Netanyahu's gifts are not to be denied, and the clearest evidence of them is that he has remained Israel's top leader longer than any of his predecessors among the founders and the historic figures.
Those gifts have been concentrated on managing his own leadership within Israeli politics, drawing on the vacuums that opened and widened with the passing of the great men, who left behind no leaders qualified to govern after them. Those once called the "generation of princes" - the children of Likud's founding generation - faded away, unable to withstand Netanyahu's talents and capacities. When a vacuum takes hold after the great men are gone, opportunities open for someone gifted in power, politics, and oratory, as Netanyahu is. That is what happened.
The great men who established the state and built its institutions did not achieve what they achieved merely by virtue of their personal qualifications, but because decisive international powers founded their state. What set apart the Zionist founders was that they knew how to make use of favorable international factors, at a time when those who confronted them did not match their competence.
The generation of the great men, among them Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, and Menachem Begin, and one may add Moshe Dayan, their military icon, recorded real achievements in their own names: founding the state, winning its wars, building and developing its capacities. At the core of their achievements lies the important beginnings of normalization, accomplished by Begin, who thereby delivered a prelude to the wish of the founder Ben-Gurion, whose greatest hope was to see Israel as an ordinary country among the states of the Middle East.
Netanyahu inherited everything these men did. If his era is judged by what he has actually accomplished, there is nothing in the record that qualifies him for the description of a historic leader. In the few months that may prove to be his last in power, Netanyahu has found no achievements to convince Israelis. Everything he has actually brought about falls on the negative side of the ledger. These are samples of what he has done.
In his era, Israel carried out a war of extermination that placed the state in the dock of accusation and condemnation and placed him personally under pursuit as a war criminal.
In his era, one-man rule took root in Israel, after it had prided itself on a civilized, modern, democratic governance that it counted the only such governance in the desert of the Middle East.
In his era, he led a counter-revolution against the judiciary in order to escape punishment, even to the point of abolishing its authority and hollowing out its powers.
In his era, Israel sustained the greatest human and economic losses in wars on several fronts, not one of which it has been able to settle - and will not be able to.
In his era, he was charged with the gravest dereliction ever attributed to an Israeli prime minister, over what happened on October 7, 2023, and with blocking the formation of a state commission of inquiry into it, out of his certainty that he would be condemned.
In his era, he courted the Haredim and bent the state and all its institutions to their interests - they who abstain from military service at a time when the army needs the manpower it lacks because of his multi-front wars.
In his era, American popular and institutional support for Israel declined, after the decisions and policies of the great power, particularly on Middle Eastern affairs, had been hostage to it - formulated and taken in Tel Aviv before Washington.
In his era, production fell, reverse emigration grew, and war spending reached its highest rates since the state was born - and the bleeding continues, with no one knowing how or when it will stop.
All of the above has been said in assessments of Netanyahu's era by Israeli Zionist writers, scholars, and politicians, allowing an officer once outside Israeli political life to beat him in the polls: Gadi Eisenkot.
The most important thing Netanyahu has done - and the thing the Israeli public has begun to notice, save for the right-wing forces invested in him ideologically and by interest - is that he has misled Israel with impossible agendas: mastery of the Middle East, while he cannot control the smallest patch of ground among the many theaters of his wars; and the marketing of his nostalgia for a Greater Israel, and his pursuit of it, which would require seizing a hundred times the country's present area from neighboring states.
Finally, had Netanyahu's achievements matched what Israel actually needs - lasting security, firm stability, and membership in the club of ordinary states in the Middle East, as Ben-Gurion dreamed - he would have been recorded in memory and in the books as a historic leader equal to the state's founders, perhaps their superior. But instead, and this is the sum of his era, he is tilting at windmills to escape the guillotine of the judiciary and win a new term. And if he wins it, by virtue of the vacuums spreading through the state, then Israel's losses because of him will be the gravest in its history.
