Ever since Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu returned from his trip to the United States on Oct. 3, which ended in another media conflict with the White House, he has been totally immersed in plans for advancing the primaries for Likud Party chief.

Anyone who hoped to see a post-Operation Protective Edge Netanyahu make an effort to lead the regional diplomatic initiative he had alluded to, now discovers that the prime minister is mainly preoccupied with rehabilitating his political position within the Likud and the right. Netanyahu’s recovery plan includes confidence-building measures vis-a-vis his right-wing electorate in the form of promoting construction projects in Jerusalem’s Givat Hamatos neighborhood and land expropriation in the Etzion settlement bloc. As expected, these plans led to unprecedented, harsh reprimands from the Barack Obama administration. However, this is Netanyahu’s way to strengthen his grip on the right, in the struggle vis-a-vis HaBayit HaYehudi Chairman Naftali Bennett and against elements in the Likud’s hard-core right.

Simultaneously, Netanyahu is carrying out his plans for expediting the primaries for the Likud leadership, to take place after the holidays in late October. He is expected to win by a large margin, whether he will be the only candidate or whether he will run against far-right-wingers Knesset members Danny Danon and Moshe Feiglin. In any event, in a few weeks Netanyahu will be re-elected for the nth time as Likud leader, without facing a real fight or a significant rival. In other words, in the upcoming general elections, which according to current assessments are likely to take place at the beginning of 2016, Netanyahu will run for the premiership as the party’s candidate for a fourth term of office.

It seems that Netanyahu and his associates were very much interested in the festive political meeting held on the evening of Oct. 12 by Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz in his sukkah (traditional hut constructed for the Feast of Tabernacles) at the Kfar Achim village. They were much more interested in that gathering than in the international donors' conference for the Gaza Strip's reconstruction that opened that same morning in Cairo, or in the crumbling relations between Israel and the United States.