Over the past several months, only one politician has managed to goad Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu into attacking him, and that was former Prime Minister Ehud Barak. In a video that Netanyahu posted on his Facebook page Sept. 4, he can be heard mocking and even imitating Barak. On another occasion, he called him, “an old-fashioned man with a new-fashioned beard.”

For some time now, Barak has exploited various social networks to become an effective, if brutal, one-man response team to Netanyahu. Barak regularly refers to him with a vast and creative array of insults, for instance, calling him a “feeble lackey of a prime minister” and deeming him “paranoid.”

Netanyahu's life would be absolutely miserable if Barak were head of the opposition. Barak, however, has no formal political position. The public abandoned him long ago, and he does not pose a political threat to Netanyahu. What is evident, however, is that Barak is demonstrating how the opposition should be reacting to a prime minister drowning in criminal investigations.

The clearest sign that Israel is experiencing the worst opposition ever is that Netanyahu can afford to ignore the very people who are supposed to be his political rivals. None of Netanyahu's dozens of Facebook posts, tweets or speeches in the past few months has referred to his rivals, among them Avi Gabbay, the new Labor Party chair and hope of the left, and Yesh Atid Chairman Yair Lapid. They may be the most prominent leaders of the opposition, but they simply don't exist as far as Netanyahu is concerned.