Benjamin Netanyahu has served longer as prime minister than anyone in Israel’s history. Longevity, however, is not statesmanship.

A statesman leads his or her people toward a vision, a unifying message of hope, with the courage to spend political capital on a moral clarity that reaches well beyond the politics of the moment. Few in Israel’s short life as a modern state have earned the title, and some arrived at it from controversial beginnings. Menachem Begin traded Sinai for peace. Yitzhak Rabin took Arafat’s hand. Even Ariel Sharon, in his final years in office, broke with his own party to leave Gaza. Each rose above the political fray and will be remembered as a statesman.

But not Bibi Netanyahu.

Netanyahu’s career since the mid-1990s is a study in survival above all else and at any cost.

When Naftali Bennett assembled an unprecedented coalition, spanning right to left and including an Arab party for the first time, Netanyahu set out to break it. With the help of two useful idiots, Idit Silman and Nir Orbach, Bennett’s government fell within a year. It was a masterful maneuver, and a revealing one: the skill of a tactician, not a statesman. Statesmen spend political capital. Netanyahu hoards it.

Nearly three years after the October 7 massacre, the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, and with Israel still at war, Netanyahu remains prime minister. He........

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