Binyamin Netanyahu’s plan to win Israeli—and global—hearts and minds

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Binyamin Netanyahu will be leading the Likud Party in a general election for the 12th time this year. He is already Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, having spent a total of over 18 years in office.

If he wins, he could become the longest-serving leader of any democracy since the second world war. The election date has yet to be set, but speaking to The Economist in a filmed interview for “The Insider" on January 8th in Jerusalem, Israel’s prime minister was very much in campaign mode. One focus is his quest for another term.

“As long as I believe that I can secure Israel’s future, to which I’ve devoted my life, both as a soldier and as a politician, as a statesman, then I’ll do so," he says. Yet in most polls his coalition of nationalist and religious parties is well short of a majority. Mr Netanyahu is also determined to restore his country’s international standing.

Israel has emerged from the two years of war in Gaza with a gravely tarnished global image: not just among its habitual critics but also among many of its former supporters in the West, shocked by the destruction of much of Gaza and the deaths of over 70,000 Palestinians. “I’d like to do everything I can to fight the propaganda war waged against us," he says. “Basically, we’ve been using cavalry against f-35s, because they’ve flooded the social networks with the fake bots and many other things." One early move, he says, could be for Israel to give up the subsidies from the United States that it uses to buy American arms.