It was strange to watch Fox News’ Martha MacCallum yesterday refer to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “unpopularity” in Israel. McCallum is a straight-shooting journalist. So how is it that she is unaware that Netanyahu is the most popular prime minister Israel has had in ages?
Direct Polls is Israel’s most accurate polling company. It was the only one to accurately call the 2022 Knesset elections that returned Netanyahu and his Right-Religious bloc to power. Over the past year, Direct Polls accomplished what was previously considered impossible: It conducted uniformly accurate polls of much smaller local government elections.
Netanyahu’s popularity reasonably sank in the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7 invasion and slaughter of 1,200 Israelis. But it began rebounding in late November. After National Resilience Party leader Benny Gantz resigned from Netanyahu’s government in June, Netanyahu steadily rose in Direct Polls tracking polls—leading Gantz and Opposition leader Yesh Atid Party head Yair Lapid by double digits in head-to-head matchups. In the intervening months, the gap between Netanyahu and his rival has grown steadily.
On Sunday, two days after Israel eliminated Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, Direct Polls published the results of its latest tracking poll for Channel 14. It found that for the first time since Oct. 7, the parties comprising Netanyahu’s governing coalition have an outright majority in Knesset seats. If elections were held today, the government would be re-elected.
As for Netanyahu, his popularity has reached epic proportions in Israel’s polarized political jungle, enjoying higher ratings than his top two rivals combined. In head-to-head matchups, he leads Gantz in favorability 52% to 25% and Lapid 54% to 24%.
Despite Netanyahu’s wild popularity, the media narrative in Israel and across the world remains where it was in the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7. The standard mantra is the one MacCallum parroted on Tuesday evening. The underlying message is that Netanyahu is prolonging the war to avoid elections.
Aside from being dead wrong, the assertion that Netanyahu is unpopular and is prolonging the war to avoid elections obfuscates the importance of what Netanyahu is doing. If the war is reduced to a question of politics, then we can ignore its strategic significance. And if we ignore the war’s strategic significance, then we can also avoid the issue of the polls, which show that the public is rallying around Netanyahu in a way no Israeli leader has experienced in recent memory. And if we ignore the polls, then we can ignore the reasons for Netanyahu’s historic popularity.
But understanding his popularity is key to understanding not only the political realities of Israel, but the forces driving events.
The sources of Netanyahu’s popularity
Netanyahu’s support stems from two sources. The first is the public’s recognition that Israel is fighting for its survival. The second is the Biden-Harris administration’s hostility.
Oct. 7 was a shattering event. It wasn’t merely a massive terrorist attack. For Israelis, it was a glimpse of the future if Israel fails to win the war. It showed Israelis that we are in a zero-sum game with Iran and its terror proxies. There is no deal to be had with Hamas, Hezbollah or the Iranian regime. Either they win and Israel is annihilated, or Israel wins and they are destroyed as military and political entities. There is no middle ground, no win-win deal.
While the Biden-Harris administration has professed solidarity with Israel since Oct. 7, Hamas’s day of atrocities did not change the administration’s policy goals. Both before and since Oct. 7, the Biden-Harris administration has had two goals in the Middle East—reaching a nuclear accord with Iran through strategic appeasement; and establishing a Palestinian state in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and Gaza.
Both of these goals are opposed by the overwhelming majority of Israelis who view both a Palestinian state and a nuclear-armed Iran as existential threats to the country. Given the outpouring of emotional support Israelis received from President Joe Biden and his advisers after Oct. 7, Israelis reasonably expected that they would jettison their anti-Israel policies.
But the administration did no such thing. Instead, just days after Oct. 7, the Biden-Harris administration unfroze $6 billion in Iranian accounts and transferred the funds to Tehran. Despite mountains of evidence, the administration denied that Iran was involved in planning and approving Hamas’s terrorist invasion. And they ignored the fact that upwards of 75% of Palestinians supported the slaughter of that day and no Palestinian Authority official condemned the atrocities.
Far from standing with Israel, as early as Oct. 8, the administration began a policy of gaslighting Israel, intimating that it was on the verge of committing war crimes by insisting that Israel fight in accordance with the “laws of war,” as if there was any reason to think that it wouldn’t do so as a matter of course.
Just a month into Israel’s ground operation in Gaza, the administration began slow-walking offensive weapons, including everything from assault rifles and bullets to tank and artillery shells, and bombs for air force jets. The only armaments that were steadily resupplied were Iron Dome missiles.
From the administration’s perspective, Israel had the right to self-defense but not to victory. To this end, the administration sought to micromanage Israel’s military operations and minimize the strategic significance. Israelis recognized that fighting to a draw meant being defeated.
Gantz, Lapid and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant were all willing to accept the administration’s position. It aligned with the way the military had been doing business for decades. Moreover, by accepting the administration’s dictates, they were showered with praise from the administration. The Netanyahu-hating media used their love fests with the White House and Pentagon as a means to present them as statesmen and Netanyahu as an isolated egomaniac who was only keeping up the fight to avoid new elections.
But the public didn’t buy the media narrative. Far from viewing Netanyahu as egotistical, they saw him as their only hope of preventing national destruction. From the very early stages of the war, Netanyahu distinguished himself as the only leader the public saw: Israel is facing foes who want to kill every single Jew they come across, and if we don’t defeat them, they will.
Netanyahu alone pledged publicly and repeatedly that he would not permit Israel’s fallen soldiers to have died in vain and would not relent in the war effort. As U.S. pressure grew stronger and more aggressive, he was also the only one who didn’t falter.
The administration responded to Netanyahu’s refusal to accept anything short of victory by openly interfering in Israeli politics with the clear aim of either neutralizing him within his government or ousting him from power. To achieve the first goal, Biden, U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and their subordinates used the public’s call for national unity to compel Netanyahu to give effective veto power over military operations to Gantz by making him a partner in the war cabinet. From his position, Gantz was able to consistently weaken Israel’s military operations in line with U.S. dictates. The administration was also deeply involved in Gantz’s decision in June to exit from the government. The idea was that following Gantz’s resignation, Gallant would rally four Likud Knesset members to leave the government with him and form an alternate coalition with the left. In the event, Gallant was unable to carry out the plan. And in Gantz’s absence, Netanyahu quickly moved to ratchet up the aggressiveness and the effectiveness of Israel’s war effort in Gaza. The public strongly supported Netanyahu’s moves. Any chance that Likud MKs would join the opposition disappeared.
The symbiotic relationship that the Biden-Harris administration cultivated with the Israeli left did not weaken Netanyahu politically, as the media and its political allies on the left assumed. To the contrary. Since the public agreed with Netanyahu that this was a war for national survival, as the public grew more aware of the administration’s opposition to Israeli victory, its support for Netanyahu grew. Likewise, politicians like Gallant, Lapid and Gantz, who are perceived as having good relations with the Biden administration, became objects of suspicion.
What moved Netanyahu’s approval ratings from the impressive 40s to the stratospheric (in Israeli terms) 50-plus was his trip to Washington in late July. Israelis overwhelmingly view the U.S.-Israel alliance as a strategic imperative. So while they approved Netanyahu’s refusal to bow to American pressure, they worried that the media were right when they accused him of wrecking U.S.-Israel relations.
The enthusiastic response Netanyahu received from lawmakers from both parties as he delivered his speech to the joint houses of Congress, and his successful meetings with Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump demonstrated to the Israeli public that Netanyahu’s pursuit of victory didn’t dampen U.S. support for Israel at all. Netanyahu’s biggest jump in approval came following that visit.
The purpose of the myth of Netanyahu’s unpopularity
This returns us to the persistent media myth regarding Netanyahu’s unpopularity. To a large degree, the international media narrative regarding him is shaped by the Israeli media’s coverage. With the notable exception of Channel 14, Israel’s print and electronic media have been central actors in the left’s longstanding efforts to demonize the prime minister with the goal of ousting him from power. To this end, since the early stages of the war, the coverage has been defeatist and demoralizing. For instance, Channel 12’s correspondents and commentators reacted to the announcement by the IDF on Sept. 27 that Nasrallah was killed with mournful faces and barely hidden disappointment. In contrast, the public was elated and energized by the news.
By insisting that Netanyahu is unpopular, and his unpopularity is driving his determination to bring victory in war, the media drives a narrative that ignores the strategic implications of ending the war without defeating Hamas, Hezbollah or Iran.
But the public isn’t buying it. Netanyahu supported because by insisting on fighting to victory at all costs, and then doggedly maintaining allegiance to his pledge, Netanyahu regained the public’s trust. And now that his determination is yielding victories, from day to day, Netanyahu’s unrelenting determination increases his popularity and makes the administration, the opposition and the media appear increasingly ridiculous and irrelevant in the eyes of the Israeli public.
{Reposted from JNS}
