Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been enjoying a "dramatic but quite consistent recovery" in the polls in past months, after the failures of October 7 sent his popularity plummeting to unprecedented lows, according to public opinion expert and Haaretz columnist Dr. Dahlia Scheindlin . On this week's Haaretz Podcast, Scheindlin analyzes what may be Netanyahu's slow but steady political comeback despite the fact that the war has continued while a deal to return the country's remaining hostages still has not actualized .
She says recent escalations with Iran, particularly the daring assassination of Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, which Israel has not claimed responsibility for, have restored some of the public's faith in his leadership. "When escalation happens, and Netanyahu manages it in a way that Israelis ultimately feel like they managed to both strike a blow and not be existentially destroyed, that gives them the old sense of the 'rally round the flag effect' which you would normally expect to see in wartime among most countries," she tells host Allison Kaplan Sommer. Scheindlin also discusses the government's troubling "assault" on democracy , and how, contrary to public perception, the Gaza war is accelerating the process by allowing it to happen "under the radar.
" "Those determined to weaken [democratic institutions] know that they need to get as much as they can done under the fog of war, and hopefully the citizens won't notice," she says. "The government is hoping that citizens will be too busy worrying about how to get to the nearest shelter and having a stockpile of water and cell phone batteries" to worry about "luxuries like the question of democratic governance." Also on the podcast, Haaretz cyber and disinformation reporter Omer Benjakob reviews the "dangerous" breaches of the Israeli military's cybersecurity and how the same Iranian military units devoted to hacking in order to harm Israel are now setting their sights on the U.
S. presidential elections . With an "endless stream" of Iranian hacks of sensitive information from its top-secret bases and tracking of soldiers through their smartwatches, the country's most dangerous enemy is collecting and publishing dossiers, which Benjakob describes as a "very dangerous cyber nightmare" that should be feared and fought against as vigorously as missiles, rockets and drones.
It is already clear that during the U.S. election campaign, Benjakob says, Iran is doing its best to "foment tensions" around what has already proved to be a dividing issue and the Israel-Hamas conflict "is being amplified at a level that is unprecedented.
" In U.S. intelligence agencies, "there's already a recognition that the news cycles will spin out of control and there will be weird crazy surprises coming from foreign actors.
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