Both the Likud and its various opponents have decided to make the upcoming election all about the current prime minister, with one left-wing politician adopting “just not Bibi” as her unofficial slogan. But there is still much popular support for the prime minister and, despite conventional wisdom in the U.S., this has little to do with dislike of the American president, as Haviv Rettig Gur explains:
Foreign observers routinely misunderstand Netanyahu’s popularity in the Israeli electorate. In 2009, when U.S. President Barack Obama pressured Netanyahu on settlement construction, eventually extracting from him a ten-month settlement freeze, Obama’s formerly sky-high popularity among Israelis plummeted. In the years since, many American officials, Obama included, interpreted this decline as a sign of Netanyahu’s popularity: when the two leaders bickered, Israelis rallied around their own.
But Netanyahu’s approval ratings didn’t soar when Obama’s crashed. Israelis wrote off America’s leader on the basis of his own failings, as they saw them. His tiffs with Netanyahu were secondary to the perception among many Israelis that Obama seemed to be shortsightedly expecting them, after the second intifada, the second Lebanon war, and a fresh war in Gaza, to trust once again in their neighbors’ peaceful intentions. . . .
[A] poll over the weekend found that just 36 percent of Israelis view Netanyahu as the most fit candidate for the job of prime minister among those running. Yet these numbers mark little change from the past. Netanyahu has won elections not because of his own popularity, but because of his opponents’ unpopularity.
Read more on Times of Israel: http://www.timesofisrael.com/will-netanyahu-face-his-own-six-year-itch/