Until about 3 months ago, and certainly at the time of the last election, Netanyahu was not unpopular.
He'd had the job on and off for like 17 years, he was a known factor. His major selling points had always been that he massively improved Israel's economy and diplomatic standing while avoiding major change, especially avoiding major change with the Palestinians. And he did. He was viewed as a highly polarizing figure because of his personal scandals - illegal campaign gifts, illegally trying to pressure a newspaper publisher into not printing bad stories about him - but many Israelis were able to shrug this off like Americans who saw the Clinton era as a good one even though he banged his secretary and tried to cover it up. There are almost no political differences between 2022 Netanyahu and his chief rivals - Benny Gantz, Avigdor Liberman, Gideon Sa'ar. It is entirely personality-based.
Netanyahu almost compulsively, uncontrollably doublecrosses and lies to people who should be his political allies. He makes a tit-for-tat deal with them, gets his tit, then says "Tat? What tat? I never promised you anything." It's just a douchey game he can play and he loves it, like Lyndon Johnson forcing his staffers to talk to him while he was taking a dump. Because of that, a huge swath of Israeli politicians who should be on his side because they agree with him on most or all issues cannot stand him, personally, and form new parties to offer the people "More of the same, but without Bibi." And for the last 4 or 5 elections in a row, it's been about 50:50.
Because so many of his colleagues loathe him, it is now impossible for Netanyahu to build a governing coalition (61 or more seats in the 120-seat Knesset) out of the right-wing parties who actually know how to govern a country. He was only able to win re-election in late 2022 by elevating a Halloween parade of ultra-ultra-extreme racist, criminal fringe candidates. From a national functioning standpoint, there is a difference between Mike Pence and Mike Lindell, and that's the difference between Netanyahu's prior terms and this one.
Most people who wanted to turn the page on Netanyahu voted for Yair Lapid's party since Lapid is the leader of the opposition and had been the engineer of Netanyahu's last defeat. Unfortunately, TOO MANY people supported Lapid and not enough supported other sane right-wing / moderate / left parties, which mostly shrank, some so much that they fell below Knesset inclusion criteria and got no seats at all, so all the "turn-the-page" votes cast for them were totally wasted. Lapid's vote bloc grew, but he didn't reach 61 seats, and there were no allied parties left big enough to bring him past the threshold. Lapid did not foresee or prevent this because he has far less experience at actually building governing coalitions than Netanyahu.
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