The Likud primary: Trolling as a way to gain support – opinion

Yoav Kisch, a respected former IDF pilot and now an education minister apparently converted to trolling, joins the AI-song craze. Idit Silman – minister of something, presumably – floods social media with her customary graciousness.

Before Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blocked her from running, Hadar Muchtar, who has spent years trying to turn TikTok virality into a Knesset seat, made her pitch plainly: Young Israelis live on TikTok and Instagram, and she could deliver their votes to Netanyahu.

A viral clip keeps a minister in the public conversation without forcing him to explain what the government has actually delivered.

The deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust occurred on this government’s watch. Israel has since inflicted severe damage on Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran and demonstrated extraordinary military capabilities. Yet after almost three years of war, the “total victory” repeatedly promised by Netanyahu is difficult to identify on any front.

Hamas’s disarmament remains remote. Hezbollah has been badly weakened, but the northern threat remains. Iran’s nuclear program was set back an estimated three to five years, yet enriched uranium remains in the country, the ballistic threat survives, and the regime that built both is still in power and openly committed to Israel’s destruction.

In June, only 15% of respondents in an INSS survey thought Israel had won the latest war against Iran.

Meanwhile, 968 Israeli soldiers have been killed since October 7. The war’s human and psychological costs are only beginning to surface.

In July, the Defense Ministry’s Rehabilitation Department reported 26,200 wounded from the current war in its care; 65% were seeking treatment for psychological distress or PTSD. It expects to be treating around 50,000 people with psychological injuries by 2028. Reservists make up 62% of the current-war wounded in the system.

The domestic record offers even less cinematic material.

Police figures recorded 309 murders in 2025. The haredi (ultra-Orthodox) draft question has festered through years of war while the same reservists are repeatedly called back to duty. Political and social polarization has returned at an even higher level than before October 7: A May 2026 study measured it at 8.3 out of 10, above the level recorded during the 2023 judicial-overhaul crisis.

On the cost of living: Israel entered this government’s term already among the OECD’s most expensive countries. Food prices were 37% above the OECD average and 51% above the European Union in purchasing-power terms.

Since then, major household expenses have climbed another 15% to 30%. Netanyahu ran in 2022 on bringing prices down. His government’s committee on the cost of living met once.

Then there is the brain drain. A study published this month estimates that 268,509 Israelis left the country for at least three consecutive months between 2023 and 2025 – close to 90,000 a year, compared with roughly 60,000 annually in the previous decade.

Researchers found particularly worrying increases among doctors, engineers, PhDs, academics, and high earners. In 2024 alone, 530 doctors left Israel, roughly twice the previous annual norm.

For a small country whose economy, health system, military edge, and tax base depend heavily on skilled human capital, this is a strategic warning, and potentially a quasi-existential threat to its long-term viability as a modern society and economy.

There are some positive signs in the current chaos, but an impressively solid and resilient economy and exceptional IDF tactical achievements do not automatically add up to a safer, more cohesive, or better-governed country. In that context, “boom, boom, boom” starts to look like strategy rather than accident.

Netanyahu cannot cast himself as the adult rescuing Likud from this degeneracy. He helped build the incentives that reward it. Long before generative AI, he understood the value of bypassing traditional mediation, personalizing politics, and speaking directly to the base.

The Likud trolls did not fall from the sky. They developed in an ecosystem where provocation became political capital. Tally Gotliv may be its purest product. Her politics runs on permanent confrontation, accusation, yelling, and spectacular language, and internal Likud polling has repeatedly placed her near the top.

TheMarker reported explicitly that Netanyahu feared the trollization of Likud’s top 10 and what that culture may look like on a national ballot. That helps explain the unusually large number of reserved slots he has accumulated to shape the upper part of the ticket.

Even mamlakhtiyut changes meaning here. Traditionally, it referred to an ethic of state responsibility: restraint, institutional seriousness, an understanding that office imposes obligations on its holder.

In this primary, it functions more like casting: more respectable faces positioned high enough on the list to reassure voters about what the party’s internal market has produced underneath.

The AI clips are ridiculous, but they are not incidental.

They belong to a governing culture particularly skilled at projecting power and far less convincing when asked what, concretely, it has delivered to Israelis.