No. 1: Benjamin Netanyahu: Flipping the Middle East on its head for better or worse

There’s a word his admirers use, half-jokingly, half in earnest: “Bibistim.”

But even among them, October 7 shattered something. Many walked away then, convinced the responsible adult had refused responsibility, and the polls recorded it. Through mid-2024, surveys regularly showed Netanyahu trailing his chief rivals – and his bloc falling short of a governing majority. In late May and early June 2024, for example, polls had Benny Gantz leading on suitability for prime minister and in projected seats; the gap over Netanyahu widened across multiple surveys.

The conversation we’ve drawn on captures the psychology of that turn.

In today’s compressed time horizon, in which the world gives us a limited window to act, the prime minister’s claim to leadership is straightforward: Act while the window is open.

Here, too, lies the tragedy his supporters feel. They feel that he genuinely wants to bring back the hostages, but that he’s punished for wanting to defeat Hamas.

This framing has a cost, both moral and diplomatic, and it raises the bar for results. But in the empirical sense of influence, as the person who imposed his frame on the year’s hardest problem, that was Netanyahu’s strongest moment.

The Iran strikes were the culmination of decades of Netanyahu’s warnings about Tehran and the nuclear file. For his camp, Operation Rising Lion validated his doctrine: Deter patiently, then strike decisively. For his critics, the operation risked escalation while leaving Gaza’s end-state unresolved. Both can be true. What is measurable is that after Iran, Netanyahu’s personal “suitability” numbers and Likud’s standing improved from their 2024 lows, at points regaining the lead, even as the overall bloc math remained stubborn.

In June 2025, a Post poll still showed him leading rivals on suitability by a wide margin, but falling short of a coalition majority; a month later, Likud polled as the largest single party at 27. Then, in September, Naftali Bennett’s new party edged past Likud in at least one Channel 13 survey. A rally, then a plateau, then volatility. Influence without mandate.

At home, 5785 did not produce a triumphalist prime minister; it produced a coalition gatekeeper who still controls the calendar. Dissolution bids failed. Key votes held. The government did not fall. In June 2025, the Knesset rejected a dissolution motion, preserving the coalition despite intense strain. That, too, is influence: the ability to decide when politics happens and when it does not.

The price is plain even to some of those who returned to him over Iran, with some complaining that he’s too accommodating to the haredim (ultra-Orthodox) and others expecting more steps to unity and healing.

Admiration for method coexists with fatigue over style and partners.

A father who praises Netanyahu’s instinct, “when to use force and when not to,” still tells his son he’ll “Never” vote for him. The paradox of the year’s polling flows from that vibe: resilience without a broad mandate. He keeps the board intact, but starting national repair proves harder.

The haredi draft will likely dominate the next campaign cycle. After the High Court ended blanket exemptions in June 2024, the legal and political clock began ticking. In 2025, the IDF announced it would issue roughly 54,000 call-up notices to haredi yeshiva students by July 2026. The ruling, subsequent enforcement steps, and sharp debates have rocked the coalition and the country. Expect a hard conversation among conservative voters whose families absorbed the war’s burdens: combat deaths, PTSD, shuttered businesses, and marriages stressed by months of reserve duty. This is not an abstract policy fight; it is a fairness fight.

Even so, Netanyahu’s political hydraulics still work. A Reuters analysis on the June 2025 dissolution vote shows him managing the draft crisis just enough to block early elections. The result: time to maneuver, but little relief from the core dilemma, how to reconcile coalition arithmetic with a changing social contract.

Abroad, Netanyahu retains what his critics sometimes underplay: access plus endurance. Crisis coordination with Washington around the Iran exchange was constant; regionally, Israel signaled resolve. But the same will to act that rallied Israelis around deterrence produced a second file with very different optics: the strikes on Hamas leadership in Doha.

The leadership calculus there was doctrine-consistent, pressure all levers, deny sanctuaries. Yet it crashed into mediation. Qatar, the UN Security Council, and key partners condemned the strikes or urged de-escalation, and the reporting in both Hebrew and English media suggested rifts within Israel’s own security apparatus over the operation’s wisdom. The diplomatic blowback was immediate, and the hostage track grew more fragile.

All of which sharpens a domestic argument that runs through our transcript: Is political survival distorting the order of battle between hostage deals and maximal military aims? One voice in the conversation contends that if Netanyahu didn’t want to prioritize hostages, he could have aligned fully with Smotrich and Ben-Gvir months earlier, kept the coalition neatly intact, and forsworn negotiations. The choice to keep the channel alive, even while striking terror leadership, becomes, for supporters, proof of intent to bring the captives home.

For critics, it is mis-sequencing that undermines mediation while failing to deliver decisive battlefield gains. The year’s diplomatic ledger is exactly that: a prime minister who can pick up the phone and reset a regional narrative, and also make the table wobble by acting just inside, or just past, the lines allies draw.

A serious appraisal should neither launder nor weaponize the debits. Netanyahu bears responsibility for October 7 but he’s not the only one.

The policy was broadly supported by the security establishment. Everyone shares responsibility. That is neither exoneration nor the opposition’s maximalist demand; it is the vocabulary of shared failure used to defend the choice to keep him in the chair during the war.

It is likewise true, however inconvenient for caricatures, that Netanyahu is one of the least hard-right figures in his own coalition. Were he aligned with the far Right program, sovereignty moves in the West Bank would be further advanced; Gaza would be treated as a conquered space with renewed settlements. He has not gone there. He speaks fluent Washington; he has relationships; he understands consequences. He also remains stuck to parties far to his right because they are the math that keeps him in office. That tension, between worldview and coalition, was the central drama of 5785.

We end where we began, with a limited window to act, that is already closing. This year, Netanyahu used that window against Iran and reset deterrence in a way that even his critics acknowledge changed the regional conversation. He also stretched public patience by narrowing his governing coalition to the edge of its legitimacy and by under-delivering on unity at home.

If influence, not approval, is our standard, Netanyahu was the center of 5785. When he moved, the system moved: generals, ministers, markets, mediators, enemies. But influence can break a deadlock, and it can break the table. In Doha, it did both. In the Gulf, patience is near its limit; integration has conditions. At home, the haredi draft is a moral ledger, not just a legal one.

Netanyahu is less extreme than his coalition and more fluent in the world’s grammar than many of his allies. That’s precisely why the most influential Jew of this past year should form a real unity-Zionist government.

If the choice is between the math that keeps him afloat and the coalition that allows Israel to heal, the latter must be chosen. The “Bibistim” will cheer. The skeptics may still never vote for him. But the nation will have a chance to breathe.

And that, in a year measured by missiles, votes, and terse communiqués, would be the most influential act of all.\