The Art of the Political Victim: Netanyahu’s Campaign Playbook

Power has a curious way of transforming political veterans into perpetual underdogs. Benjamin Netanyahu has occupied Israel’s prime minister’s office for 18 years across three distinct terms, reshaping the country’s political spectrum to the right. Yet, as he prepares for his 13th parliamentary election, the nation's longest-serving leader is once again wrapping himself in the mantle of the persecuted outsider.

Faced with severe scrutiny over the security failures of October 7, 2023, and the heavy toll of the war in Gaza, the official response from Netanyahu’s camp has rarely centered on institutional introspection. Instead, the strategy prioritizes deflection. When the daily newspaper Haaretz reported that the United Arab Emirates had provided advance warning of the Hamas assault, Netanyahu’s team immediately threatened legal action, alleging foreign interference in domestic elections. Confronted with his own handling of the initial hours of the October 7 attack, Netanyahu claimed that military and security officials chose not to wake him—an omission he insisted prevented him from containing the assault. Sara Netanyahu took the rhetoric a step further during an appearance on Channel 14, implying that opposition leader Yair Golan possessed advance knowledge of the raid simply because he drove to the attack site immediately.

This approach relies on a familiar populist formula, observed in political figures globally, including Donald Trump in the United States, Narendra Modi in India, and Hungary’s Viktor Orban, whose conservative government has similarly mastered the art of navigating state authority alongside anti-establishment rhetoric. Netanyahu casts every challenge from the judiciary, the press, or political rivals as the work of an unelected deep state. Political psychologist Neta Oren notes that blaming failures on entrenched elites allows Netanyahu to maintain strong support among his base, even if it risks making him appear hindered by the very government he leads.

The message strikes a deliberate chord with Likud’s core demographic. As Ben Gurion University professor Dani Filc points out, many Mizrahi supporters hold a collective memory of exclusion by Israel’s historical Ashkenazi establishment. Netanyahu taps into these social fissures, linking his personal legal battles to broader narratives of collective identity and historical grievance. Tel Aviv University professor Daniel Bar-Tal emphasizes that adopting the status of a victim allows a political figure to disengage from standard accountability and distance himself from officials he himself appointed.

The campaign has reached notably symbolic heights. A recent Likud advertisement portrayed Netanyahu as a bullied schoolchild picked on by classmates carrying anti-Bibi placards. At the same time, Netanyahu has engaged in a public rivalry with National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir over the historical mantle of Irgun, the pre-state militia dissolved after 1948. Both politicians have conducted separate events highlighting the historic oppression of the group.

For a leader who has shaped Israeli statecraft for nearly two decades, presenting himself as a target of the system rather than its architect requires considerable political agility. As election day approaches, the question is whether voters still buy the narrative of the prime minister as a helpless victim of his own state.

Written by Andreas Hofer andreas.hofer@alpineweekly.com