Binyamin Netanyahu hopes to win yet another election in Israel

years serving as an Israeli commando, Binyamin Netanyahu travelled to America in 1972 to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He signed up for a course in statistics. The first lecture was on pandemics. “I remembered that at the beginning [cases] go up slowly, slowly,” he now tells audiences at his campaign rallies, sometimes using a whiteboard. “And suddenly it shoots up like a wall! And I knew that when it shoots up, everyone will want [vaccines].”Mr Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister (pictured on billboard, left), then recounts how he argued with bureaucrats and insisted they buy large quantities of covid-19 vaccine early in the pandemic, no matter the cost. That strategy has paid off: Israel’s vaccination rate is the highest in the world. The country is lifting lockdown measures. Mr Netanyahu hopes it will also pay off for his party, Likud, when Israelis go to the polls on March 23rd, for the fourth time in two years. But he faces stiff competition from former allies.