Israel’s next election campaign is well under way, with political defections, fractious coalition-building and naked appeals to ethnic exclusion marking its opening salvoes as a crowded field of challengers queues up to try Benjamin Netanyahu for the security catastrophe of October 7, 2023 and the wars that followed.

The vote, constitutionally set for this October, is shaping up as a referendum on the prime minister’s central claim to power: that only he can keep Israel safe.

But after two and a half years of grinding warfare across Gaza, Lebanon and Iran, that claim has worn thin. The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) are overstretched, Iranian missiles have repeatedly struck the country and much of its north near the Lebanese border is now largely uninhabitable.

Not only that, but the regime in Tehran survives – despite Netanyahu’s best efforts – with what analysts describe as a greater motivation than ever to acquire a nuclear weapon.

“Israel has never been less secure,” Israeli-American geopolitical analyst Shaiel Ben-Ephraim told This Week in Asia. “In a country obsessed with security, this is what matters.”

Nearly two-thirds of Israelis believe Netanyahu should not stand for re-election, recent opinion polls show – a damning verdict driven not only by the intelligence failure of October 7 but by the perception that he has deliberately prolonged the wars to stave off legal accountability, according to Middle East researcher Annelle Sheline.