As ceasefire halts fighting, Iran war becomes a battlefield for votes

Another military campaign halts with questionable success, as Netanyahu may find his standing less improved than he’d hoped. With elections looming, his rivals won’t wait to take advantage

US President Donald Trump’s announcement of a two-week ceasefire between the United States and a battered but still defiant Islamic Republic has calmed the Iranian battlefield.

But it has had the opposite effect in the Israeli political arena, with party leaders heading into an election season jockeying to parlay the public’s perception of the war into points for themselves or against their opponents.

In a televised address Wednesday evening, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted that the 39-day war was a success that had “undermined the foundations” of the Iranian regime.

In his own televised speech, Opposition Leader Yair Lapid called the war a “strategic debacle” and a “diplomatic disaster on a scale I don’t recall ever seeing.”

Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, considered Netanyahu’s most potent rival in the upcoming vote, was quick to warn that the prime minister’s handling of the war left Israel vulnerable to a “vengeful Iran,” which will be even more determined to go nuclear. And Yair Golan, who leads The Democrats, accused the prime minister of orchestrating “one of the gravest strategic failures Israel has known.”

Netanyahu “came out and said he had a great victory and achieved everything,” said pollster Mitchell Barak of Keevoon Research Strategy & Communications. “And all of the opposition people said it was a failure. Election season is starting now.”

And the first TV polls, published a day after the ceasefire, showed a dip in support for Netanyahu and his coalition allies, with majority public opposition to the halt in fighting. (Israeli opinion polls have often proved unreliable, but do give a sense of public sentiment.)

When the war was getting underway in early March, many believed Netanyahu saw it as a way to boost his standing among the electorate, with Israelis set to go to the ballot box in October, though the vote may still be earlier. The election will be the first time Israelis will get to vote on their national leaders since the October 7, 2023, attack, and Netanyahu was thought to be keen to scrub the security debacle and ensuing diplomatic isolation over the war in Gaza from his record.

Netanyahu was hoping that a “narrative of a win over Iran would boost the PM’s reelection chances and shift the narrative away from October 7,” one coalition insider argued at the time.

The Prime Minister, the source said at the time, said that “regime change [in Iran] plus a Saudi [normalization] deal could be enough to be that game changer.”

Indeed, the war remained largely popular in Israel, despite daily missile attacks that disrupted life and killed nearly two dozen. Throughout the fighting, Netanyahu’s political opponents held their fire to a significant degree.

With the ceasefire, though, Netanyahu now faces the prospect of heavy criticism from his political opponents, the return of large anti-government demonstrations largely silenced by the war, and the unenviable task of selling a war that appeared to fall short of any of its goals as a win.

While admitting that Israel still “has more goals to complete” in Iran, Netanyahu insisted this week that Jerusalem and Washington had together “dramatically changed the face of the Middle East in Israel’s favor” and that any minimization of such accomplishments was attributable to either ignorance or “ulterior motives.”

While Netanyahu managed to seriously degrade Iran’s capabilities, its armed forces maintained their ability to fire consistently at Israel and Arab states and to close the Strait of Hormuz through the credibility of their threats.

Though weakened, all of Iran’s proxies still exist and are still armed — and in the case of Hezbollah, still fighting, highlighting the fact that the military overestimated the damage done to Hezbollah’s capabilities during the 2024 ground offensive in Lebanon.

The claims of Israel’s achievements in Iran were reminiscent of Netanyahu’s proclamations following the 12-day war in June.

Israel removed “two existential threats — the threat of destruction via nuclear weapons and the threat of destruction via 20,000 ballistic missiles,” he said at the time, hailing “a historic victory” that would “abide for generations.”

Yet less than eight months later, Israel was back fighting Iran again, with Iran’s ballistic missiles forcing most of the population to get re-acquainted with bomb shelters and air raid warnings.

While that round of fighting managed to build some political lift for Netanyahu, it largely came at the expense of his natural partners on the right. At the start of the current war, polls showed him gaining again, though again largely to his allies’ detriment.

Complicating matters further is the fact that the latest war may have undermined whatever points he won with the public in June. In December, a poll by the Jewish People Policy Institute found that 28 percent of respondents believed the June war had accomplished less than previously thought.

When the same question was posed in March, 42% had a more negative view of the June war’s accomplishments. And while 24% had said in December that they were more sanguine on what the war achieved, once Israel went back to fighting in March, only 13% said they now thought the June war had been more successful than their earlier understanding.

As of this writing, the ceasefire is not yet two days old, and it’s much too early to fully grasp how the public views its end, assuming fighting does not resume.

How Israelis feel about Netanyahu’s decision to go to battle against Iran again may also be shaped by the result of upcoming US-Iranian negotiations in Islamabad, which could leave Israel in the lurch by giving the Iranians concessions opposed by Jerusalem.

The ongoing fighting in the north against Hezbollah, and how that war eventually draws to a close, will also play into voters’ views of the premier, with pitfalls aplenty.

And Barak noted that the premier’s almost-singular reliance on Trump for support for his military offensives could end up pushing Netanyahu into a politically complicated corner.

“What is going to happen when Donald Trump says, Bibi, you’ve done everything you wanted in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Iran twice, we’ve achieved great victory. And now I’m going to bring peace to the Middle East, and there’s going to be a Palestinian state like you agreed,” Barak asked.

The opposition, at least, is not waiting to see how things pan out, going on the attack against Netanyahu and attempting to turn the war from a political asset into a liability.

Their focus on the Likud leader, though, has highlighted the degree to which the political conversation and the electoral campaign remain a referendum on Netanyahu, with the opposition divided and unable to rally around a single challenger.

In effect, Netanyahu “is running unopposed,” Barak said. “He is running as the be-all and end-all leader. The one who is responsible for security, for the safety of Israel and the Jewish people.”

Lazar Berman contributed to this report.