Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s consummate political survivor, is scrambling for options to hold on to power after hard-fought elections delivered no clear winner.

Voters on Tuesday cast their ballots in numbers not seen in decades, in a pivotal vote seen by many as a referendum on Netanyahu, who has governed Israel on-and-off for more than 19 years.

With almost all the votes counted, Netanyahu’s right-wing bloc appeared to finish slightly ahead of the camp of his rival, ex-military chief Gadi Eisenkot, but still short of a majority. Both have said they will seek to form a government.

The outcome might mean weeks of trying to cobble together coalitions. In the immediate term, a stalemate could benefit Netanyahu, who would remain caretaker prime minister.

Arab parties, which have made unprecedented gains, could play a kingmaking role in ousting the premier if the opposition agrees to work with them.

But Netanyahu, who relentlessly attacked Arab parties throughout his campaign, is now accusing them of having stolen the election and has demanded an investigation into unproven accusations of foreign funding.

President Isaac Herzog, who is tasked with tapping a candidate to form a government, has said Israel must try to avoid new elections, raising the possibility of a national unity government.

– ‘Vote Likud’ –

In the final hours of the vote, a visibly tense Netanyahu worked feverishly to boost turnout among his supporters.

“We cannot leave this battle here in the hands of the left and the Arab parties,” he told a crowd in a Likud stronghold.

“So no barbecues, don’t go to the beach — go to the polling station and vote Likud.”

Netanyahu’s security-first reputation was all but shattered by Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack, with Eisenkot channelling public anger over the failure in the run-up to the polls.

But Netanyahu pulled out all the stops on the campaign trail, touting an endorsement from Donald Trump as well as military blows dealt to Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the groups’ backer Iran.

The 77-year-old faces an international arrest warrant over alleged war crimes in Gaza, a long-running corruption trial and a spiralling multi-front conflict that has dragged on for over three years.

– Spokesman for Israel –

Born in Tel Aviv on October 21, 1949, Netanyahu inherited his ideological background from his father Benzion, a former aide to Zeev Jabotinsky, leader of the so‑called “Revisionist” strand of Zionism that advocates for a “Greater Israel”.

Netanyahu opposed, and eventually helped to bury, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process of the 1990s, which held a two-state solution as its ultimate goal.

He now promotes a vision of an Israel whose borders extend as far as Jordan, voicing support for annexing parts of the occupied West Bank and undertaking measures to promote the growth of Israeli settlements, which are illegal under international law.

As a younger man, Netanyahu served in an Israeli commando unit and fought in the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.

His early life’s defining tragedy came when his elder brother Yonatan was killed leading the Entebbe hostage-rescue mission in Uganda.

“When the news reached me that Yoni had died, I felt as if my life had ended,” Netanyahu later wrote.

Raised partly in the United States and a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he became one of Israel’s most visible spokesmen abroad, showing an ease on US television that has never left him.

Elected to parliament in 1988, he took over leadership of the right-wing Likud party in 1993.

In 1996, in the first election after the assassination of peace-negotiating Yitzhak Rabin, Netanyahu pulled off an upset victory by the tiniest of margins and at age 46 became the youngest prime minister in Israeli history.

He served as head of government from 1996 to 1999, then again from 2009 to 2021, before returning to power in late 2022 by cobbling together a coalition that includes once-shunned extremists.

– Reshaping the region –

For years, Netanyahu maintained that the foundations of Israel’s security rested on military strength, but he also gained a reputation for caution.

Adamantly opposed to a Palestinian state, Netanyahu saw Hamas rule in Gaza — bankrolled by Qatar — as a way to divide Palestinians and weaken the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority, which enjoys strong European support.

The Hamas attack exposed the failures of this setup. As the war in Gaza widened, Netanyahu began to frame the conflict as a generational struggle intended to reshape the region and uproot the influence of Iran’s clerical state.

In recent months, he has repeated the refrain that he “changed the face of the Middle East”.

His supporters credit him with responding to Israel’s darkest hour with unprecedented military resolve, and confronting Tehran directly — something none of his predecessors had done.

Critics, however, say his actions have mired the country in intractable conflicts and made it a pariah on the world stage.

The looming possibility of return to war with Iran has lent more urgency to talk of a unity government with Eisenkot, who has previously declared that Netanyahu “is unfit to remain in office”.

AFP