Benjamin Netanyahu’s Staying Power By Aaron David Miller

Posted By on April 1st, 2016

http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2016/03/31/benjamin-netanyahus-staying-power/

Aaron David Miller is a vice president at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars and most recently the author of “The End of Greatness: Why America Can’t Have (and Doesn’t Want) Another Great President.” He is on Twitter: @AaronDMiller2.

If elections were held today in Israel, the newspaper Haaretz reported recently, a single list of center-right candidates would edge out Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition and usher in a more centrist one without his Likud Party that could govern with a comfortable majority. A more telling sign that Israelis are tiring of Mr. Netanyahu came in another new Haaretz poll, which found that 51% of Israelis believe that Mr. Netanyahu should “leave political life” rather than run again in the next scheduled election.

Despite this, the chances of Mr. Netanyahu leaving and major change coming in Israeli politics before scheduled elections in 2019 are not great. Here are four reasons why:

Mr. Netanyahu’s political longevity. Should he survive until 2018, Benjamin Netanyahu will  be the longest-governing prime minister in Israel’s history, surpassing David Ben-Gurion. Critics of Mr. Netanyahu say that, rather like “Seinfeld,” his tenure has been a show about nothing. Yet he survives. His political wiles have established the perception that he is indeed prime minister material, with tested security credentials. And there is no single Israeli leader on the scene with the stature to challenge him.

The bad neighborhood. As the Middle East melts down, the value of a leader’s security credentials goes up. You might argue that Israelis would be looking for a leader with vision and principle to at least extract them from their conflict with the Palestinians, but there’s little faith these days in the peace process or in Mahmoud Abbas or the Palestinian Authority. Mr. Abbas is perceived as either acquiescing in the current wave of terror, unable to stop it, or using it as leverage. A compelling argument could be made that Mr. Netanyahu has been remarkably averse to risk and that he has not provided an answer to the wave of Palestinian stabbing and shooting attacks on Israelis since September or orchestrated a determinative defeat of Hamas in Gaza. Still, he has not blundered into quagmires or unnecessary or unwinnable wars either. CONTINUE AT SITE

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