Next week, if there are no surprises, Benjamin Netanyahu will have assembled his fifth government. He is about to achieve his dream of serving as prime minister longer than David Ben-Gurion, but in matters like these, it's not the length that counts.
A brief summary of the four governments he has led does not give us an answer about what kind of mark he will leave on history. But for now, it's hard to point to any dramatic moves he has led that changed the face of Israel. Based on his ideology, he can mostly be proud of preventing things – he prevented the establishment of a Palestinian state and a settlement freeze; he stopped the Oslo peace process; and convinced U.S. President Donald Trump to withdraw from the nuclear deal with Iran.
The youngest prime minister in Israel's history is a patriot, a talented man, educated, well-read, and a professional orator. He repeatedly promised us that he did not want a binational state, but rather a Jewish, democratic one. He promised, a number of times, mostly during his first years in office, to surprise us all. Once he went so far as to say he would surprise us more than even Menachem Begin did.
But it's hard to believe that the person who waited out four governments with no surprises will roll one out in his fifth. He cannot be accused of having failed to achieve the dreams of his predecessors. The problem is that he has never proposed a major political move that would save Israel from slipping down the slope to a situation in which a Jewish minority rules over an Arab majority to the west of the Jordan River.
In the past few years, Netanyahu has struck an unofficial alliance between Israel and shady regimes, without needing to. He extended his hand to moves that created a rift between the Jews of Israel and those in the U.S., which reached an apex when the compromise for mixed-gender prayer at the Western Wall was canceled. With his own two hands, he turned Israel into the ally of one party in the U.S., after long years of bilateral support. The Democrats' retreat from Israel necessarily poses a real problem for the fifth Netanyahu government.
Netanyahu has turned a cold shoulder to his own strongly-worded declarations and weakened our ability to take his current determination seriously: "No" to the two-state solution, "no" to trading prisoners for Israeli captives, "no" to restricting the power of the Supreme Court. So what if he said so? He opposed the death penalty in Israel, and then supported legislation that would allow it; he opposed annexing parts of the West Bank and then made exactly that part of his campaign promises. He even demanded that a prime minister under investigation resign before he could be indicted, arguing – and convincing many – that a prime minister in such a position could not focus on affairs of state. Now he has announced that he is not busy trying to evade the legal process, but it's clear that the "pre-indictment hearing coalition" he has put together will give him the chance to maintain his immunity.
After so many years in power, Netanyahu senses that he has a sort of moral immunity, and his colleagues talk about the election results giving him a major victory that expresses the people's desire for him to remain in power despite any pre-indictment hearing or any possible indictment. But a victory at the polls is not an exoneration from criminal charges, and what's more, a victory against a party that is the same size as the Likud – while losing the right-wing coalition a seat compared to the last government and increasing his dependence on extremist parties – can't be considered something to write home about. If one small party turns its back on him, his government will crumble.
He is once again creating the impression of being a victim of the system, after so many years in which he served as a symbol of the establishment. When he stands at the head of his fifth government, which was put together under the shadow of a pre-indictment hearing and such serious suspicions, all he can hope for is to make it to the end of the term in peace – to postpone, to delay, to maneuver, and to finally make it to the promised land where, most likely, he will face trial.
