How Netanyahu Used Fear, Again, to Win More Votes Than Anyone Else

 

news analysis

How Netanyahu Used Fear, Again, to Win More Votes Than Anyone Else

 

Despite years of political baggage, the Israeli prime minister outperformed expectations, and his rivals, by playing on Jewish voters’ fears of Arab political power and potential security threats.

 

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reacts to exit polls during a speech at his party headquarters in Jerusalem on Wednesday.Credit...Ronen Zvulun/Reuters

By David M. Halbfinger

Reporting from Jerusalem

Oct. 29, 2026Updated 6:29 a.m. ET

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/29/world/middleeast/netanyahu-fear-election-votes.html

 

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu didn’t win Israel’s election. He certainly didn’t lose, either. Neither he nor his chief opponent has a clear path to form a government.

What is clear is that Mr. Netanyahu performed far better than anyone carrying so much political baggage would have any reason to expect.

His opponents, led by the former military chief Gadi Eisenkot, sailed into Tuesday’s fateful vote having consistently led in the polls and confident that their goal, an outright majority relying only on predominantly Jewish parties, was within reach.

Mr. Netanyahu limped into Election Day by comparison, dragging the public’s fury over his failure to take responsibility for the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack; its weariness with a four-year term in which he tried to gain power at the expense of the courts; and its frustration with his refusal to force ultra-Orthodox Jews to share in the sacrifice of military service.

And yet, initial results in Tuesday’s election showed that his Likud party outperformed all others. The result has left Jewish opposition leaders pondering an exceedingly difficult choice.

They now can give up on conclusively defeating Mr. Netanyahu and look to join him in a potential unity government that dispenses with some of his more extremist allies. Or they can try to form a governing majority themselves, by overcoming their reluctance to partner with predominantly Arab parties that Mr. Netanyahu — and the majority of Israeli Jews — have treated as outside the bounds of political acceptability. In the meantime, Mr. Netanyahu keeps his job.

How Mr. Netanyahu managed that feat, however, was anything but a surprise. The veteran Israeli leader, renowned as a political escape artist, did not unveil any new tricks. But he may have uniquely grasped that his old ones would serve him well.

“He was dealt a very tough hand, but he used the assets that he had as well as he possibly could,” said Michael J. Koplow, an analyst at the Israel Policy Forum, a New York-based research group.

Chief among them is Mr. Netanyahu’s knack for playing on Israelis’ fears.

Mr. Netanyahu argued to Israeli voters that if they thought what had happened on Oct. 7 — the most calamitous day in Israeli history — was bad, that was nothing next to the nightmare that could come from the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank.

It was a transparently bogus argument. Only the most left-leaning of Israel’s opposition leaders, Yair Golan of the Democrats party, had spoken positively about a two-state solution — and even he called Palestinian statehood unachievable anytime soon, especially after Oct. 7.

Still, nothing the opposition said could rebut the accusation as pungently as how Mr. Netanyahu leveled it: with skyscraper-sized billboards screaming “Yamin o Filastin” — right-wing or Palestine.

Mr. Netanyahu also played on many Israelis’ fears about Arab citizens of Israel and their political leaders wielding power.

Israeli Jews have been polarized over Mr. Netanyahu for years, leaving opposition leaders perennially short of a parliamentary majority without the votes of Arab lawmakers. If that held true again, Mr. Netanyahu’s political challenge would actually be fairly limited: To stay in power, he need only make Jewish opposition leaders afraid to consummate a full partnership with their Arab allies.

So he relentlessly depicted Arab politicians like Mansour Abbas — who had served in the government in 2021 and 2022 — as enemies within and a sinister threat to the country if they were allowed to wield power.

One of his many A.I.-generated ads showed Mr. Abbas and Mr. Golan, of the Democrats, in the belly of a Trojan horse being dragged inside the walls of an Israeli citadel. Another showed Mr. Abbas, languidly smoking a hookah with his feet up on the cabinet table, vetoing proposals for anti-Palestinian security moves by an Eisenkot-led government. Mr. Abbas then perks up and approves the “evacuation of Jewish communities to build trust toward a Palestinian state.”

All the anti-Arab groundwork Mr. Netanyahu had laid served him well when Arab voters flocked to the polls in record numbers on Tuesday. Mr. Netanyahu turned the historic turnout into a red alert for the right, posting a stream of images on social media showing Arabs flocking to the polls in head coverings or on camels, and urging right-wing Israelis who might have backed other parties to instead vote for Likud as if it were “a matter of life and death for us.”

“I think he recognized long ago that a high voter turnout in the Arab street is actually not going to be bad for him, if the conversation in Israel is going to delegitimize the Arabs,” said Shira Efron, an Israeli analyst at RAND.

In fact, Mr. Abbas and his Raam party have worked to gain acceptance from Jewish lawmakers and from the Israeli public, eyeing participation in a future government and even a cabinet post. He acknowledged that Israel was and would remain a Jewish state and — in a bold pre-election move — named a Jewish lawmaker, Yoav Segalovitz, to the No. 2 spot on Raam’s candidate list.

The larger of the two Arab parties, an alliance of three smaller parties called the Joint List, includes a Palestinian nationalist faction and is seen as more antagonistic toward Zionism. Its leader, Yousef Jabareen, said he was ready to cooperate to topple Mr. Netanyahu’s government, but few expect the Joint List to help other than by supporting a new premier from outside the governing coalition.

Mr. Netanyahu’s campaign benefited from other factors. Mr. Eisenkot never quite denied that he would enter a government with Arab lawmakers, but he never pushed back hard on the idea that there was anything wrong with it. The opposition bloc never fully coalesced behind Mr. Eisenkot at all, as his allies Naftali Bennett, a former prime minister, and Avigdor Liberman, a former minister of defense, clung to hopes of engineering their own premierships instead.

Mr. Netanyahu also exploited his relationship with President Trump, who gave him an effusive endorsement, and flexed the powers of an incumbent to control the agenda, which he sought to keep focused on Iran and its nuclear ambitions — another source of great fear among Israeli voters.

The more he spoke of potential security crises ahead, the more Mr. Netanyahu was able to take Israelis’ minds off the security failures he had failed to avert, said Yaakov Katz, former editor of The Jerusalem Post and co-founder of the Middle East-America Dialogue.

And in that sense, while Mr. Eisenkot’s military background was reassuring, Mr. Katz said, Mr. Netanyahu could draw on a relationship with right-wing voters that dates back 30 years.

“He’s talking about real threats,” Mr. Katz said. “So then, when he makes you think about them, the next question you ask is, ‘Who’s going to defend me and protect me from them? And I know that he’s got a mixed record, but at least I know him. The other guys are a gamble.’”

David M. Halbfinger is The Times’s Jerusalem bureau chief, leading coverage of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. He also held that post from 2017 to 2021. He was the politics editor from 2021 to 2025.