So Benjamin Netanyahu has done it again. With the support of some of the most ultra-nationalist parties in Israeli politics, he beat (only just, but a win’s a win) the rather odd dream team of Blue and White, Meretz and Labor to retain — probably — his position as prime minister for the fifth time. This makes him the most successful electoral politician and, in a few months, the longest-serving PM in Israeli history, longer even than David Ben-Gurion, the ruthless and visionary founding father of the modern Israeli state. So is that it? Bibi the record breaker, Bibi the winner, Bibi the one who outlasted all his critics, all his rivals, including several former chiefs of staff, and won — what exactly? The late Ariel Sharon was an arrogant and often brutal soldier. He was severely censured by the Kahan Commission of Inquiry after the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and his career in politics seemed to be terminally damaged. But he served in all four of Israel’s major wars, stormed through the Sinai passes in 1967 and neutralized the over-rapid Egyptian advance in 1973 by counter-crossing the Suez Canal and encircling the Egyptian 3rd Army. Sharon’s supporters called him Arik Ha Melech — Arik the King. He held the US at bay, reoccupied the West Bank in 2001/2 and evacuated the Israeli settlements in Gaza — along with a few in the northern West Bank — in 2005 against heavy domestic opposition. Ehud Barak was a much-decorated veteran of the Israeli Special Forces. Shimon Peres was another of the state’s founding fathers, a prime advocate of the 1976 Entebbe raid, in which Netanyahu’s brother died, and the architect of Israel’s nuclear program. Yitzhak Rabin, the chief of staff in 1967, had a fearsome reputation as a security hard-liner but became one of the architects of the Oslo Accords, for which he paid with his life. Menachem Begin had been a rebellious commander of the Irgun, had eventually come to terms with Ben-Gurion, became the first follower of Vladimir Jabotinsky to become prime minister, thereby destroying the historic supremacy of the Zionist left, and signed the historic Camp David Accords with Anwar Sadat. Golda Meir had been a highly regarded labor activist, was instrumental in persuading diaspora Jews, particularly in the US, to support the fledgling state, and she was one of the signatories to the declaration of independence. Levi Eshkol, a decent, cultivated man, was prime minister during the 1967 war and had presciently foreseen the dangers involved in the acquisition by conquest of more territory. Moshe Sharett — born in the diaspora like Peres, Begin, Eshkol and Meir, and a man of moderation — had served in the Ottoman army, worked closely with Chaim Weizmann and was the first foreign minister in the most difficult days of Israel’s existence. Each of these previous prime ministers had and still has a distinct identity. But it is very difficult to say what Netanyahu stands for, apart from electoral victory. He sought to derail Oslo and accused Rabin of treachery, but still signed the Wye River Memorandum in 1998. He has populist instincts but, as finance minister, presided over a period of reform and fiscal discipline. He has made ferocious noises about Iran, but in practice has been cautious about confronting Tehran in ways that might lead to unpredictable consequences, preferring to recruit the US and other regional states into a coalition designed to contain and deter, rather than confront Iranian expansionism. He has been harsh on Abu Mazen and the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority (PA) and has made threats of removing Hamas from Gaza, while in reality seeking to manage the problems there — even to the extent of allowing Qatari funding to compensate for the severing of fiscal transfers from Ramallah. He has regularly sought to stoke the fears of Jewish Israelis of the potential voting power of Palestinians, to some effect: The community’s turnout was very low in last week’s election, exacerbated by renewed splits between the different Arab political groupings. Yet he has now said he wants to be a prime minister for all Israelis, regardless of faith, ethnicity or political affiliation. Most importantly, he has cultivated the Republican Party in the US, having apparently written off the Democrats under Barack Obama as irredeemably hostile to what he conceived of as Israeli interests. He and President Donald Trump seem to have the sort of relationship of which previous Israeli PMs could only dream. And Trump delivers: His decisions on the US Embassy and the occupied Golan were political gifts, and Jared Kushner’s “deal of the century” will doubtless fit Bibi’s bill perfectly too. He has also cultivated Vladimir Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping of China, both of whom provide models of autocracy in action, against the messiness of Europe and the US. And he has proclaimed a new era in Israeli-Arab relations on the back of an apparent weariness with the Palestinian issue in the corridors of Middle Netanyahu is a chameleon, and a paradox. He is a populist who loves the high life — if even some of the rumors about him and his wife and the accusations currently being processed through the Israeli criminal justice system are true. He is a self-proclaimed security hard-liner who proceeds with great caution; keeping Israel out of Syria, avoiding at all costs another war over Gaza, keeping both the Russians and the US onside at the same time. He is a political street fighter who can use an address to Congress to directly attack a sitting US president, yet wants to be known as a consummate statesman who preserved Israel’s freedom of international maneuver and did more for Israel’s security and standing than all its previous leaders. And perhaps that’s the point. It’s a new era in politics generally. In a world in turmoil, people don’t particularly want heroes. They want people who will reflect all the virtues and the faults that they think they have themselves. And, in that sense, Netanyahu is very Israeli, in his mixture of Madison Avenue slickness, charm and crude directness, his bellicosity and caution, his cynicism about politics and his pride in his own political achievement. But, at his core, there genuinely seems to be an irreducible belief, perhaps inherited from his father and reinforced by the memories of his brother, that he is personally responsible for Israel’s safety, security and future survival. You might not like the way he goes about his business. You might think (as I do) that, without a genuinely equitable and durable settlement of the Palestinian issue — which means a real Palestinian state, whatever the myriad failings of Palestinian politicians and the destructive behavior of Hamas and other Islamists — there can never be proper normalization with the Arab world. You might think that he has been needlessly divisive domestically and externally; above all in the US, something that might come back to haunt him if the Democrats recover their poise (admittedly unlikely at the moment). He now has a difficult task to construct a coalition. But, in the end, he has won five elections, weathered all earlier allegations of impropriety, overcome all domestic rivals, and has now seen off the most powerful political challenge for years. The next five years will be seriously troubled. He has to deal with the current legal charges against him. The aftermath of the war in Syria will be volatile and dangerous, with Iran showing no signs of backing off its imperial project in the greater Levant. The issue of Hamas has been postponed, not solved. If Netanyahu tries to deliver on his opportunist promise to start annexing West Bank settlements, it will undermine his carefully constructed Arab world strategy and only help Iran. And weakening the PA doesn’t look to me like a clever plan — after all, what exactly are the Palestinians supposed to do if neither the two-state nor the one-state solution is remotely on offer? But maybe that’s to miss the point. After all, Benny Gantz’s position on most of these issues — annexation excepted — was not that different from Netanyahu’s. That was probably a mistake: You can’t outflank Netanyahu to the right. And maybe Bibi wins elections because a plurality of Jewish Israelis — especially the 63 percent who self-define as being on the right — prefer the original to the copy, because he thinks more like they do than other politicians and takes the same cynical and suspicious view of the world. That’s democracy. It also sounds very much like Trump. And I’m not sure I’d bet against him winning the next time either, whatever the more progressive types in the New York Times, Guardian, Frankfurter Allgemeiner, Le Monde or the Washington Post may think. What a world.Eastern power.