If Benjamin Netanyahu, a silver-tongued tough guy and master political survivor, has succeeded in one thing in his past decade as prime minister of Israel, it’s in making it almost impossible for his citizens – even his fiercest critics – to imagine the country without him at the helm.

But last week, a lengthy investigation produced what promises to be a 57-page indictment against him in three cases involving fraud, bribery, and breach of trust. And heading into a general election in April, a new political rival has emerged in the form of a popular general whose new centrist party, Blue and White, has surged ahead of Mr. Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party in the polls.

Even as Netanyahu launches a fight for his political life with what analysts say is a one-two punch strategy of racism toward Israel’s Arab citizens and false statements about his rivals and the media, Israelis are beginning to contemplate the twilight of his reign.

“Fake cases” was Netanyahu’s summation of the announced indictments, and on Monday, to cheers at a campaign rally, he led a chant of “Bibi or Tibi.” Bibi is his own nickname, and Tibi is Ahmed Tibi, a long-time Arab Knesset member and popular target of the right.

To improve his chances at coalition-building after the vote, Netanyahu also arranged for the ideological heirs of an extreme right-wing party, once outlawed as racist, to join a religious faction, a move that has been condemned across the spectrum in Israel and among American Jews.

Even if Likud manages to win in the April Knesset election and form the next government, it’s unlikely Netanyahu would be able to remain premier once a trial against him begins, analysts say.

Nevertheless there is no law blocking him from doing so. And as both his supporters and critics point out ­– and as towering campaign billboards featuring a photo of Netanyahu and President Trump shaking hands next to the words “Netanyahu, In A Different League” imply – normal rules don’t seem to apply in his case.

Shift on the right

“He’s become King Bibi for a lot of people,” says Yuval Deleeuw, the owner of a flower shop and café in Tel Aviv. He has never supported Netanyahu and says he will most likely vote for the Blue and White party. “But I am hearing from friends who vote Likud that they are getting tired of him, and feel like it’s time for a change.”

Yehuda Carmel, an entrepreneur from the coastal city of Netanya who has usually voted for right-wing parties, has this message for Netanyahu: Time’s up.

“I think he became corrupt and it’s no longer fitting for him to remain in office. And yes, he has had some diplomatic achievements – but recently the failures have piled up in many directions, despite the stories he tries to sell us as the master of international relations and Mr. Security,” Mr. Carmel says. “I think he’s lost his place, and at the end of the day he’ll end up in jail.”

He, too, says he is planning to vote for Blue and White.

Ariel Schalit/AP

Retired Israeli military chief Benny Gantz, (l.), smiles with Yair Lapid, head of the Yesh Atid party, as they launch a joint list for national elections in April, in Tel Aviv, Feb. 21, 2019. The centrist challengers to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have moved ahead of him in recent polls.

According to a poll Tuesday by Walla, an Israeli news site, the Blue and White party is leading Likud by five seats in parliament. The party, named for the colors of Israel’s flag, is led by Benny Gantz, a retired general and political newcomer whose most recent job was military chief of staff. Mr. Gantz is joined by Yair Lapid, who merged his popular centrist party in the Knesset, to create a united front against Netanyahu.

Netanyahu says the choice is between “a strong government led by me, or a weak leftist government of Lapid and Gantz.”

Despite Netanyahu’s description, the pair swing more hawk than dove and have promoted the message that, unlike Netanyahu, they will put the country’s interests first, not their own. Gantz and Mr. Lapid are both the sons of Holocaust survivors who, the two say they recently found out, once shared a room in the Budapest ghetto.

Mistakes under pressure

Akiva Eldar, a veteran analyst, says Netanyahu feels the pressure and is making mistakes, especially the political lifeline he threw to the followers of the late Meir Kahane, an American immigrant rabbi and ideological father of the Jewish militant fringe-right who called Arabs “dogs” and advocated expelling Palestinians.

“He is now acting like a wounded animal in the corner and fighting for his life,” says Mr. Eldar, a columnist for Al-Monitor. His main mistake, he says, was “to bring into his own fold the Kahanists, something even AIPAC [the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee] cannot abide, and that’s saying a lot because they usually are able to accept anything.”

Several American Jewish groups condemned the merger of the far-right Jewish Home party with the extremist Jewish Power as normalizing the latter’s racist, anti-Arab ideology. Jewish Power is the ideological heir of Kahane’s Kach party, which was banned from the Knesset in 1988 as undemocratic and racist.

Netanyahu has blamed his legal problems on what he charges is a left-wing “witch hunt” by media outlets bent on destroying him, opposition lawmakers, and a complicit police force and attorney general doing the left wing’s bidding.

It’s a narrative his party faithful seem to support.

Eitan Sherman says the charges are exaggerated. Last election he voted for Jewish Home, but this time, because he sees Netanyahu needs support, he will be voting Likud.

“I want Likud to stay strong and people are out to destroy him,” he says from the upholstery shop in Tel Aviv he has owned for 40 years. Too much has been made of the corruption charges, he says, adding that, “It’s not like he took envelopes stuffed with cash,” an allusion to a corruption case that took down Netanyahu’s predecessor, Ehud Olmert.

Says Eldar, the columnist, of one indictment alleging Netanyahu took gifts from a wealthy friend in exchange for favors in office: “He has corrupted Israeli society, so much so that today people think he is a king and it’s okay that he takes for himself.”

Impact on democracy?

So what do Netanyahu’s woes mean for Israel’s political system?

“To have a prime minister in a democracy with indictments is very serious. But it says something about Israeli democracy that it functions despite this,” says Gayil Talshir, a senior lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “It will be interesting to see if some on the right will rally and say, ‘Yes, he is the victim,’ or if some will say, ‘No more – we cannot let his survival sink Israeli democracy.’”

Dan Shadur is the director of a new documentary, “King Bibi,” that traces Netanyahu’s path from his upbringing in the Philadelphia suburbs as the less-favored son of Benzion Netanyahu, an Israeli history professor who always felt himself the outsider. He says Netanyahu was key in bringing a previously unseen level of “toxic discourse” to Israeli politics.

“A lot of people know he’s lying. And they don’t mind,” he says. “He is seen as our representative, fighting the establishment – even if it’s an imaginary establishment since Likud is in power – but he’s our guy there and he will show them.”

Mr. Shadur says Israel now seems to be at a turning point, “But I just don’t know where we are going. Something deep is changing in the way we perceive truth and way we look at ideas and describe them and the way we talk to each other. There’s a big change, and Trump and Netanyahu are people who are using it.… It’s a change where the image is more important than the substance.”

Israel after Netanyahu?

“I think Israel is much bigger than Netanyahu. Netanyahu has sucked the oxygen out of Israeli society and democracy for a decade now, and to a very large degree, politics have been about him,” says Anshell Pfeffer, author of “Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu.”

“I think Israel will not only overcome this period but it will be very healthy for Israelis to deal with the real issues finally.”

That includes revisiting peace efforts with the Palestinians, which Netanayahu has resisted, as well as social and economic issues, that Mr. Pfeffer argues have been subsumed by the question of whether or not they help Netanyahu. “We have not been asking the real question: what is good for Israeli society?”

Pfeffer sees Netanyahu less as a father figure for the nation than a father figure for the right, a right that respects him and is increasingly worried that without him around, they might cede power.

“Israeli society will need a recovery period after Netanyahu. Probably it will be something incremental – it cannot be black-and-white change, but something in the middle,” says Eldar. “We need to get used to a situation to be without a father and leave the warm home we had. Maybe after that we will get used to a situation that Israel can be without Bibi, that the country can go on without him,” he says.

Michal Levy, a Tel Aviv shopkeeper who used to vote for the left-wing Meretz party but will now be casting her ballot for the centrist Blue and White, says, “I want to vote for the party that has the best chance of beating him.” 

J. Scott Applewhite/AP

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (r.), has a quick word with Rep. Jerrold Nadler, (D) of New York (c.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, at the Capitol on Jan. 4. Representative Nadler says that he believes President Donald Trump obstructed justice and that House Democrats are requesting documents from scores of people from Trump’s administration, family and business as part of the Russia probe.

Elections have consequences. That’s the first, and most obvious, implication of the sweeping inquiry into President Trump and his campaign and administration launched Monday by the House Judiciary Committee. Having won the House in November’s mid-term elections, Democratic lawmakers are now using their new powers in an organized attack that could serve as a prequel to Mr. Trump’s impeachment.

The questions are, how far will they get, and how far should they go? Sending out a regiment of written demands is not the same thing as producing useful documents, witnesses, or information. Trump and his allies are sure to resist an inquiry they see as illegitimate overreach. Some, if not much, of the requested material might be subject to administration claims of executive privilege. Witnesses outside government could slow-walk their response.

And the “I” word is a fraught subject. The vast majority of Republicans still support Trump and the job he’s doing. Unless House inquiries convince Trump voters to change their minds, the GOP-dominated Senate won’t vote to oust him from office – and the entire impeachment effort might further rend the fabric of US politics.

Thus what the House is really beginning may be more a process of discovery than an impeachment prequel. Democrats hope to link together different events to create a narrative of Trump’s rise and time in power in a way that special counsel Robert Mueller’s more legalistic investigation does not do. This could serve as a political argument in 2020 as much as impeachment spadework.

“I don’t think [impeachment] is inevitable,” says Patrick Griffin, former legislative liaison to President Bill Clinton.

For impeachment, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler and other Democrats would have to make a case that would erode the president’s political standing, says Mr. Griffin. It would be very, very risky to proceed in any other circumstance.

If Democrats can’t get that support, they undermine their chances of defeating Trump in 2020, just as Republicans felt a backlash against their impeachment proceedings in the 1998 midterms.

“It ended up blowing up in their face,” Griffin says.

In general, House Democrats are trying to sell their new investigative efforts as their duty. It’s just oversight of the executive branch, they say – something that wasn’t done in the past two years, when Republicans controlled the chamber.

On Monday, Chairman Nadler asked some 80 individuals and entities for a wide range of documents. Events covered ranged from the payment of hush money to adult entertainer Stormy Daniels, to the firing of former FBI head James Comey and Trump’s interaction with Mr. Mueller and various witnesses and targets of the Mueller investigation.

Much of the wording of the letters was similar legal boilerplate, and many of the documents may already be in the possession of Mr. Mueller or other congressional committees. This could speed up responses to what is surely just the first tranche of Nadler’s requests.

It’s possible that Nadler’s release was sparked by last week’s testimony from former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen. While the broad outline of Cohen’s scathing testimony about his former boss was already public, his personal testimony drew wide public interest. Liberal members of the Democratic caucus who are adamant about pushing impeachment were fired up by the event; in that context, the document requests might be an effort by House leadership to keep restive elements under control.

At least three other Democratic-controlled House committees are probing separate aspects of the Trump era. Some of those investigations overlap or bump against parts of the new Judiciary Committee work. On Tuesday, the White House rebuffed a request from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee for documents pertaining to the Trump security clearance process. The refusal all but guarantees a subpoena and subsequent court battle.

At 9 A.M. on Tuesday, Trump responded in his signature manner to the various investigations now aimed in his direction. “PRESIDENTIAL HARASSMENT!” he tweeted.

Taryn Perkins remembers searching for Thoreau, N.M. on a map.

Last summer, she and her husband were both offered teaching jobs there that seemed perfect, and the couple had always loved small, rural communities. But Thoreau seemed … really small and really rural.

“Where would we even live when we get there?” Ms. Perkins recalls thinking. The school district soon told Ms. Perkins and her husband about the teacherage: a neighborhood of small, affordable homes in Thoreau built exclusively for the town’s teachers.

“We were ecstatic to find that out,” says Perkins. “It’s been a huge blessing.”

As school districts across the country struggle to recruit and retain teachers, many are also experimenting with different ways to help with housing – especially in rural districts, which typically have more staffing struggles. Thoreau, for example, a town of fewer than 2,000 people on the outskirts of the Navajo Nation, has cut teacher vacancies by almost 95 percent in the last few years by offering subsidized rent in the teacherage.

“We face odds that other districts just don’t face,” says Gerald Horacek, assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction at Gallup McKinley County Schools, from his office in Gallup, N.M., the closest town to Thoreau, a 30-minute drive away. “How do you incentivize for qualified, quality teachers to go there when they can come here? You have to provide housing.”

A real incentive 

Joanna Tulabing, a sixth-grade English teacher at Thoreau Middle School, sits on a bench in front of her house and draws an open palm across her body, as if she is presenting the winning prize on a game show.

“Three parking spots, a shed, and backyard,” she says, describing how her home was one of the main reasons she decided to move to Thoreau four years ago.

Ms. Tulabing and her husband pay $475 a month for their two-bedroom apartment, which comes with free utilities. It’s a great deal, says Tulabing, and it’s convenient: When the weather is nice, she can walk to work.

The teacherage plays a big part in encouraging teachers like Tulabing to come to – and stay in – places like Thoreau.

In 2016, Gallup McKinley started the school year with 120 vacancies on the first day of school. By 2018, that number had dropped to just 7, a change Mr. Horacek attributes to the teacherage.

And while the district is still one of the lowest performing in the country, it’s improving: 600 more students became proficient in math and reading last school year – the district’s greatest ever year-over-year growth. Gallup McKinley has offered forms of teacher housing since the 1960s, but the district attributes the recent success to, among other things, increased housing incentives such as free utilities and a few months of free rent.

“It’s good for us, it’s good for our kids,” says Horacek. “These things help the schools improve academically.”

Helping teachers stay in the profession

The average teacher salary is below the family living wage in more than half of US states, according to a study last year by Education Resources Strategies, and teachers in large, coastal cities can spend up to 70 percent of their income on rent – far above the recommended share of 30 percent. Largely because of these financial struggles, almost 20 percent of teachers leave the profession within their first five years of teaching, and thousands of classrooms face teacher vacancies each year. All of this affects students, who do better with less teacher turnover.

“I’ve interviewed hundreds of teachers over the years and a line that comes up is, ‘I never expected to get rich.... But now I’m not paid enough to be able to afford teaching anymore,’ ” says Susan Moore Johnson, an education professor at Harvard University and director of The Project on the Next Generation of Teachers, a group that focuses on recruiting and retaining a strong teacher force.

Some education experts say districts should just raise teachers’ salaries instead of putting money toward housing incentives. But in low-populated, rural districts such as Gallup McKinley, housing for teachers quite simply doesn’t exist. These districts see it as a tangible improvement they can make.

Several urban districts like San Francisco, where teachers are often priced out of living in the district, are also experimenting with alternative housing solutions for teachers. Dare County Schools, located in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, says its affordable teacher housing allowed the district to recruit enough teachers to build a foreign language program. The Miami-Dade school system in southern Florida is considering building residential complexes on school grounds, and a district in San Mateo County, Calif., plans to break ground on a 116-unit apartment building for teachers this year.

Housing or not, building a community for rural teachers can make a big difference for recruitment and retainment, says Robert Mahaffey, executive director of The Rural School and Community Trust in Alexandria, Va.

“The most important part of staffing schools in rural places is community-placed support for the school,” says Mr. Mahaffey. “If the teacher feels welcomed and engaged and a part of the community, [he or she] is more likely to stay.”

Tulabing never saw herself living in a place like Thoreau, but now she can’t imagine leaving. First, because of the home she made in the teacherage, and secondly, because of her colleagues – whom she also can call her neighbors.

“I thought it was going to be really difficult,” says Tulabing. “But when I came into this building and started to meet my colleagues … they are the friendliest people I have met.”

When Godwin Jabangwe stood in front of a room full of Hollywood movie executives to pitch his first feature film last November, he knew his idea wasn’t exactly the stuff of a conventional blockbuster.

He wanted to make an animated movie called “Tunga,” he explained, about a young girl who travels to a mythical lost city on a quest to save her village from drought. It would be set in Zimbabwe. Oh right, and it would be a musical.

“Five years ago, with an idea like that, you would have been laughed out of the room,” Mr. Jabangwe says. But his idea immediately caught the ear of a big production company, and last month, after a scrappy bidding war, Jabangwe signed a deal with them. “Tunga” is going to be a Netflix original.

In recent years, as Netflix has made a global play for subscribers, it has courted them with local stories – from Korean police dramas to Mexican political thrillers to Japanese sci fi. But until recently, African viewers were largely left out of that equation. Log into Netflix in Johannesburg, Nairobi, or Lagos, and almost any movie or show you could watch took place somewhere else.

That is changing, if slowly. Since May of last year, Netflix has commissioned original shows and films from Nigeria, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. Last week, the service debuted the Sundance darling “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind,” a film by the Nigerian-British director Chiwetel Ejiofor set in rural Malawi and acted mostly in a local language, Chichewa. 

The growing interest in Africa reflects a growing market, as more people go online and earn enough disposable income to subscribe. And a handful of African productions is a relatively low-stakes investment for Netflix, which rolled out about 700 original movies and shows last year alone.

But in courting African filmmakers, it’s also helping to shake up tired notions of whose stories are worth paying attention to.

“There’s no reason why an African film can’t be global in the same way an American or European one can,” says Samson Kambalu, the Malawian-British artist who translated the script for “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind” into Chichewa and appears in the film. “There’s no reason why African films can’t open themselves up to the world like that.”

But they have often lacked the platforms to do it. 

Take Nollywood, the Nigerian film industry, which churns out more movies every year than any other country except India. But despite its frenetic levels of production and millions of devoted fans, few Nigerian films have become hits outside the country’s borders. 

In part, that’s by design. Nollywood’s core appeal is that it tells Nigerians stories they don’t often find in film elsewhere: their own. But as piracy has gobbled into Nollywood’s profits in recent years, that local focus has turned against it, says Nigerian film critic Wilfred Okiche.

“For a while now, producers have been struggling with how to crack distribution,” he says. “How do you get these films to the widest possible audience, while still getting paid?”

Netflix wasn’t the first company to try and take Nollywood online. In 2011, a Nigerian entrepreneur launched a streaming service called iROKO TV, and more recently, South African TV giant MultiChoice added a streaming option to its cable offerings, which include a series of channels with mostly Nigerian content called Africa Magic.

Netflix itself dipped into Nollywood slowly, buying its first global streaming rights for two Nigerian films in 2015, and opening a server in Lagos the following year to allow faster streaming for Nigerian users.

But it wasn’t until this January that Netflix released its first Nigerian original film, “Lionheart,” a drama about a Nigerian woman struggling to keep her family business alive after her father has a heart attack.

“I believe authenticity has a home in today’s globalized world,” the film’s director and lead actress, the megawatt Nollywood star Genevieve Nnaji, told Essence Magazine in January. “A good human story with relatability from anywhere will travel far and resonate with viewers despite their backgrounds.”

In some cases, that’s about setting familiar storylines against new backdrops, as Netflix is doing with its first two African original series: a South African spy thriller called “Queen Sono” and a South African high-school drama called “Blood & Water.”

In others, it’s about taking viewers so deeply into an unfamiliar place that they feel at home there, says Mr. Kambalu, of “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind,” which dramatizes the true story of a 13-year-old Malawian boy and his attempts to construct a homemade windmill to save his village from drought.

“I realized with this movie that you don’t have to rely on all these tropes to make people care. You can just present reality. You can just let characters indulge deeply in their own personalities. That’s enough,” he says.

Of course, globally known cast members like Ms. Nnaji or Mr. Ejiofor (famous for, among other things, his starring role in “12 Years a Slave”) don’t hurt. Still, says Jabangwe, the creator of of “Tunga,” Netflix’s omnivorous interest in finding new shows made it more eager than its competitors to hear from a wider range of voices.

“What Netflix has done is crack open a door for stories that probably have never been told by the big studios,” says Jabangwe – like the mythological, musical adventure of a little Zimbabwean girl and her companion, a honey badger.

For many of his viewers, he knows, “Tunga” will take them into a new and unfamiliar place.

But for Jabangwe, after more than a decade in the United States, it will take him somewhere else.

Home.

Reuters

South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un shake hands at the demilitarized zone separating the two Koreas on April 27, 2018.

These may be trying times for the Nobel committee. So many world leaders are standouts to win this year’s Peace Prize. In the midst of their particular crises, each one is trying different ways to prevent violence. Yet each can be held up as a model of peacemaking in process, worthy of a supportive award.

Perhaps the most visible example is Venezuela’s Juan Guaidó. In January, he became interim president with the support of the National Assembly and has insisted on nonviolent means in the effort to oust dictator Nicolás Maduro. Week by week, his pacifist approach has persuaded more and more members of the military to break ranks with Mr. Maduro.

“This is unprecedented in the world,” he told The Wall Street Journal. “I think the change is going to be peaceful and constitutional.”

In South Korea, President Moon Jae-in took office in 2017 and soon opened a door to a North Korea that was escalating its missile and nuclear tests. His deft diplomacy laid the groundwork for the first summit between the United States and North Korea last June. With the apparent failure of a second summit last month, he again seeks peaceful engagement. Reconciliation between the two Koreas, he says, is the “driving force” to denuclearize North Korea.

In Ethiopia, Abiy Ahmed, who holds a PhD in conflict resolution, took office as prime minister last year and promptly won over foes with his trademark phrase: “Love always wins.” He has signed a peace pact with Eritrea and freed political prisoners. He has welcomed dissidents to help him reshape the country.

Dr. Abiy’s biggest challenge is reconciling 80 different ethnics groups that often fight each other or try to secede. The days of using military force to suppress dissent are over, he says. “Negative peace is possible as long as you have a strong army. We are heading to positive peace,” he told the Financial Times.

Perhaps the biggest surprise in peaceful leadership – and most critical to the world – is Imran Khan. The former cricket star became Pakistan’s prime minister last year in a country where the military traditionally controls security policy. After a Feb. 14 suicide attack arranged by a Pakistani terrorist group killed 44 Indian security forces in disputed Kashmir, India launched its first airstrike inside Pakistan since a 1971 war. The two nuclear-capable states were primed for all-out conflict.

In a goodwill gesture that suddenly changed the mood, Mr. Khan returned an Indian fighter pilot shot down inside Pakistan. He also offered talks with India and promised to seize the assets of terrorists groups operating in Pakistan. “Nobody wins in a war. Especially countries that have the sort of weapons that India and Pakistan possess should not even think of war...,” he said.

It remains unclear how much Khan will further confront a military that has often used terrorist groups for strategic purposes. He is the first prime minister not to come from the traditional political establishment. If he can bring terrorist groups to heel, it will start to heal ties with India.

Which of these leaders deserve a Nobel? Events are still moving in each country and the Peace Prize will not be known until October. For now, however, each deserves attention and support, especially for their conviction that peace is possible and natural.