v On Tuesday night, Benjamin Netanyahu was in his element.
Taking off from Ben Gurion Airport for a conference on Iran, the Prime Minister was ebullient, telling the media about how he and the rest of the world were going to get down to business in Warsaw.
But Netanyahu said one more thing about Iran. He acknowledged that, a day earlier, Israel had attacked an Iranian target across the border in the Golan. It was this acknowledgement, the last in a series of departures from the official Israeli policy of opacity on attacks in Syria, that caused senior defence officials to despair once again.
In recent weeks, some have raised the possibility of Mr Netanyahu, who is now also Defence Minister, mixing political and electoral considerations in to his decision-making.
That is somewhat unfair to Mr Netanyahu. He has been cautious and risk-averse on these matters for years and there is no sign of him changing tack. And Israel’s security establishment is well-equipped to make the public aware, if it were to receive politically motivated orders.
The issue is not with the operations themselves, but Mr Netanyahu’s sudden openness about acknowledging them. It is becoming increasingly difficult to claim that has no connection with the impending election.
There have always been two Netanyahus: the cautious, yet confident statesman and the much more impulsive, sometimes brilliant, but often panicked local politician. As the April 9 election date draws closer, we are seeing more of the second. While in the polls, Likud is still the largest party and the coalition of right-wing and religious parties still holds a small majority, he is acutely aware that it would take only a few percentage points of electoral shift to Benny Gantz’s new Israel Resilience Party for Likud to lose both its primacy — and the coalition.
When Israel Resilience officially launched less than two months ago, Mr Netanyahu feigned bemusement, saying dismissively that “how the left divides its votes among itself is none of my business.”
In recent days, he has not even pretended to be cool. Likud has launched a series of attack videos, trying to brand Mr Gantz as “weak left”, supported by the Arabs. They even accused the former IDF Chief of Staff of having left a soldier to die of his wounds in Nablus 18 years ago. Playing “the Arabs are voting in droves” card was something Mr Netanyahu did in the last campaign but only on election day itself. Throwing everything at Mr Gantz now, eight weeks before the election, is a sign of panic. His chief worry is that, when the attorney-general announces his intention to indict him for corruption in a few days or weeks, enough Likudniks may look elsewhere and find Mr Gantz an attractive alternative.
Both sides know this election could be won by the leader who manages to claim credibility on security. Israel Resilience has accused Mr Netanyahu of having “evicted Jews by force” by supporting the Gaza Disengagement in 2005 and paying off Hamas in Gaza with Qatari money. The fight is on for the support of “soft right” voters who will decide the election.