JERUSALEM — The pre-Sabbath rush was on at Reuven and Negina Abramove’s grocery store in Rehovot, a city that’s been called Israel’s Ohio for its tendency to mirror the results of national elections. But the proprietors were stuck on the unthinkable: Israel without Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister.

The announcement that Mr. Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister for the past decade, could be indicted on corruption charges had upended Israeli politics overnight, giving his chief rival a big lead in a new poll by a Netanyahu-backing newspaper.

But the Abramoves were unstinting in their support for the man everyone here knows as Bibi.

“I would rather have a dishonest but strong leader than an honest but clueless leader,” said Ms. Abramove, 42. “He is the one holding this country up.”

And if Atlas were to shrug?

“Look around,” her husband, 45, chimed in. “Israel under his leadership has gotten stronger and safer. Only Bibi can run this country.”

That last sentence would be the perfect bumper sticker for Mr. Netanyahu’s re-election campaign.

Running as Israel’s indispensable man, Mr. Netanyahu argues that he is the only one who can keep Israel safe when Iran is making aggressive moves from nearly every direction. Because of him, he says, Israel’s tech sector has become the envy of much of the world, formerly hostile capitals have opened to Israeli diplomats, and a thorough debunking has been administered to the idea that Israel, with its brutal treatment of the Palestinians, had to choose between its security and international acceptance.

But on Thursday, the attorney general announced plans to indict Mr. Netanyahu on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust. He is accused of trading lucrative official favors for positive news coverage and gifts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, including cigars, jewelry and pink Champagne.

With the corruption case hanging over his head and a stiff challenge from Benny Gantz, a retired army chief of staff whose security credentials rival Mr. Netanyahu’s, Israelis are starting to ask whether Israel can not only survive, but thrive, without the man who has come to dominate their national self-image.

[The cases against Mr. Netanyahu, explained.]

Mr. Netanyahu, 69, has become nearly synonymous with Israel in the eyes of much of the world.

“Even people who hate him, when they close their eyes, they can’t imagine anyone else sitting in his office,” said Micah Goodman, a Jerusalem-based scholar and author of “Catch-67,” on the conundrums of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

On Friday, a major poll for the first time showed Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition being dislodged by a center-left one led by Mr. Gantz.

Much can change between now and April 9. Mr. Netanyahu could well survive the election, and go on in July to become Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, surpassing David Ben-Gurion, its founding statesman. He could even forge a right-wing coalition willing to let him stand trial in the morning and run the country in the afternoon — though the reaction to his recent alliance with a far-right, racist party in hopes of holding onto its sliver of the electorate suggests that this could come at great cost.

But what looked at first like a matchup of intramural athletes against a varsity star shifted sharply weeks ago into a competitive showdown between Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Gantz, who enticed two of his predecessors and a popular centrist politician, Yair Lapid, into a flag-waving, security-minded party aimed at Israel’s moderate middle.

Whether one sees a post-Netanyahu Israel as salutary or not, generally speaking, depends on one’s tribe.

Nowhere is Mr. Netanyahu more valued than on the right wing. His halting promotion of the settlement enterprise on the occupied West Bank has exasperated settlers and their supporters, but he is seen fundamentally as an ally, said Oded Revivi, mayor of Efrat and a spokesman for an umbrella group of settlements like it.

“Having been close to him, knowing from him what the pressures were, we can be grateful for what we’ve achieved the last 10 years,” Mr. Revivi said.

He would have no part of an after-Netanyahu conversation.

Hagai Segal, editor of Makor Rishon, a right-wing newspaper, said half-grudgingly that his esteem for Mr. Netanyahu had grown over the years. “We’ve had left-wing governments, and the sun shone the next day,” he said. “But there isn’t anyone to replace him. There is no heir who’d have Netanyahu’s stature, at least not anytime soon.”

A vacancy would change that, of course, and there are no shortage of pretenders to the throne — though none would want to be seen, in the eyes of Mr. Netanyahu’s voters, as having delivered a coup de grâce. Nearly all have scars left by Mr. Netanyahu, who towers over the right wing in part because he has never allowed up-and-comers to grow powerful enough to challenge him.

No one would welcome a Netanyahu exit more than Israel’s anemic left, which has been loudly assailing his authoritarian and rightward drift for several years.

Few on the left place much hope in a Gantz-led government for major change.

“I think the big change would be the climate,” said Naomi Chazan, a liberal activist, scholar and former lawmaker from the Meretz party. “Some notion of hope on the horizon. More emphasis on integrity. And conceivably on the Palestinian issue, a greater openness.”

Merely quieting Mr. Netanyahu’s voice could have its own benefit after years in which he exploited divisions between Arab and Jew, religious and secular, Ashkenazi and Sephardic, said Avishai Margalit, a prize-winning philosopher who was among the founders of Peace Now.

“The only emotion that connects him with his people is resentment, and the need for revenge,” Mr. Margalit said. “He’s poisoning the well of public discourse.”

It is in the broad center where Mr. Netanyahu is most at risk politically, where Mr. Gantz’s party is trying to carve out a winning plurality, and where voters have shown a preoccupation with bread-and-butter issues on which the prime minister has not distinguished himself.

A few months ago, when Mr. Netanyahu was heckled by a Likud activist over problems in the health care system, he snapped that she was “boring.” His challengers have not let that gaffe be forgotten. Mr. Gantz has made pocketbook issues the heart of his candidacy, promising to address income inequality, build new roads and affordable housing, add hospital beds, overhaul the education system and curtail consumer price gouging.

Nearly half of likely voters in a poll this past week said such economic issues were most important to them — more than twice as many as cited security.

Mr. Goodman, the Jerusalem scholar, suggested that Mr. Netanyahu was suffering the result of a career spent not as a builder, like Ben-Gurion, but as a self-styled “preventer” — someone who warns of catastrophe, and then, like Churchill, one of Mr. Netanyahu’s heroes, succeeds by averting it.

“It makes him a very careful leader,” Mr. Goodman said. “He didn’t go bomb Iran, he didn’t invade Gaza” last fall the way some of his allies wanted him to, he didn’t push for peace. “He’s the guy that doesn’t do things.”

Ordinarily, he added, Israelis — surrounded by the volatility of the Middle East — like to sip coffee in cafes and have nothing happen to interrupt them. “Change doesn’t sound fine, it sounds terrifying,” he said.

On matters of security, Mr. Goodman noted, Mr. Gantz’s party was essentially promising the status quo but “without the price” that Mr. Netanyahu had demanded.

Another constituency taking a keen interest in Mr. Netanyahu’s fate — but not a voting one — is American Jewry.

Many American Jews are growing weary of the prime minister’s longstanding bargain with Israel’s ultra-Orthodox, resulting in policies that have repeatedly inflamed less observant Jews in the United States.

David Makovsky, an Israel expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said Mr. Netanyahu’s survival instincts were “so all-consuming” as to overtake important policy decisions, and that he had “so sanctified his political base” as to make the Israel-diaspora relationship “expendable.”

Those expressing distaste for moves that antagonize less religious or more liberal American Jews include some of the prime minister’s longtime admirers.

“Even those who respect his security experience have just felt distant because of the lack of respect for their religious pluralism,” said Abraham H. Foxman, retired director of the Anti-Defamation League. “From that perspective, change can only be better.”

Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting from Rehovot, Israel.

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