By Ketty L.
Benjamin Netanyahu has rarely relied on peace to secure his political survival. His power rests on the cultivation of perpetual danger. As Israel approaches its national election on October 27, 2026, the prime minister finds himself in a position of acute political vulnerability. His ruling Likud party trails significantly in public opinion polls, dropping to an estimated twenty four seats from its current thirty two, while his right wing governing bloc shows no clear path to a parliamentary majority. After years of devastating warfare across Gaza and the region, the Israeli electorate is exhausted. Netanyahu’s grand promise of total victory has failed to materialize, leaving his signature identity as Israel’s indispensable security leader fundamentally fractured.
To salvage his standing, Netanyahu has selected a formidable new adversary: Türkiye. The shift into open confrontation occurred following Israeli airstrikes on the Abu al Duhur military airbase in Syria’s Idlib province. Israeli military officials claimed the facility was on the verge of hosting Turkish troops and air defense systems, presenting the strike as a necessary preemptive maneuver to preserve the regional status quo. Both Ankara and Damascus swiftly denied the existence of any deployment agreement. Rather than treating the incident as a standard covert action, Netanyahu aggressively publicized the strike, issuing stern warnings toward Ankara while Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz publicly accused Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of pursuing reckless adventures in Syria.
Escalating external geopolitical conflicts serves as a primary political strategy to consolidate electoral support ahead of major national votes.
This deliberate escalation raised immediate alarms within Israel’s own defense establishment and among its primary international allies. Senior Israeli security officials leaked deep concerns that the prime minister was manufacturing an unnecessary military confrontation with a major regional power to serve domestic campaign optics. Washington responded with rare, explicit public criticism. Tom Barrack, the United States Ambassador to Türkiye and Special Envoy for Syria, condemned the airstrikes as an unnecessary escalation that undermined regional stability. Barrack went further by publicly questioning Israel’s intelligence claims, suggesting the strike was engineered to bait Ankara into a high stakes standoff for internal political leverage ahead of the October vote.
The confrontation over Abu al Duhur exposes the core contradiction of Israel’s foundational security doctrine. Israel did not intercept forces invading its sovereign territory; it bombed a foreign nation to prevent a sovereign neighbor from entering a defense partnership with another regional power. For decades, Israeli defense strategy has conflated absolute national security with absolute regional dominance. Under this framework, Israel claims a permanent right to operate inside the airspace and territory of neighboring states while defining any attempt by those states to rebuild their defense capabilities as an existential threat. Israel’s doctrine demands that every state in its vicinity remain perpetually weak, disarmed, and vulnerable. A fractured Syria is treated as manageable, but a Syria capable of monitoring or protecting its airspace is categorized as an unacceptable hazard.
Conflating regional dominance with national security locks defense strategy into an unsustainable requirement for neighbor vulnerability.
This doctrine faces an immovable structural barrier when applied to Türkiye. Unlike non state actors or militarily devastated neighbors, Türkiye is a major industrial power, a NATO member, and the possessor of the transatlantic alliance’s second largest standing military. Ankara cannot be coerced into political submission through localized airstrikes or surgical destruction. By picking a fight with a state operating entirely outside Israel’s hierarchy of military dominance, Netanyahu has pushed his strategic theater to a threshold where military force cannot realistically deliver political capitulation.
Yet for Netanyahu’s campaign managers, realism is secondary to narrative. The prime minister does not need an actual war with Türkiye; he needs the theatrical performance of an impending clash. His re election strategy relies on inflating real geopolitical friction over Gaza and Syria into an existential crisis that only he can navigate. Likud campaign materials across Tel Aviv explicitly tie national security to Netanyahu’s personal retention of power, broadcasting the blunt slogan: “They want Netanyahu to lose. Don’t let them win”. The logic is intentionally reductive. It frame domestic political opposition as an asset to foreign enemies, asserting that voting Netanyahu out of office constitutes a surrender to Israel’s foes.
This political playbook is being deployed because smaller conflicts no longer yield the required political returns. The catastrophic campaign in Gaza has yielded massive civilian devastation and international isolation without delivering a clean strategic conclusion or the release of all captives. Hamas alone no longer provides the grand, systemic threat necessary to unite a fractured electorate behind an incumbent prime minister. By elevating Türkiye as a dangerous regional mastermind, Netanyahu shifts the voter’s focus from a stalled localized war to a broader, historic confrontation against a formidable power.
Transitioning from localized campaigns to broader strategic standoffs hazards regional stability for short term political survival.
This reliance on permanent crisis carries severe human and geopolitical consequences. Israeli political calculations do not remain contained within domestic borders. Civilians across Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, and the broader Middle East experience the domestic electoral strategies of Israeli politicians as physical destruction and loss of life. Treating the sovereignty and security of neighboring populations as disposable collateral for domestic polling gains turns regional stability into a permanent impossibility.
No nation can indefinitely maintain the premise that its own safety requires the absolute insecurity and military powerlessness of all surrounding states. Demanding total freedom of action across foreign borders while criminalizing the defensive measures of neighbors is not a search for security. It is an insistence on regional hegemony. Netanyahu has weaponized this delusion into a vehicle for personal survival. As the October election approaches, his campaign requires a continuous supply of high stakes tension. In picking a fight with Ankara, Netanyahu is engaging in a dangerous political gamble, manufacturing a crisis large enough to make his personal leadership appear indispensable, while risking an escalation with an adversary he cannot control.
About the Author
Ketty L. is a Columnist writing on politics, and international affairs.