00:00The man has run Israel longer than anyone.
00:02He's wanted in The Hague, is on trial at home,
00:06and he's decided he'd like another term as prime minister, please.
00:10Wait, who?
00:11Benjamin Netanyahu.
00:13In 2015, he went to Washington to argue against the U.S.'s nuclear deal with Iran
00:19in front of Congress without Barack Obama's White House on board.
00:23You see, most foreign leaders come to Washington to ask for things, not give notes.
00:28This was the diplomatic version of saying,
00:31I object at a stranger's wedding.
00:33A decade later, he skipped the notes and just went to war with Iran.
00:37Netanyahu also got four Arab countries to form ties with Israel.
00:41Now, for decades, the price for forming relationships was a Palestinian state.
00:46But Netanyahu got the deal without paying the price for it.
00:50Israel controls what goes into Gaza, and for years,
00:53they've allowed Qatar to send millions of dollars a month.
00:56Netanyahu framed it as preventing a humanitarian collapse.
01:00Later, he said he did it to keep Palestinians divided.
01:04Then, October 7th happened.
01:05Hamas killed about 1,200 in Israel and took 251 hostages.
01:11The war that followed killed tens of thousands of Palestinians,
01:15according to Gaza's health ministry.
01:16The International Criminal Court issued a warrant for Netanyahu's arrest over alleged war crimes.
01:22He denies them, and Israel rejects the court's jurisdiction.
01:26To build his current government, Netanyahu put Itamar Ben-Gavir in charge of the police,
01:31the man the Israeli army had decided was too extreme to draft.
01:35While Netanyahu was on trial for corruption charges,
01:38his government moved to limit the power of the courts,
01:41and hundreds of thousands of Israelis disagreed and protested for months.
01:46His fans point to the scoreboard.
01:48Peace with four Arab states, the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah killed,
01:52Iran's supreme leader killed,
01:53and since 2009, he's lost power exactly once and was back in 18 months.
02:00Now Israelis vote.
02:01But Israelis vote for parties, not a prime minister.
02:04To govern, someone has to sit together 61 seats.
02:07It usually takes weeks of deal-making,
02:09and until that happens, the sitting prime minister keeps the job.
02:12In 2019, nobody could form a coalition,
02:15and Israel voted three times in under a year.
02:19He was the prime minister the whole time.
02:20It's a bit like getting fired,
02:22then staying on to interview your replacement.
02:25Indefinitely.
02:26That's Benjamin Netanyahu.
02:28Wait, who?
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