On Thursday evening, Israel time, Benjamin Netanyahu is set to address the United Nations General Assembly. He could well face a large choreographed walkout by Israel’s vast array of international detractors, and won’t be remotely fazed. He’s stood at the podium at least a dozen times before, and relishes such moments.

Innumerable TV stations worldwide will screen parts or all of his address live. But most importantly for Netanyahu, barely a month before elections, all of Israel’s main TV stations will do so, and will continue to run highlights from the speech, and dissect it, through the weekend.

Netanyahu’s annual prime ministerial appearances at the UN, and the vast coverage they routinely engender, abroad and especially at home, are merely Thursday’s example of how hard it can be to unseat an incumbent leader. The nature of the role automatically places the prime minister front and center in the life of the nation, an essential presence at every national event, his every utterance potentially significant and thus newsworthy, his capacity to set the national agenda unparalleled.

On Thursday evening, Israel time, when Netanyahu will be addressing the UN, a watching world and the Israeli electorate, his main rival, Gadi Eisenkot, as far as is known at the time of writing, does not have any major events planned.

The very vulnerable incumbent

In perennially embattled Israel, prime ministerial longevity is also an immense asset. With enemies all around, it’s a particularly difficult battle to unseat a familiar leader in favor of one who has never been tried in the hottest of seats.

And Netanyahu is a uniquely familiar prime minister. He’s held the post for almost 19 years in total — by far the longest in our history — and for 16 of the past 17 and a half. For almost a generation of Israelis, the name “Benjamin Netanyahu” and the title “prime minister” have become nearly synonymous.

And yet, even Netanyahu proved beatable, losing power for 18 months in 2021-2022. And that, of course, was before October 7, 2023.

Familiarity can breed trust and dependence, and Netanyahu had largely achieved that… until his catastrophic failure to prevent the Hamas invasion and massacre. Defeating him in the wake of that failure constitutes an entirely achievable proposition.

Every poll shows anti-Netanyahu parties, notably including the two mainly Arab slates, headed for a clear Knesset majority, indicating that more than half of the electorate, with its 17% Arab component, wants him gone. That does not amount to a viable, broadly consensual, non-Netanyahu coalition, but the prime minister has never been more vulnerable.

Netanyahu failed in his prime obligation to his nation on October 7, 2023. He failed to keep Israel and its people safe.

There is growing evidence that, shortly before October 7, he ignored at least two sets of direct, specific and credible warnings that Yahya Sinwar’s Hamas was about to invade — conveyed via Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. He and his security chiefs — all of whom have long since gone home — protractedly and resolutely discounted overwhelming evidence, including Hamas’s own war plans, that a massive attack was being prepared. He and those security........

© The Times of Israel