Powered by Chaos: How Netanyahu Stays in Control
The ceasefire was always fragile—but its collapse came with uncanny convenience. As accusations volleyed between Israel and Hamas, and airstrikes once again lit up the Gaza skyline, one question loomed large: why was Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu so ready to reignite the war?
The answer lies not in security briefings or battlefield calculations, but in the far more personal terrain of political survival.
For Netanyahu, remaining in office is no longer just a matter of legacy or ideology, it’s a matter of freedom. With an ongoing corruption trial threatening his future and a fractious coalition holding the keys to his power, the Prime Minister has every incentive to prolong crisis, escalate conflict, and cast himself—once again—as Israel’s indispensable protector.
But this isn’t a sudden pivot. It’s the culmination of a decades-long strategy: using external threats to sideline internal scrutiny, manipulating chaos to consolidate authority, and aligning with the most extreme elements of Israeli politics to stay one step ahead of accountability.
This time, though, the stakes are higher—and the cracks are starting to show.
What follows is not just an analysis of Netanyahu’s tactics, but a look at the deeper machinery behind them: how a man on trial for corruption became dependent on a permanent state of conflict to delay justice, suppress dissent, and keep the spotlight fixed not on his courtroom, but on the battlefield.
The Long Game: How Netanyahu Built His Playbook
To understand Netanyahu’s maneuvers today, one has to go back—not just to his most recent term, but to the roots of his political career. Because Netanyahu is not improvising. He’s drawing from a playbook he’s been refining for decades—one that leverages conflict, rewards hardline positioning, and weaponizes fear for political longevity. Like all politicians, he uses the tools that worked before. And what gets rewarded, gets repeated.
His early career was steeped in security. As a member of the IDF’s special forces unit, Sayeret Matkal, and later as head of the Jonathan Institute, a think tank named after his brother and focused on terrorism studies, Netanyahu cultivated an image as a security expert and anti-terrorism authority. He knows what escalates violence with asymmetric groups like Hamas. More importantly, he knows what sustains it.
It’s a relationship of convenience. In many ways, Netanyahu and Hamas have functioned in a kind of grim symbiosis. He first rose to power in 1996 after Hamas suicide bombings upended public confidence in Shimon Peres who was the favorite for the elections at the time, allowing Netanyahu—then running on a hardline Likud platform—to ride the promise of security into the Prime Minister’s Office.
From his earliest terms to the months just before the October 7th attack, Netanyahu repeatedly undercut the Palestinian Authority while enabling Hamas to maintain its grip on Gaza. Through alleged facilitation of Qatari funding (accusations he vehemently denies ), he allowed the group to stay financially afloat. Drawing from the colonial handbook of divide and rule, he saw that an entrenched Hamas in Gaza, separate from and at odds with the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank reduced the viability of establishing any coherent Palestinian state; so long as the two leaderships could not come to terms or agree on the way forward, any talk of Palestinian statehood including Gaza and the West Bank remained moot. As an added bonus, a Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip ensured perpetual tension, and a constant threat meant continued relevance for Netanyahu.
At the onset of his first term, he wasted no time slowing down the Oslo peace process, drawing praise from the right and criticism from moderates. But ironically, he wasn’t hardline enough for the more extreme elements of the Knesset, who accused him of conceding too much to the Palestinians. It was a lesson he would never forget: his political power in Israel is maintained through the right, not the center, and if he wanted to hold onto that power, he had to keep the right satisfied.
The pattern repeated.
Throughout Netanyahu first term, Israel faced regular attacks from Hamas which—much like the October 7th assault decades later—served to derail peace efforts and detract from the credibility of the Palestinian Authority, thereby securing a role in any future negotiations. Even when he wasn’t in power, his messaging remained consistent. As opposition leader in 2008, he opposed ceasefires with Hamas, claiming they would only allow the group to regroup and rearm.
When he returned to power in 2009, he offered rhetorical concessions toward the establishment of the Palestinian state to placate Washington, but imposed unimplementable conditions to ensure that any real progress toward this goal would grind to a halt. He had learned from his earlier premiership: don’t actually concede anything if you want to stay in power. Concessions, even limited or minor ones, lose him support from the extreme right that bolsters his political coalitions.
As elections approached in 2015, he once again declared his opposition to a Palestinian state, only to later walk it back when it was politically opportune to do so, and shift again when engaging with his hard line supporters. His political compass was rarely fixed on ideology, rather it became centered on the voting blocs that secured his power. That meant aligning, more and more, with the ultra right, while managing his relationship with Washington through rhetorical concessions that rarely if ever materialized on the ground.
Even when Israel made historic diplomatic strides with the U.S. brokered 2020 Abraham Accords, Netanyahu’s underlying approach remained consistent. While the normalization of relations Arab states was framed as a bold new chapter in regional diplomacy, Netanyahu was reluctant to tie these agreements to any meaningful progress on the Palestinian front.
The Accords delivered an important diplomatic victory for Netanyahu on the international front, without detracting too much from his tactical deployment of conflict to bolster his political support at home. The Gaza Strip, with an entrenched and empowered Hamas, remained a pressure valve he could open or close at will. Normalization could proceed with other Arab states, conveying a mantle of legitimacy upon Netanyahu as a deal maker who appeared to be working toward regional integration, while at the same time leaving him the leeway to perpetuate conflicts as a useful tool for domestic mobilization and a lever to rally his base whenever his hold on power slipped.
The formula had crystallized: make rhetorical concessions to peace, then provoke, escalate, then pose as the only figure capable of managing the ensuing chaos.
When he briefly lost power in 2021–2022, Netanyahu returned with a more hardline coalition than ever before. He began his sixth term in December 2022 by immediately launching a judicial overhaul designed to weaken Israel’s checks and balances, an effort that sparked mass protests across the country because of the perceived risks to the separation of powers and undermining the governance system in Israel. He also fast-tracked settlement approvals in the West Bank and Gaza and empowered his right-wing finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich who harbors aspirations of annexing Gaza and the West Bank, to accelerate the process even more. Netanyahu knew full well that these decisions would elicits reactions from the Palestinians, and banked on that.
Through his actions, weakening the Palestinian Authority, changing the facts on the ground, expanding settlements, and provoking reactions, Netanyahu was laying the groundwork not for peace, but for a controlled cycle of escalation that he believed he could ride to continued political dominance.
And then came the day the cycle broke loose. Despite receiving warnings, a matter that is under investigation in Israel, Netanyahu had either underestimated or ignored the scale of what was coming. When Hamas launched its attack on October 7th, the scale and impact of the operation was beyond anything that it had done previously. In its wake, however, Netanyahu saw opportunity.
Facing waves of protests lasting more than 40 weeks, he seized the chance to divert attention from his government’s overreach and his own scandals and various court cases. Leaning back on his tried and tested strategies to maintain political power, he took control of the narrative.
Cornered: The Legal Noose Tightens
For most world leaders, losing power is a political setback. For Netanyahu, it could mean prison.
Since 2017, Netanyahu has been under investigation in a series of corruption cases including bribery, fraud, and breach of trust—not symbolic slaps on the wrist, but serious accusations that carry the potential for years behind bars. In 2019, he became the first Israeli Prime Minister in history to be indicted while still in office.
His trial is ongoing. And it looms over everything.
Each new hearing chips away at the myth of invincibility he’s spent a lifetime constructing. In courtroom footage, the image he tried to construct of Israel’s steely protector often appears visibly rattled, his composure cracking under the weight of the evidence and public scrutiny. The stakes are no longer about legacy or ideology. They are existential.
This is what makes Netanyahu’s current position so precarious and so dangerous. He is no longer just governing to win. He is governing to survive. His continued occupancy of the Prime Minister’s Office offers more than influence; it offers insulation. As long as he remains in power, he can delay proceedings, deflect pressure, and leverage his position to erode the institutions meant to hold him accountable.
But even that isn’t enough. Delay alone cannot protect him—not with the legal machinery grinding forward and public opinion turning sharply against him. What he needs is not just time, but distraction—something powerful enough to keep the nation’s focus on war, not on his courtroom battles.
And that’s exactly what prolonged chaos delivers.
By maintaining a state of emergency, Netanyahu ensures that questions of governance, accountability, and justice are pushed to the background. The longer the conflict drags on, the more he can frame calls for his resignation or prosecution as distractions from national security, dangerous indulgences in a time of war.
In this light, the war isn’t just a geopolitical conflict. It’s a personal firewall. The smoke rising over Gaza is also rising between Netanyahu and the gavel.
The Dual Twist: Power as Prison Break
Netanyahu’s predicament isn’t just legal, and it isn’t just political, it’s an intertwining of both. On one side, he needs to remain in office to avoid the very real possibility of conviction and prison time. On the other, he needs the support of Israel’s increasingly extreme right to keep that office. The result? A leader held hostage by the very forces he once thought he could control.
The political bargain is stark: in exchange for shielding him from prosecution through continued political support, and to keep their loyalty, Netanyahu must constantly validate their worldview. But the more he caters to them, the more he alienates the center, the international community, and even significant portions of the Israeli public who are as we speak demonstrating against his policies. And so the only way for him to hold it all together is to extend the crisis until the general elections in 2026.
That’s the dual twist: he needs chaos to stay in power, and power to survive chaos.
The cost of returning to normalcy is too high. If the war were to end, if hostilities were to subside, attention would inevitably swing back to Netanyahu’s failures, both the intelligence lapses that enabled October 7th and the corruption charges hanging over him, as well as the accusations about propping up Hamas (under the divide and conquer strategy) leveled at him . His political instincts, honed over decades, now push him toward the only outcome that keeps the clock frozen: permanent emergency.
This is why his familiar campaign playbook has returned with such force. Just as he first did in 1996, Netanyahu has once again cast himself as the indispensable protector of Israel, accusing his opponents of weakness, dismissing peace advocates as naïve, and using every flare-up to reinforce the idea that only he can hold the line.
But defending Israel requires a threat to defend from. And if one does not naturally present itself, his political machine knows how to provoke it. Whether it’s through unchecked settlement expansion, the greenlighting of extremist rhetoric from coalition partners and minsters, or the indirect bolstering of Hamas over the years, Netanyahu has shown again and again that conflict is not a risk to be avoided, it’s a resource to be managed.
And the deeper the crisis goes, the more it becomes clear thar this is no longer about strategy. It’s about survival. And for Netanyahu, survival means ensuring the threat never fully disappears.
Fires on All Fronts: Conflict as Political Insurance
Netanyahu is not a man who puts all his bullets in one basket. Even as Gaza remains the epicenter of Israel’s military campaign, his government has expanded its operations across the region, ensuring that if one theater cools, another can quickly reignite.
Over the past several months, Israel has escalated its activities in the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria, each offering its own kindling for conflict. The result is an intensification of friction that raises the likelihood of violent flashpoints that can then be used to justify further crackdowns.
In Lebanon, tit-for-tat exchanges with Hezbollah have continued, with Israeli rhetoric ramping up alongside cross-border fire, even as discussions on the demarcation of borders take place. And in Syria, the government has gone further still by targeting military installations, expanding the IDF presence in Syria, and even making veiled threats against the new Syrian leadership. Defense Minister Israel Katz has declared that Israel can see Damascus from the top of Mount Hermon, a statement crafted to provoke reactions from Syria’s new president .
None of these moves are coincidental. They are part of a larger strategy: keep every border tense, every theater open, and every threat plausible. That way, if the situation in Gaza becomes untenable and he is compelled to deescalate whether due to international pressure, shifting American interests, or regional diplomatic efforts, there’s always another front to pivot to, another crisis to elevate, another justification to remain at the helm and attempt to galvanize support for his policies.
In this way, Netanyahu has effectively constructed a safety net of conflict, a sprawling web of instability that he can activate, escalate, or suppress depending on his political needs. It is not chaos as a side effect. It is chaos as policy designed to keep him exactly where he is, in the office of Prime Minister.
Bolstering Legitimacy: Allies Abroad, Silence at Home
If chaos is Netanyahu’s shield, legitimacy is his armor—and he’s been careful to polish it on both the international stage and the domestic front.
The clearest pillar of that effort is his renewed alliance with President Trump. In February, Netanyahu became the first foreign leader to be received at the White House, a calculated show of favor that sent a message that he was able to secure the support of Israel’s most important ally at a critical juncture, enhancing his ability to secure its defense.
He leveraged Trump’s proposal for the displacement of Palestinians from the Gaza strip to renew the vigorous support of his coalition, framing the proposal in terms of policy alignment between his government and the Trump administration. He has since sought to maintain control of the narrative as the Trump administration engaged with Arab allies in the region regarding the Egyptian plan for Gaza’s reconstruction. He then vehemently opposed the involvement of the U.S. Special Envoy for Hostages, Adam Boehler, in negotiations for the release of the hostages because of his deviation from Netanyahu’s narrative on Hamas, and the risk that any success Boehler would have would highlight Netanyahu’s own failures to secure their release.
The embrace of President Trump, whose popularity in Israel often eclipses Netanyahu’s own, allowed him to borrow from that glow. The relation thawed after a long-standing distance between them triggered by Trump’s annoyance at Netanyahu congratulating Biden on his presidential win in 2020, handing Netanyahu an important political backer at a critical time for his political standing in and out of Israel.
As Israel’s international standing wanes as it faces growing criticism for its actions in Gaza, whether in the International Court of Justice or in the International Criminal Court that issued warrants for Netanyahu and former minister of defense Yoav Gallant, or even among traditional allies in Europe, Netanyahu pivoted to engagement with alternative sources of international legitimacy.
For the upcoming Global Antisemitism Conference scheduled to take place in Jerusalem on March 26, the decision to invite a number of far-right European leaders—some with histories of antisemitic rhetoric and affiliations with ultranationalist movements highlights his eagerness to regain some of his legitimacy on the international stage.
The move has led to significant backlash. Several prominent figures have withdrawn their participation in protest, including French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, Germany's antisemitism commissioner Felix Klein, and the Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, all of whom cited the involvement of controversial participants in the conference as their reason.
But legitimacy abroad is only half the battle. The real war is at home.
As opposition within Israel has grown louder, spurred by his handling of the October 7th attack, the prolonged war in Gaza, and the deepening corruption trials, Netanyahu has turned inward with equal force. Rather than soften his stance he has countered by not only strongly opposing political rivals but also uprooting elements of Israel’s own security establishment.
One of the most striking moves was ousting Ronen Bar, the head of the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency. Bar had reportedly voiced discomfort with Netanyahu’s tactics and questioned the internal intelligence failures preceding the October 7th assault, and was investigating Netanyahu’s aides involvement with Qatar. Removing him served two purposes: silencing a critic and sending a message to other officials who might break ranks, or at least that was the aim. The move triggered widespread opposition within Israel and remains a point of political contention that may end up doing more damage to Netanyahu’s plans than he foresaw. The protests that rocked the country then have reignited, with tens of thousands marching in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem to denounce what they see as Israel’s drift toward authoritarianism.
Cracks in the Fortress: Is It Still Working?
For a time, it did work. After the October 7th attack, the country rallied around Netanyahu. The war gave him a buffer. The chaos distracted from the courtroom. And for a brief moment, his grip on power seemed secure.
But that moment is fading.
What once read as strategic mastery now looks increasingly like unraveling control. The longer the war drags on, the more glaring it becomes that Netanyahu’s stated objectives—eliminating Hamas, restoring Israeli security, securing hostages—are not being achieved or even truly addressed. On the contrary, the war has deepened international isolation, strained ties even with allies, and fueled the very instability he claims to be stamping out.
At home, the façade is crumbling. Former and current security officials—once cautious—have become openly critical. Protest movements are back in the streets. Opposition leader Yair Lapid is gaining ground, and even participated in the most recent protests alongside hostage families and former security officials, chipping away at Netanyahu’s coalition and presenting himself as a voice of competence and restraint. Recent polling shows that a majority of Israelis now hold Netanyahu personally responsible for the failures that led to October 7th, and for the prolonged, costly, and often aimless war that followed.
Even Netanyahu himself seems to be showing strain. In recent Knesset sessions, he has lashed out from the podium, rattled and defensive. During court proceedings, cracks have appeared in his carefully managed image of composure. His political instincts remain sharp, but the margin for error is narrowing—and the forces he once used to prop himself up are becoming harder to control, even as they shore up support for him with Ben Gvir’s return to the coalition.
Netanyahu’s entire strategy now rests on a fragile timeline: hold the line until the 2026 elections, secure another term, and then—perhaps—reposition, reframe, recover. But that strategy assumes he makes it that far. That the public’s anger can be redirected. That the far-right remains loyal. That the courts can be delayed. That another front doesn’t collapse.
He has positioned himself at the center of everything—conflict, diplomacy, internal security, judicial survival. But the very system he built to protect himself is looking more and more like a house of cards ready to collapse.
In the end, Netanyahu may well prove once again that he is Israel’s most cunning political survivor. But the game he is playing—this dance of chaos and control—is more fragile than ever. And the longer it goes on, the more it reveals: this is not a strategy of strength. It is a strategy of desperation.