Benjamin Netanyahu had barely reached the United Nations podium when a sea of delegates jumped from their seats and began walking out in protest at the Israeli prime minister’s speech at the UN General Assembly in late September. Undeterred, a grinning Netanyahu, who is seeking re-election later this month while being wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes in Gaza, shot back: “If there are any other moral cowards who haven’t left the hall, please do so now.” For his supporters watching in Israel, it was precisely what they wanted to hear. He makes them proud to be Jewish.” On October 27, Israel must choose between Netanyahu and an assorted number of rivals who are unified by little other than their absolute opposition to Israel’s longest-serving prime minister.
In the eyes of both his supporters and his opponents, as well as much of the world, Netanyahu has become the face of modern Israel. Born in Tel Aviv in 1949 to Benzion Netanyahu and Tzila Segal, he spent his early years between Israel and the United States, the few constants in his life being the profoundly pessimistic views of his father – a right-wing historian who saw a world fundamentally opposed to the existence of Jews – and the military legacy of his brother, Yonatan, who was killed in 1976 while leading a raid to rescue hijacked Israeli hostages in Entebbe, Uganda. Since then, Netanyahu has gone through numerous iterations.
In 1982, he was named deputy chief of mission at the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC. Two years later, he was appointed Israel’s ambassador to the UN, before returning to Israel to join the cabinet of then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir as deputy foreign minister in 1988. In 1996, Netanyahu became Israel’s youngest prime minister, leading the first in a series of coalitions that also saw him serving a record 12-year tenure from 2009 to 2021.
He returned to power for a sixth term the next year, leading the most far-right government in Israel’s history. From the outset of his political career, he faced growing accusations of having deliberately engineered division to further his own political and personal ends. Describing Netanyahu as “always” being “in campaigning mode”, he said the Israeli leader “is very good at building coalitions that reflect public opinion, as well as steering that opinion in his own direction”.
Under Netanyahu’s leadership, Israel has continued to lurch to the right, rejecting the path towards a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict set in motion by his predecessor, the assassinated Yitzhak Rabin. At the same time, vast swaths of the Israeli electorate have also grown accustomed to the violent expansion of illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank and reconciled themselves to the genocide in Gaza following the Hamas-led attack on October 7, 2023 – for which many still blame Netanyahu for alleged security failures – as well as the multiple wars waged at his direction since. In July 2018, Netanyahu’s coalition passed the Nation-State Law, declaring the right to national self-determination “unique to the Jewish people”, stripping Arabic of its status as an official language and making the development of Jewish settlements a national value.
In the law’s wake, settler violence in the occupied West Bank has surged, with the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) recording 1,291 attacks in 2023 and 1,835 in 2025. At least 1,071 Palestinians, including 233 children, have been killed in the West Bank by Israeli forces or settlers since October 7, 2023, according to OCHA, amid what a senior UN official called “virtually no accountability”. More immediately, Netanyahu’s current coalition has seen some of Israel’s most controversial figures – such as National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, convicted of incitement to racism and support for a “terrorist” group, and the explicitly pro-settlement Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich – placed at the heart of power.
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