The military victories under Netanyahu's leadership are seemingly not staunching the Israeli right’s continued collapse in the polls as the war grinds on in its 635th day

MARC ISRAEL SELLEM/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stands amid debris outside the Soroka Hospital in the southern city of Beersheba, after it was hit by a missile fired from Iran on June 19, 2025.
It might be hard to remember now, with all that has happened in recent weeks, but the Knesset seemed very close to calling an early election a day and a half before Israel commenced its airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs last month.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu received a post-Iran victory bump, and is once again leading in the polls – but not by much. A poll published on Tuesday showed his Likud party leading a potential party led by former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett by only two seats, and tied with Bennett for leading candidate for prime minister. Another pollster showed a similar margin during the Iran operation, but had the two parties tied after the ceasefire. Parties in the current coalition made up less than half of the Knesset in every poll. In a poll from the Israel Democracy Institute published on Wednesday, only 46% of Jewish Israelis said they trust Netanyahu.
A common accusation heard by Netanyahu’s political opponents at home and abroad is that he is prolonging the war in Gaza to stay in office, because ending the war before his far-right coalition partners deem Hamas fully defeated would likely see the collapse of his government. But the victories under his leadership are seemingly not staunching the Israeli right’s continued collapse in the polls as the war grinds on in its 635th day.
Though Israelis are impressed by their intelligence agencies’ feats and pilots’ daring and skill that significantly degraded Hezbollah and then Iran, they clearly remember who was in charge during the Hamas massacres on Oct. 7, 2023. Fifty hostages remain in Gaza; 13 soldiers have been killed there in the past three weeks. Inside Israel, thousands have been displaced due to Iranian strikes — joining the thousands more who were left without homes after the Oct. 7 attacks.
An Israeli comedian’s video last week asking why there isn’t a victory parade after “winning” in Iran went viral; she answered that Israel is in a Babushka doll of a war within a war within a war. “We need to end something,” she said.
Netanyahu may consider the political advantages of “ending something” as he heads to Washington next week while President Donald Trump is pushing for a broad deal that would encompass a Gaza ceasefire and the release of hostages, the administration of Gaza by moderate Sunni states, normalization between Israel and Syria and perhaps other countries, plus working to ensure Iran doesn’t rebuild its nuclear program.
Hamas tends to spoil the best-laid plans of American negotiators, but Trump has been hinting that things are moving in a positive direction in the past few days.
If Netanyahu returns to Israel with a Gaza ceasefire and the hostages returned, an expanded Abraham Accords and a way to keep Israel’s achievement in Iran intact, then he may get a more significant electoral bump. In that scenario, one option for him could be to ride that wave and call a snap election, rather than wait until the official October 2026 date for the vote.
Or, Netanyahu could see this as his legacy-clinching move, a sign that his work is done. In 2021, the prime minister said that he wants his legacy to be that he was the “protector of Israel, because I devoted much of my adult life to preventing Iran from having a nuclear weapon.”
That doesn’t seem likely in light of Netanyahu’s behavior over the years. After he lost the 1999 election, Netanyahu returned to publicly commenting on politics as a “concerned citizen” the following year and by 2002 was foreign minister. When he lost the election in 2021, he remained as opposition leader and successfully peeled off members of the Bennett coalition, contributing to its demise.
But Trump’s recent Truth Social posts tying together a deal and Netanyahu’s corruption trial are instructive here. Trump seemed to be lamenting that the trials are time-consuming when Netanyahu’s focus should be elsewhere. But there are constant rumors of a plea deal or a pardon of some sort, which could also pave the way for a dignified exit from the political stage, saying he fulfilled the promise of most of his political life, to stop Iran from going nuclear.