Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party held on to 30 of its 31 seats in the government after last week’s close election in Israel. The Zionist Union, Netanyahu’s main rival, garnered only 24 seats, and the Joint List came in third, with 14 seats. The victory could extend Likud’s mandate into 2019 and make Netanyahu Israel’s longest-serving prime minister. His brazen last-minute maneuvers to energize his right-wing base have garnered a lot of media attention. In a controversial speech before a joint meeting of Congress on March 2, Netanyahu attempted to circumvent Israeli campaign laws to trumpet Iran’s supposed nuclear threat. In the days before the polls, he clarified his position on Palestine, promising there will not be a Palestinian state as long as he remains in power. On Election Day, he resorted to race-baiting pleas, urging Jews go to the polls to prevent Arabs from having a meaningful voice in the elections. But none of this should come as a surprise. Netanyahu built his entire political career on portraying Iran and Palestine as existential threats to the Jewish people. Likud’s performance at the polls and the opposition’s likely inability to form a government shows that a plurality of Israeli electorate has bought into years of Netanyahu’s gospel of xenophobia and confrontation.

Transforming Likud

Likud was founded as a secular centrist party in 1973. It won the first premiership in 1977 and subsequently formed a coalition government, unseating the Labor Party for the first time since Israel’s establishment. In 1979, Likud’s founder and first prime minister, Menachem Begin, signed the landmark Camp David Accords, which called for the establishment of a Palestinian state. The party shifted to the right after Begin’s resignation from politics in 1983. But Likud maintained its prominence through the ’80’s by forming a national unity government. Netanyahu sought to consolidate power in his party and for his party through fearmongering after Likud’s 1992 electoral loss. His portrayal of the existential threats that surround Israel overruled all domestic concerns. He maintained that the enormous security challenges demanded a show of strength, requiring Israelis to stand united and rendering dissent close to treason. It was in 1992 that he began insisting that Iran is “three to five years” away from obtaining a nuclear weapon. He called for an international coalition, led by the United States, to intervene and halt Iran’s nuclear ambitions. He failed to provoke regime change in Iran, but by 1995 the Israel lobby persuaded Washington to declare that "Iran is a threat to its neighbors, is developing weapons of mass destruction, sponsors international terrorism and opposes the Arab-Israeli peace process" — largely on the basis of unverified intelligence provided by Israel. Palestine was another major component of Netanyahu’s politics of fear. He accused Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of compromising Israeli security and sovereignty by negotiating with the Palestinians during the Oslo Accord in 1993. Netanyahu and his party were so effective at stoking fear among Israelis that they helped engineer Rabin’s demise. Right-wing Zionist extremists assassinated him in 1995. Rabin’s assassin was reportedly propelled to action out of a conviction that the Oslo Accord represented an existential threat to Israel — repeating Netanyahu’s propaganda nearly verbatim. Despite the widespread belief that his irresponsible rhetoric contributed to Rabin’s untimely death, Netanyahu narrowly won the 1996 election, Israel’s first direct election for the premier post.

Bibi’s re-election demonstrates that his tactics have polarized the Israeli public, highlighting widespread frustration with his potent formula of fear and diversion from real issues.