Sociopathology, Israel’s Netanyahu Part II

“Netanyahu spends at least as much of his time on media as he spends on security matters, including on matters an outsider would consider nonsense.” - Nir Hefetz

“It’s a political witch hunt. It has one purpose: To prevent the firing of the head of the Shin Bet … There is nothing. … A political investigation, a political witch hunt, that’s what this is.” - Benjamin Netanyahu

“A leader who portrays himself as one of the persecuted, the target of an incessant witch-hunt by the so-called deep state. A liberal media intent on revisiting an election gone badly. And a left-wing political machine supposedly out to get him.” - Natan Sachs

From June 2021 to November 2022, Netanyahu's seventeen months in opposition were a furnace of ego and paranoia rather than a retreat. His trials by 2021 devoured at the myth he had long fostered of himself as Israel's indispensable saviour, after he was indicted in 2019 on charges of corruption, bribery, fraud, and breach of trust.

Deprived of authority, he calcified his hatred. He concealed himself in grievance rhetoric language, portraying the prosecutions as a "witch hunt" orchestrated by a deep state, a paranoid script intended to conceal the cracks in his authority. Is Benjamin Netanyahu a narcissist who uses humiliation as a weapon when he is cornered? To