With the Likud party having won an impressive 35 Knesset seats in Tuesday’s elections, it seems likely that Benjamin Netanyahu will be asked to form the next Israeli government, giving him a fifth term as prime minister. To Shmuel Rosner, the reasons for his continued success are straightforward:

[Netanyahu] seems to have succeeded again this time for the same reason he has dominated Israeli politics for most of the past 25 years: because when it comes to Israel’s national security, he is a leader with strategy and vision. And that is what many voters want.

In the mid-1990s, during his first term as prime minister, Netanyahu rejected the assumptions underlying the peace process with the Palestinians. At the time this was considered daringly right wing. Today, it is considered common sense in Israel, including by Netanyahu’s political rivals. Likewise, Netanyahu was one of the first politicians to recognize Iran as the main threat to Israel’s survival, and fought fiercely in international forums to get the world’s attention to this problem. Today, this view is also widely appreciated across the Israeli political spectrum.

The list goes on: in 2005, he warned that withdrawing Israeli troops from Gaza would end in disaster—and it did. He successfully resisted eight years of the Obama administration’s pressure to offer concessions to the Palestinians. He quickly forged an alliance with President Trump that has already proved to be of great benefit to Israel. . . .

Has Netanyahu ever been wrong when it comes to security? The truth is, many Israelis will find it hard to think of an example. And this goes not just for voters for the Likud party, or the right-wing parties that are expected to join Likud in the next government, but even for Blue-and-White, which largely echoed Netanyahu’s positions on important foreign-policy and national-security questions.

Yesterday, the Iranian foreign minister flew to Geneva to meet with European diplomats. President Trump, meanwhile, indicated that cease-fire negotiations might soon begin with Iran, which would presumably involve Tehran agreeing to make concessions regarding its nuclear program, while Washington pressures Israel to halt its military activities. According to Israeli media, Iran already began putting out feelers to the U.S. earlier this week. Aviram Bellaishe considers the purpose of these overtures:

The regime’s request to return to negotiations stems from the principle of deception and delay that has guided it for decades. Iran wants to extricate itself from a situation of total destruction of its nuclear facilities. It understands that to save the nuclear program, it must stop at a point that would allow it to return to it in the shortest possible time. So long as the negotiation process leads to halting strikes on its military capabilities and preventing the destruction of the nuclear program, and enables the transfer of enriched uranium to a safe location, it can simultaneously create the two tracks in which it specializes—a false facade of negotiations alongside a hidden nuclear race.