It’s long been clear that Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump’s Middle East mini-me, will do almost anything to keep his job as Israel’s prime minister. His resort to overtly racist, divisive tactics last week in a dispute over who will form the next government was ugly, yet unsurprising. Netanyahu’s vicious brand of hard-right identity politics has become a familiar blister on the face of Israel’s democracy.

A bigger mystery is how Netanyahu has got away with it for so long. To maintain his grip on power, “Bibi” has increasingly adopted the policies and prejudices of the extreme nationalist and religious right. His personal pact with Trump has wrecked peace prospects for Palestine. Under his aggressive direction, Israel – no longer a valiant David – more closely resembles a Goliath-like regional bully.

Netanyahu’s unprecedented indictment on Thursday on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust has intensified pressure on him to quit. With typical grandiosity, he denounced it as an “attempted coup”. When set alongside his failure to win a clear mandate in both of this year’s elections, this new humiliation would surely persuade any normal politician to stand down.

But Netanyahu is not normal. Despite his “divisive rhetoric, lavish lifestyle and entanglement in corruption scandals”, he stands for something, which cannot always be said of his opponents, Assaf Sharon, a Tel Aviv university professor, wrote recently. The principal reason why Netanyahu had become Israel’s longest-serving prime minister was the lack of a persuasive centre-left alternative in the years following the 1995 assassination of Labor’s Yitzhak Rabin, he argued.

“Israeli liberals are cowed by the right’s political thuggery, demoralised by decades of failure, and weakened by mediocre leadership. Afraid to articulate their values and terrified of challenging Netanyahu’s nationalism, many on the left have reverted to a meaningless centrism, assuming that the only way to defeat him is by offering a more civilised, non-corrupt version of his politics,” Sharon wrote.

Intimidatory “thuggery” was on show last week as Netanyahu strove to torpedo the leadership chances of his main rival, Benny Gantz. Suggestions that Gantz’s blandly centrist Blue and White party, level-pegging with Likud, might join forces with the Joint List of Israeli Arab parties produced a torrent of hateful vituperation.

Despite representing about 20% of Israel’s population, the Joint List was described by Netanyahu and his allies as a “terrorist-supporting fifth column” whose inclusion would jeopardise Israel’s security. Doing a deal with them amounted to “treason”.

Such language was blatantly racist, analyst Chemi Shalev declared. Israel’s enemies could rest easy. Boycotts and divestment campaigns were no longer necessary, because Israel’s leader was doing all the damage himself. “With Netanyahu around, there is no point besmirching the Zionist entity and no point in trying to defend it... The stench, after all, is coming from the very top,” Shalev wrote.

When Gantz subsequently conceded he was unable to form a viable coalition, he lambasted Netanyahu for racism and for his deal-breaking insistence that his far-right, pro-settlement and ultra-Orthodox allies should all be included in a compromise unity government jointly led by Likud and Blue and White.

Netanyahu was fomenting “civil war” by demonising Israeli Arabs, Gantz said. “I will not cooperate with an effort to turn the majority of the people [in]to a hostage being held by a small group of extremists... And I will not accept the delegitimising of any part of the Israeli public.”

Gantz’s dismay at the prospect of a third election in 12 months might have garnered more sympathy had he offered clear ideological and policy alternatives to Netanyahu. But the pragmatic former general is no radical and no leftist. He takes a tough line on Gaza and the occupation. Like Netanyahu, he welcomed last week’s perverse US claim that Israeli settlements in the West Bank are not illegal. The broad failure of the Israeli left to articulate and advance a distinct, progressive vision – the once-dominant Labor party, which supports a peace deal with the Palestinians, is now reduced to a handful of seats – has been ruthlessly exploited by Netanyahu and has invited ever more intrusive meddling by Trump.

The two have worked closely on a series of regressive, powerfully symbolic steps. US recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital was one result. Another was Washington’s acceptance of Israel’s annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights.

Last week’s US statement on West Bank settlements merely gave public expression to the crude cash-for-land proposals contained in Trump’s unpublished, crassly mis-named “deal of the century”. Like Netanyahu, Trump has zero interest in the two-state solution favoured by the UN and EU, preferring to create more irreversible “facts on the ground” while dangerously ignoring the Palestinians’ just claims.

The negative influence of the Trump-Netanyahu axis and their hardline agenda has steadily expanded across the region, notably in joint efforts to isolate Iran. Netanyahu’s frequent exaggeration of the Iranian threat to scare voters and bolster his security credentials has been aped by Trump.

American-approved Israeli military raids on Iranian or Iran-backed Shia militia targets in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq have become routine – but nonetheless self-endangering. Netanyahu has effectively turned Israel into a sub-contractor for wars Trump does not want to fight himself, while moving Israel closer to dictatorial, US-allied regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the UAE.

Nothing is off-limits in Bibi’s bitter fight for survival. The government crisis remains unresolved. His opponents scent blood. His Likud party is close to mutiny.

Yet in one sense, he is already history. For Israelis – and especially the Israeli left – the main problem is no longer Benjamin Netanyahu. It is how best to overcome the visceral, deeply damaging divisions that are his poisonous legacy.