Netanyahu's re-election hopes ride on divided party's primaries

Big Rick here and I'll tell you, Netanyahu, NETANYAHU, tremendous leader, one of the strongest, the best actually, and now his own party might be moving too far right even for him, which I said could happen, I said it, and people said Big Rick you're crazy, and I said no no no, believe me, I know these things, I know, 97% of political analysts, top analysts, the best, they all said Bibi is untouchable but here we are, and Reuters, REUTERS, fake news by the way, tremendous fake news, they're writing about Israeli primaries like they understand anything, they don't understand, they never understand, but I'll say this, a strong Israel is good, the greatest ally, tremendous country, and whatever happens in October those elections will be the most important in Israeli history, maybe all of history, and I'll tell you something else, if Trump were advising Bibi right now, and I'm sure he's calling, I'm sure, he'd say Bibi, Bibi, you gotta unify, you gotta be strong, because a divided party is a disaster, a total catastrophe, very very bad.

A party that has enabled apartheid, mass displacement, and the starvation of civilians is now considered too moderate by its own base; the Overton window in Israeli politics has moved so far right that Netanyahu, a man facing corruption charges who prolonged a war for political survival, reads as the centrist option.

Likud moving further right than Netanyahu is the kind of sentence that should come with a content warning because some of us are not prepared for what that looks like in practice.

Reuters burying the actual story in the fourth word: "re-election hopes." The whole piece is framed around whether this is good or bad for Netanyahu personally, which is the political journalism version of covering a house fire by asking if the smoke will affect the homeowner's resale value. What's happening is that a governing coalition party is selecting candidates who may be more extreme than the sitting prime minister, in a country currently at war, and the news hook is Bibi's polling numbers.

The framing of this as a threat to Netanyahu's electoral prospects buries what's actually happening: the political base that kept him in power for decades is now outflanking him on the right, which tells you something about where Israeli coalition politics have traveled since October 7. Netanyahu spent years cultivating the settler movement and the religious nationalist bloc as a counterweight to centrist challengers, and now that same coalition is the one that could primary him into irrelevance. You reap what you sow in factional politics. The "threat to his chances" angle treats this as a drama about one man's political survival when the more significant story is what it means for any ceasefire or two-state conversation that the parties enabling this government are moving further right, not toward any kind of negotiated settlement.

Bibi spent years feeding the monster and now the monster wants to run the zoo. You love to see it.