What We Can Learn from Benjamin Netanyahu and Where It Becomes Dangerous
Benjamin Netanyahu is not an accident of history, nor a deviation from democratic politics. He is what political power looks like when it is exercised for a long time under permanent pressure. To understand him is not to excuse him. It is to understand the conditions under which a system tolerates, and eventually prefers, a certain kind of leader.
Netanyahu’s central achievement is not popularity. It is indispensability. He positioned himself not as a visionary or reformer, but as a stabiliser in a hostile environment. His message is not “I will improve your life,” but “Without me, things will get worse.”
This lowers expectations and raises tolerance. Ethical failure becomes background noise. Corruption becomes survivable. The decisive question is no longer whether he is fit to govern, but whether removing him feels more dangerous than keeping him.
This is effective politics. It is also corrosive. A society that ties its sense of safety to one individual is no longer governing itself. It is outsourcing continuity.
Netanyahu never tried to unify Israeli society. He learned to operate inside its fractures. Secular against religious. Centre against periphery. Courts against “the people.” These tensions are not resolved. They are maintained.
The result is structural paralysis. Opposition exists in numbers, not in coherence. Coalitions become transactional rather than principled. Loyalty flows upward, not outward.
This is not the collapse of democracy. It is democracy after consensus has already dissolved.
It would be a mistake to read all of this as historical fate.
Netanyahu did not merely inherit a hollowed-out democratic shell and learn to survive inside it. He and his political allies actively widened the cracks. The erosion of trust in legal institutions was not only a byproduct of polarisation, but a deliberate strategy, especially once the justice system became a personal threat. Laws were reshaped to secure continuity of power. Media ecosystems were cultivated to delegitimise rival centres of authority. Emergency was not only managed. It was produced.
Late democracy may create the conditions for Caesarism, but it does not absolve agency. Structures decay, but they are also pushed.
This matters because inevitability is comforting. It suggests no one is responsible. Netanyahu’s longevity rests not only on institutional exhaustion, but on concrete decisions that accelerated it.
Once legal institutions are framed as partisan actors, legality itself loses authority. Supporters stop asking whether the charges are true and ask instead whether the accusers are legitimate. At that point, guilt becomes irrelevant. Power is judged only by alignment.
The rule of law does not die with a coup. It erodes when belief in its neutrality is exhausted.
Many Israelis do not admire Netanyahu. They recognise him. His defensiveness, suspicion, and moral flexibility under pressure feel familiar. He does not present himself as virtuous. He presents himself as realistic.
In a society shaped by permanent threat, realism displaces ethics. A leader who mirrors adaptive instincts becomes tolerable even when disliked. Moral criticism then feels abstract, even foreign.
Representation mutates into reflection. The leader no longer points upward. He reflects sideways.
A purely technical reading of power misses something essential.
Netanyahu’s politics are not only about survival mechanics. They are anchored in substantive political projects: the expansion of settlements, the systematic weakening of the two-state framework, and the cultivation of a permanent external and internal threat environment. These are not side effects of late democracy. They are ideological commitments.
The atmosphere of permanent danger did not emerge spontaneously. It was reinforced by policies that made reconciliation structurally impossible and conflict politically useful. Division was not only managed. It was instrumentalised.
What makes Netanyahu instructive is therefore not just his timing, but the convergence of exhaustion and intent.
This is not early democracy, where ideals are contested. It is not mid-phase democracy, where institutions still command belief. It is late democracy, where every argument has already been made, every principle invoked, every mechanism instrumentalised.
Politics no longer offers meaning. It offers management.
Oswald Spengler described this moment with uncomfortable clarity. When democratic forms persist after democratic conviction has drained away, power detaches from ideals and becomes technical. Politics turns from persuasion to administration of fear, loyalty, and survival.
Netanyahu does not challenge democracy. He operates inside its emptied form.
Spengler’s Caesar is not necessarily a dictator. He emerges when procedure remains but belief is gone. He governs not by legitimacy, but by necessity. Not by ideals, but by control of the situation.
Netanyahu has not abolished elections. He has outlived their meaning.
He plays democracy as an endgame: fewer pieces, no illusions, all tactics. His power feels both legal and illegitimate because legality remains while legitimacy has thinned out.
Everything described above works. That is precisely why it is dangerous.
A politics permanently organised around emergency cannot return to normality. Fear must be sustained. Institutions must remain weak. Renewal must be postponed. The leader’s indispensability depends on the absence of an exit.
At this point, adaptation hardens into identity. Survival logic becomes permanent governance. Moral compromise stops being exceptional and becomes routine.
Spengler warned that Caesarism does not destroy civilisation outright. It freezes it.
The system survives. It no longer regenerates.
Netanyahu shows that political effectiveness and moral viability are separate axes. A leader can be rational, adaptive, and destructive at the same time.
The danger is not misunderstanding this model. The danger is adopting it wholesale, mistaking late-stage survival tactics for a sustainable future.
A society that learns only this lesson will endure for a while.
It will not recover easily.