Benjamin Netanyahu has always been a divisive figure. Many older Israelis have never forgotten or forgiven his role in the incitement that preceded – and for some, precipitated – the November 1995 assassination of the then prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin. I have seen some walk out of rooms rather than listen to him speak.
If Rabin’s assassination was a bad moment for Israel, 7 October 2023 was another one, this time on a horrific scale. And Netanyahu was there again. He has held high office more or less continually in the past 28 years, as prime minister, at the foreign or finance ministries, or simply as the unsinkable chair of the Likud party, founded in 1973 by Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon to counter the post-independence hegemony of the mainly Ashkenazi Israeli left.
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