\u201cWhen they see Netanyahu at the United Nations,\u201d his former aide, Mitchell Barak, told Al Jazeera, \u201cthat\u2019s what they want \u2013 and it\u2019s hard for them to imagine anyone else doing that.\u201d<\/p>\n
He added: \u201cFor many in Israel, but not all, he\u2019s the only man that can truly lead Israel. He makes them proud to be Jewish.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s longest-serving prime minister.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 \u2013 a right-wing historian who saw a world fundamentally opposed to the existence of Jews \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
Since then, Netanyahu has gone through numerous iterations.<\/p>\n
In 1982, he was named deputy chief of mission at the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC. Two years later, he was appointed Israel\u2019s ambassador to the UN, before returning to Israel to join the cabinet of then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir as deputy foreign minister in 1988.<\/p>\n
In 1996, Netanyahu became Israel\u2019s 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\u2019s history.<\/p>\n
From the outset of his political career, he faced growing accusations of having deliberately engineered division to further his own political and personal ends.<\/p>\n
\u201cNetanyahu is the perfect encapsulation of Israel\u2019s political polarisation,\u201d said political analyst Nimrod Flaschenberg. Describing Netanyahu as \u201calways\u201d being \u201cin campaigning mode\u201d, he said the Israeli leader \u201cis very good at building coalitions that reflect public opinion, as well as steering that opinion in his own direction\u201d.<\/p>\n
Hardwired division<\/p>\n
Under Netanyahu\u2019s 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 \u2013 for which many still blame Netanyahu for alleged security failures<\/a> \u2013 as well as the multiple wars waged at his direction since.<\/p>\n In July 2018, Netanyahu\u2019s coalition passed the Nation-State Law, declaring the right to national self-determination \u201cunique to the Jewish people<\/a>\u201d, stripping Arabic of its status as an official language and making the development of Jewish settlements a national value. In the law\u2019s wake, settler violence in the occupied West Bank has surged, with the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA)<\/a> 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<\/a> called \u201cvirtually no accountability\u201d.<\/p>\n More immediately, Netanyahu\u2019s current coalition has seen some of Israel\u2019s most controversial figures \u2013 such as National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir<\/a>, convicted of incitement to racism and support for a \u201cterrorist\u201d group, and the explicitly pro-settlement Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich<\/a> \u2013 placed at the heart of power.<\/p>\n \u201cNetanyahu didn\u2019t create the racism and fascism in Israel, but he\u2019s helped it,\u201d said outgoing parliamentarian Aida Touma-Sliman, of the left-wing Hadash party. \u201cHe\u2019s smart. He knows exactly what he\u2019s doing when he includes people like Smotrich and Ben-Gvir in his government, and he knows the outcome of those appointments.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHe thrives in chaos,\u201d said Barak, Netanyahu\u2019s former aide from the 1990s. \u201cHe\u2019s all about the big picture, of ends justifying means.\u201d<\/p>\n Running through the prime minister\u2019s recent military campaigns have been his long-standing battles against any kind of domestic judicial restraint. Dogged by corruption cases<\/a> dating back to 2019, which could see him serve time in prison if convicted, he has been locked in a confrontation with the same legal establishment attempting to hold him to account.<\/p>\n![\"Israel's](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/reuters_69cadff6-1774903286.jpg\")
Israel\u2019s far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir celebrates after Israel\u2019s parliament passed a law making the death penalty a default sentence for Palestinians convicted in military courts of deadly attacks [File: Oren Ben Hakoon\/Reuters]<\/p>\n