Can King Bibi afford to wait to reclaim his throne?

Perhaps it was the jet-lag; after all, he had only returned less than a day and a half earlier from a three-week holiday in Hawaii. Perhaps it was his choice of book with which to while away the long hours of the budget debate last Thursday, alone in a special quarantine section of the Knesset gallery. But Benjamin Netanyahu looked bored and detached.

The book was the memoirs of former British Prime Minister David Cameron, but he didn’t seem particularly engrossed in it. Netanyahu is a fan of political biographies but he has found Cameron something of an enigma. Back in 2015, when, shortly after his victory in the General Election, Cameron promised he would not seek a third term, Netanyahu responded in a meeting with guests from Britain with utter surprise. Cameron had said that after ten years as prime minister, there would be need for “a fresh pair of eyes”.

Netanyahu was even more mystified two years later when Cameron resigned, on his own accord, after a majority of voters voted to leave the European Union. Why take responsibility for the people rejecting your proposal? Leaving the highest office voluntarily was a completely foreign concept to him. He probably didn’t like Cameron’s book very much.

Even now, having being forced out of power for the second time in his long career, and after surpassing David Ben-Gurion’s record to become Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, with over fifteen years in total on the job, he is still convinced that he is the only leader Israel needs. But as Netanyahu sat there alone in the gallery, down below on the Knesset floor, the talk among Likudniks was about how their leader is increasingly likely to resign his seat following the High Holidays, after the budget passes it next two readings, as now seems all but inevitable.

He hasn’t given up on his hopes to make another comeback but, three months in, the new government is proving remarkably resilient, despite its precarious majority and unwieldy makeup of eight extremely diverse parties. And once it secures its new budget, it will be almost impossible to dislodge it until the end of 2022. Netanyahu’s promises to do so very soon are looking increasingly hollow.

It’s not just the way the new government has been winning critical votes. It’s also the absence of a popular movement on the streets demanding his return. The “Bibistim” are very active on social media, tearing into Naftali Bennett and his ministers from behind their keyboards. But no more than a few dozen, always the same people, turn up to the angry protests outside Bennett’s home in Raanana. They’re noisy, and increasingly extreme — last week they tried to hijack the funeral of an Israeli soldier killed on the Gaza border and turn it into an anti-Bennett demonstration. But even Netanyahu’s rivals have been surprised at how few in numbers they are. Many Israelis still support him, but they’ve got used to his departure.

The beginning of the Jewish new year this week on Monday night was the first Rosh Hashanah in thirteen years for Israel without Netanyahu as its leader. It may be just a bit premature to speak of this as being the post-Netanyahu era. He still looms large over Israeli politics. But his influence, at least for now, is on the wane.

Without a prospect of returning soon to power, the role of leader of the opposition in the Knesset has little appeal to Netanyahu. The fact that he chose to spend an extended summer holiday as far away as possible from Israel, on the private island of tech billionaire Larry Ellison in Hawaii (though his spokesperson claims he paid for all his family’s travel costs), was proof to his party members of how he’s pining for a lifestyle he can’t lead as long as he’s a Knesset member.

If he resigns from the Knesset, he can pick up a string of lucrative directorships and consultancies and make well-paid speeches. As a private citizen, no-one but the tax authorities can enquire who pays him and for what. He will no longer be prohibited from raising funds to pay for his mounting legal bills. But leaving the Knesset also means that he can only become prime minister again after another election is held. Only a Knesset member can form a new government and Israel has no by-elections or any other mechanism which would allow him into parliament. He could still stay on as Likud leader without being an MK. None of his potential challengers within Likud can currently hope to beat him in a leadership election.

When he lost the prime minister’s job for the first time, back in 1999, Netanyahu installed Ariel Sharon as an interim leader. Sharon was 71 and no-one took the ageing and discredited general serious as a potential prime minister. Netanyahu was certain Sharon would be nothing more than a caretaker he could sweep aside whenever he decided to make his comeback. He was wrong and it took him a decade to come back. Now Netanyahu is also 71 and he’s not going to make the same mistake again. He intends to remain Likud’s king, even if as a king in exile or the king over the water.

But can he serve as an effective leader of the opposition without being present daily in the Knesset? He can keep up his constant barrage of criticism of the government through social media, from wherever he is in the world. His team ensured he did that while on holiday in Hawaii. But it is unlikely to have the same effect as speeches in the plenum. And without those, the media’s focus on him will be increasingly devoted to his corruption case which is scheduled to resume at the end of September.

There are at least half a dozen senior Likudniks who openly talk of running for the party leadership. But they always add that they will do so only “after Netanyahu”. They all know that at present they cannot hope to overcome him in a party-wide primary. But if he leaves the Knesset, even while retaining the leadership, some of them will reach the conclusion that the day after Netanyahu has finally arrived.

Anyone who spoke with Tzipi Hotovely, Israel’s ambassador to the UK, in the first weeks of the new government was left with no doubt that she would do everything in her power to remain in the elegant building just off High Street Kensington which was originally built to house William Makepeace Thackeray. She insisted that despite being a political appointee of former PM Netanyahu and a staunch member of the hard-line ideological wing of Likud, she would have no problems representing the new government’s line as a devoted public servant.

She had her three year contract on her side and was adamant that after having moved her family of a husband and three young girls only last summer and at the height of the pandemic to London, she wasn’t going to return early. Also in her favour are the generally positive assessments of her performance so far as ambassador within the Foreign Ministry, which didn’t give any formal grounds for her early recall.

Foreign Minister Yair Lapid was nevertheless determined to replace her with a veteran member of his Yesh Atid party and expected her to do what one of his team said was “the proper thing and take the hint she was no longer wanted there”. He could have gone all the way, making it clear that she no longer had the confidence of the government and directed the professional diplomats at the embassy to ignore her and report directly to Jerusalem. But this isn’t the image Mr Lapid wants to project and as Ms Hotovely made it clear she wouldn’t leave quietly, he backed down. Not without the entire saga being leaked to the press.

The outcome is a miserable one for all sides. The foreign minister has to make do with a representative in London he does not trust and Ms Hotovely, while now being assured she will be allowed to serve out her term, will have been incurably undermined by the reports that she does not have the full confidence of the government she is supposed to represent.

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