changed, the protest against him has changed, and the old arguments splinter on the ground of reality. Messages such as ‘I succeed in saving you from the pandemic’, ‘in making peace’, ‘in rescuing the economy’, and so forth, don’t work today, because Netanyahu’s opponents have managed to reframe the discourse. It’s no longer ‘Bibi yes or no’, and it’s no longer left or right. It’s ‘Yes or no to democracy,’ and in that respect Bibi has to ask himself ‘Who moved my cheese?’, or ‘Who moved my debate?’ The regular debate, which is very comfortable for Netanyahu, is ‘us versus them’, ‘right versus left’, and that has suddenly changed to a discourse he doesn’t know how to win.
"Amid all that, he is making mistakes, from attacking the IDF, to somewhat over-the-top fake news, such as saying: ‘I opposed the disengagement from Gaza.’ He’s not a golden boy with a magic touch but a strategist, and this time the strategy didn’t work, so the ‘king’ image also doesn’t work anymore."
Evidence for that can be found in opinion polls conducted over the past week showing that the coalition has lost the support of the majority, but more than that, that Netanyahu’s popularity is in decline. According to a Channel 12 poll, if a Knesset election were held today, the block supporting Netanyahu would win 54 seats and the block opposing him would win 61; the Likud party would win just 25 seats. 68% of the respondents rated Netanyahu’s performance ‘on the whole bad’, and that included 55% of the Likud voters surveyed.
In a Kan poll published about twenty-four hours after Gallant was fired as defense minister (although he has yet to be officially dismissed), 37% of respondents said that Benny Gantz was a better candidate for prime minister than Netanyahu, while 30% supported Netanyahu.
These figures represent a severe blow to a person who has carefully cultivated his status for years. Even when his opponents argued that he was out of touch and that he was seeking to impose a monarchical style of government on Israel, Netanyahu succeeded in making his admirers continue to see him as an unrivalled, indispensable leader. The soubriquet King Bibi bestowed on Netanyahu by "Time Magazine" on May 17, 2012 became the title of Dan Shadur’s documentary "King Bibi - The Life and Performances of Benjamin Netanyahu" in 2019, in which Shadur attempted to answer the question how Netanyahu had become almost invincible.
So what happened to the charm and the sure touch? "What caused it to dissipate was a strategic pivot that distanced him from the ‘Netanyahu’ brand and took him to ‘Netanyahu’s survival,’" says media consultant Assaf Shmueli. "He did an amazing political job in the election, but in forming the government he dispensed gifts out of need and not out of consideration for the brand. When you give your potential successors outside your party tools for survival, including the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of National Security, and you see them as allies who can save you ,while the world outside sees them as the most despicable characters there are, you have a problem. In order to save himself, he waved red flags at countries around the world, and that has consequences and significance."
Shmueli believes that the loss of the King Bibi brand has another cause. "Over the years, Netanyahu knew how to create a huge effect on the web. He has the ability to define messages and spread them. He did that for a long time, and it strengthened him and his brand, but he didn’t do it before the judicial reform. He went into that event over-confidently without bringing his well-oiled message machine to bear. He let Yariv Levin and Simcha Rothman lead, and didn’t control events. He thought the war was over with the formation of the government."
When Netanyahu woke up to the reality of widespread protests against him on the streets and on social networks, it was too late. Shmueli: "If we take the Ukrainian slogan ‘the army of the people beat the army of the bots’, that’s what happened here. The seriousness of what was happening made people burdened with earning a living, with their businesses, put everything aside and enter the debate on the networks, while Bibi’s array of forces was not part of the event. He didn’t amplify messages, didn’t amplify the event. When they tried to activate his network army in his name, it was yesterday’s war."
"It’s a classic story of a king gone mad, who has been in power too long and can’t let go, who thinks he really is what his courtiers say about him, and loses touch with reality. It seems that this is his endgame, the last act in the crazy story of King Bibi," says Shadur.
Gayil Talshir, a researcher in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Department of Political Science, and author of the book "Judocracy: the Netanyahu Era", believes that the Netanyahu brand is losing ground because of the prime minister’s loss of his ability to stay above the fray, to let others do his work for him and to step into negotiations only at the decisive final stage. "He has lost the ability to rise above it all. In the negotiations on the formation of the coalition, he had to accede to everything his coalition partner demanded. He lost the ability to say no. He thought that the interests meshed, that his own personal interests - control of the legal system and the media and the national agenda - coincided with the outlooks of the Religious Zionism party and of Levin and of Shlomo Karhi and Galit Distel. But what has actually happened is that he is the most moderate figure in his own coalition, and the leaders are the extremists. He has lost control. Netanyahu, who was always perceived as Mr. Security and Mr. Economy, as a level-headed leader, has lost it."
Cold shoulder from the world
This change in Netanyahu’s image is also reflected in the way he is perceived around the world. In the past several weeks, the leader for whom the red carpet used to be rolled out has been photographed entering the residences of leaders in London, Berlin and Rome alone. As for the White House, he has not even been invited. "He is now experiencing coolness, indifference and neglect overseas, and when the reform, the coup, is added to that, people are starting to ask what’s happening here," Shmueli explains. "Throughout history, what has most annoyed those on both the right and the left is the conclusion that the other side was right. And that is what Netanyahu is allowing to happen through his conduct today: the sense that the other side is right and that nothing interests him besides his own survival. People who have voted Bibi all their lives are asking what has happened to him, because he is no longer occupied with the brand Israel but with a plan that is seen as serving him alone and not the country. He has divided his identity from the that of the state and is concerned only for Bibi, and that has led to the loss of the esteem in which the world once held him."
"Biden said that the partnership with Israel was based on democracy, and that if Netanyahu led to an authoritarian, tyrannical regime, which is the model he is following, then the deep partnership between Israel and the US would be eroded," Talshir adds. "In Britain, in France, and in the US, all the great democracies are saying ‘No’ to Netanyahu, because it is clear that he is leading to an anti-democratic model. When things were good, and the Abraham Accords were signed, among other achievement, the world gave him credit and it built up his image. Now, when things are bad, that too is attributed to him."
"I hear everyone saying now ‘This isn’t the Netanyahu I knew’, and I say: this is exactly the Netanyahu I know, but he has now simply been given an opportunity," says Odelia Carmon, Netanyahu’s former media adviser and overseas liaison manager, and author of the novel "The Confidante". "The aspirations he always had of turning the King Bibi soubriquet into something real, of ruling like a king, had no partners until now. He had no-one with whom to realize the megalomania, the monarchical impulse. No government up until now allowed him that. His personal benefit always came before the good of the country, but in the past there was some overlap. In the past, he bound the one up with the other, so people didn’t see it. His image was built on creating identity between the interests of the country and his own. Today’s circumstances have only exposed the fact that this was never true, and his interests always came first, so the image burst apart," says Carmon.
Leaders admire him
There are those, however, who are convinced that this is not the case, and that the admiration for Netanyahu around the world has not diminished; even the opposite. "Only a week ago, a representative of a country that is in dispute with another country came to me and asked that Netanyahu should help mediate between them, because both leaders admire him so much," a source who once worked with Netanyahu and now works with many world leaders relates. "In the course of my work, I meet politicians, heads of governments, presidents and ministers. No-one comes near this esteem."
How do you explain the cool receptions that world leaders now give him?
"First of all, that’s interpretation by the media and by political commentators who want to tell a story. It’s not the reality. The second thing is that the Biden administration is not one of Netanyahu’s great admirers. They, for example, contribute to The Movement for Quality Government in Israel, which runs campaigns against him. So this aspect of the media, which set the tone, has an effect.
"Netanyahu is among the first rank of world leaders, and nothing can take that away from him. In football there’s Barcelona, Real Madrid, Manchester United and Liverpool, which are at the top, and he is there among politicians, because he has turned Israel into a power, because he has been in power for so long and wins the public’s hearts and minds, because he does that despite 95% of the media being against him. Leaders see that and envy it. He has managed to establish pioneering independent social media, among the first in the world, and has found a way of speaking directly to his audience without the media as go-between. So people look on him with admiration."
Rotem Sella, founder and publisher of Sella Meir Press, which published the Hebrew edition of the autobiography "Bibi: My Story", explains that the other side of the political divide will always try to argue that Netanyahu’s strength has waned, but that reality shows otherwise.
"Netanyahu was and remains one of the world’s great statesmen," Sella says. "Like all the great leaders of the past century, he, and the government he heads, have been through political crises. He is currently undergoing a crisis the results of which are unknown, but anyone who has read his book or who takes an interest in Israeli politics remembers that Netanyahu’s career has had many ups and downs. What characterizes him is not avoidance of crisis and failures, but a rare ability to deal with them and emerge from them. In 2006, he led Likud to its worst ever defeat, when it received twelve seats. He was pronounced politically dead, but he came back after less than three years and regained power in 2009. A few years ago the consensus among the commentators was that his trial, and perhaps the Bennett-Lapid government, would kill him politically, but his determination and ability buried the obituary writers.
"There’s no need to take too seriously people from the other side of the divide who have claimed that the Netanyahu era was over every five minutes for three decades. Anyone who comes to that conclusion in the face of the galaxy of facts can’t expect it to be regarded seriously.
"In order to know whether the events currently taking place will affect the way Netanyahu is remembered by history in any way, we’ll have to wait a good few years. It will have to be much more significant than what we have seen up to now. Just to give some perspective: Margaret Thatcher lost her position because of unrest over the poll tax. Who remembers any of that today? The fact is that we, the British, and the entire world, remember Thatcher as the Iron Lady, thanks to her achievements and her robust stance in favor of the free market.
"I believe that what will shape Netanyahu’s image will be his diplomatic and political activity: his campaign against international terrorism; the struggle against Iran’s nuclear weapons program; the antithesis to Oslo which was realized in the peace with the Emirates; the economic reforms that brought forth the free market in Israel; the production of gas from the sea; and bringing the Covid vaccinations. His image doesn’t stem from sound bites but from concrete achievements, and therefore from a historical point of view I don’t expect that it will be undermined by the current protests."
Do the pictures of him walking alone without ceremonious receptions overseas not reflect a decline in his image around the world, in your view?
"Throughout his career as prime minister, Netanyahu has confronted the consensus views of the global liberal elite on how to treat Israel and its enemies. His independent thought and his readiness to risk political capital in order to stand by his world outlook has led more than once to friction and challenging situations vis-à-vis world leaders. You don’t need too much historical awareness to remember the battle of wits between Netanyahu and Obama when he was president. Netanyahu did not agree to exchanging land for peace, he dared to raise the Iran issue in Congress, and forged a network of alliances and economic ties with countries like Hungary and Poland, which were not the cup of tea of the liberals in Brussels and Washington. This conduct created antagonism, but he didn’t care.
"His mission was never to receive smiles from world leaders or an embrace by the international press and media, but to represent what he saw as Israel’s interests in the best possible way. The bottom line is that he succeeded, and in the test of history this success is more important than any red carpet."
No response was forthcoming from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on April 2, 2023.
© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd., 2023.