Bennett unveils national security platform as Netanyahu turns to attack-style campaign messaging

Yes, it's a tale of a speech and a billboard…and so a bit of a distortion. In a months-long election campaign, candidates will both give earnest policy speeches and put out emotive messages through highway billboards.

But we can still learn much from the contrast between the speech given today by leading opposition figure Naftali Bennett and the highway billboards up this week from Benjamin Netanyahu's ruling Likud Party. Reason met with emotion, and breadth met with sharpness.

At a B'Yachad party conference earlier today, Bennett stepped to the podium to launch what he described as his national security policy. National security, as Bennett put it, broadly defined. Everything, it seems, made it into the speech: from drafting of Haredi yeshiva students to boosting Israeli education to strengthening social cohesion.

The breadth and ambition of the speech underscore how many vulnerabilities Benjamin Netanyahu faces in this campaign. His policy on the Haredi draft is famously unpopular and a wedge issue for use against the Israeli right.

Israel's failure to deliver decisive blows in the post-October 7 wars has left some voters sour. Other voters still have the aftertaste of the social division from the 2023 protests and could blame Netanyahu for stoking divisions. And Bennett is even stressing the issue of Israel's attitude toward Qatar, hoping both to outflank Netanyahu from the right there, too, and to hint at the Qatargate scandal plaguing the Prime Minister's Office.

In such a target-rich environment, the B'Yachad party campaign, at least on this day, chose to scatter its arrows. The question is whether a lack of focus could cost the campaign a bull's-eye.

In the Likud campaign, the focus is already on the billboards. Up this week, the giant signs star a quartet of Israel's enemies (including, in the billboard, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani) with the message: "They want Netanyahu to lose. Don't let them win."

In its billboard campaign, the Likud Party draws on Netanyahu's core strategy throughout his political career: Casting choices in dramatic terms between right and left. Here, trying to pull back into the tent center-right voters drawn, in this case like their counterparts in other democracies, to right-wing policies on national security. Even if you're disappointed by the results of the past three years, the billboard hints, the alternative should scare you.

The raw, emotional message is meant to neutralize the arguments from the opposition and, especially, from the opposition's center-right and right-wing elements (such as Bennett). Netanyahu has long proved adept at using emotive messaging in election campaign to forge (or deepen) his bond with voters in the right-wing camp.

That approach may well work again. But the billboards are still an admission of weakness. After three years of war many Israelis see as inconclusive, Netanyahu's national security record leaves him open to the kind of attacks Bennett has launched. Netanyahu is also matched against the leading opposition figure Gadi Eisenkot, a former head of the Israeli military with obviously strong security credentials. Netanyahu's choice of national security as a campaign focus is an admission of weakness on a range of other issues.

Netanyahu could yet tack in other directions. The issues that most mobilize Israelis, especially in Netanyahu's base, are the societal and cultural issues that owned the streets in the months before October 7. This could yet develop into an October 6 election and not an October 7 one.

Even so, even if the specific focus shifts, this week's contrast between a speech and a billboard, with the necessary caveats, could signal a contest between argument and message. A contest Netanyahu has won many times before but whose success this time is less certain.