Dr. Alon Ben-Meir

For nearly three decades, Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu has treated the state as an instrument of personal power rather than a public trust. No external enemy—not Iran, not Hezbollah, not Hamas—has done more to hollow out Israel from within than a leader who repeatedly sacrificed the country’s long-term interests to preserve his own rule.

This is a grave charge—but the record sustains it. Netanyahu did not merely misjudge events or pursue failed policies in good faith. He systematically advanced a governing strategy designed to block any political horizon with the Palestinians, deepen national dependency on fear, and render himself indispensable as the sole guardian of Israeli security. In doing so, he left Israel weaker, more isolated, internally fractured, and far less secure.

From the outset, Netanyahu understood that a genuine peace process would threaten the politics on which he built his career. The Oslo Accords, whatever their flaws, opened a path—imperfect but real—toward a negotiated settlement between Israelis and Palestinians. Netanyahu rose to prominence in part by discrediting that path and mobilizing opposition to Palestinian statehood.

Over time, this ceased to be a matter of skepticism and became an organizing principle of state policy: no Palestinian state, no credible negotiations, no transfer of real political sovereignty, and no end to a status quo in which Israel could continue to dominate Palestinian territory while stifling any prospect for a permanent solution.

His government’s support for settlement expansion was strategic. Every new outpost, every expansion of existing settlements, every effort to normalize permanent Israeli control over the West Bank served the same purpose: to foreclose the territorial basis of a two-state solution. Negotiations were never meant to succeed because success would require the very concession Netanyahu was determined to prevent—the recognition that Palestinians have a right to self-determination.

Among the most destructive elements of Netanyahu’s legacy was his deliberate exploitation of the division between Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. This was not simply a policy failure in retrospect; it was an acknowledged strategy. In 2019, Netanyahu defended the transfer of Qatari funds to Gaza as part of a broader effort to keep Hamas and the Palestinian Authority separate, and said that whoever opposed a Palestinian state should support such transfers because maintaining that division helped prevent its establishment.

Netanyahu repeatedly advanced the false narrative of an existential Palestinian threat, embedding permanent fear within Israeli society. His policies—marked by harsh treatment and dehumanization—deepened resentment and ensured that successive Palestinian generations would resist Israel by any means necessary. In doing so, he knowingly fostered enduring defiance and a cycle of continuing violent hostilities.

For the same reason, Netanyahu refuses to release Marwan Barghouti, who has been in prison for more than two decades. Barghouti is the only Palestinian leader capable of uniting factions across the political spectrum and galvanizing broad support for a viable Israeli–Palestinian peace settlement.

Even more troubling, Netanyahu and his government now openly invoke the vision of Greater Israel.” This would profoundly destabilize the region as it would entail permanent control over the West Bank, Gaza, and potentially parts of Lebanon and Syria—crossing a critical regional red line, a recipe for inevitable disastrous regional developments in the years to come.

Netanyahu’s logic is deeply cynical. Rather than pursuing a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace, he has favored a divided, adversarial Palestinian polity. Fragmentation and resistance, in his view, undermine diplomacy and conveniently justify his preference to avoid meaningful negotiations. Encouraged by the Abraham Accords, he believed that the Arab states would come around and normalize relations with Israel, even without reaching a peace agreement with the Palestinians.

That strategy collapsed in the most horrific way on October 7, 2023. Although Hamas’s savage attack can never be mitigated or excused, Israeli leaders must be judged not only by what they condemn but by what they enable, ignore, or misread. Netanyahu treated Hamas as a manageable instrument and believed Palestinian fragmentation served Israel’s interests. Elevating that political calculus over strategic foresight helped create the conditions for disaster. Netanyahu’s claim to be the ultimate custodian of Israeli security did not survive what was the deadliest attack on Jews in a single day since the Holocaust.

The catastrophe in Gaza further revealed the moral bankruptcy of his leadership. Israel had every right to defend itself after October 7 and dismantle Hamas’s military capabilities. But under Netanyahu, the war became a war of revenge and retribution—identified by many as genocidal—with collective punishment, mass civilian suffering, and open-ended devastation.

The damage to Israel’s international standing has been profound. Given Netanyahu’s extremism, Israel’s isolation in Europe is at a high never seen before. The loss of support by a majority of the American public has reached an unprecedented nadir.  A country that long claimed to be both democratic and bound by law, now finds its reputation destroyed by images of ruin, displacement, and civilian death, as well as by the growing perception that its war aims are inseparable from territorial ambition and obliteration of the Palestinian national identity.

International criticism of Israel today is not simply the product of old prejudice or reflexive hostility, though both exist. It is also a reaction to the conduct of a government whose actions have made Israel appear indifferent to Palestinian life and openly dismissive of a just political settlement.

That reputational collapse has strategic consequences. Alliances fray when trust is eroded. Diaspora Jews, especially younger generations, are increasingly pressured to defend policies they find indefensible. Antisemitism, already a persistent scourge, is inflamed further when Israel’s conduct under Netanyahu is taken—wrongly but predictably—as a measure of Jewish moral identity everywhere. In that sense, Netanyahu has not only endangered Israel; he has burdened Jewish communities worldwide with the consequences of his recklessness.

Nor has Netanyahu’s leadership strengthened Israel internally. After seventeen nearly uninterrupted years in power, he has left behind a public exhausted by permanent emergency, polarization, and the absence of any path out of wars he has lost. Israel was created to provide security, dignity, and sovereign agency, yet many Israelis today feel less secure. The state remains militarily formidable, but strength without strategy and power without legitimacy cannot produce lasting safety.

The demographic signals are troubling. According to the Taub Center, net migration turned negative in 2024 and remained so in 2025, with the gap expected to reach 37,000; the same report estimated population growth in 2026 would fall to about 0.9 percent, less than half the pre-COVID decade average. Emigration among Israeli Jews has risen over the past three years—warning signs of anxiety, fatigue, and eroding confidence.

Economic strain reinforces that anxiety. The Bank of Israel cut its 2026 growth outlook amid heightened uncertainty tied to the war with Iran, while noting 2.9 percent growth in 2025 despite prolonged conflict. The underlying reality is a society paying the price of Netanyahu’s wars, investor caution, labor disruption, and a government that has normalized crisis as a means of rule.

Netanyahu has not only degraded Israel’s domestic political horizon but also co-opted the opposition into supporting his wars. In times of conflict with Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran, criticism of his corruption and manipulation faded, as both rivals and the public deferred to security imperatives, blunting meaningful political accountability.

Removing Netanyahu is necessary, but not enough. Israel will remain trapped until its leadership tells the public an unavoidable truth: there is no military substitute for a just political resolution with the Palestinians, and no durable Israeli security that can be built on Palestinian dispossession.

History will judge Netanyahu harshly. To cling to power, he shattered Israel’s moral legitimacy, diminished its global standing, and fractured its internal cohesion—betraying the very ideals upon which the state was founded.

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Dr. Alon Ben-Meir is the President of the Institute for Humanitarian Conflict Resolution.