Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.
Benjamin Netanyahu chose his moment well to strike Iran.
His right-wing governing coalition came close to falling apart midweek over the contentious issue of whether religious students should be exempted from military service.
Now Israel’s unprecedented and so far highly successful offensive against Iran, from targeting the mullahs’ nuclear sites as well as the top echelon of its military and intelligence leadership, is prompting a rally-around-the-flag effect.
That’s what Bibi no doubt rightly calculated would happen.
Opposition as well as coalition party leaders are united in what should be considered as the opening chapter in a war that Netanyahu has been thirsting to wage for most of his political career — and one that Israel’s military and intelligence apparatus long and painstakingly planned, stretching back two decades.
As last year with the breathtaking decapitation of Hezbollah — the Shiite militant group in Lebanon that serves as Iran main regional proxy — which saw Israel humble the group by eliminating its leader and top commanders destroying probably more than half of its huge missile and rocket arsenal, so too this time.
Even some of Bibi’s most prominent critics, who’d prefer not to give him the time of day and have long wanted to see the back of him, wasted no time to advertise their support for the preemptive assault on Iran. And how could they not, even if they harbor some doubts about where Bibi’s forever wars might eventually lead Israel and whether his effort to transform the region will, in the long term, be exposed as hubristic.
Opposition Leader Yair Lapid offered blessings to “the security forces.” The centrist Benny Gantz, who quit Netanyahu’s war cabinet in 2024, posted a prayer recited weekly in synagogues for the welfare of Israeli security forces, adding at the end “we are all united against our enemies.”
Yair Golan, leader of the left-wing Democrats, said “a strong people, a determined army and a home front behind them, that is how we were always victorious, and that is how we will win today.” And Avigdor Lieberman, leader of the right-wing Yisrael Beytenu party and a former deputy prime minister, who last week was excoriating Netanyahu for arming criminal militia-turned-clans opposed to Hamas in Gaza, quickly posted on social media: “The eternal people are not afraid.”
Netanyahu has been widely accused of gaslighting Israelis into thinking that striking a deal to end the fighting in Gaza now would leave Israel with existential threat on its border. There are plenty of Israelis, including former prime ministers Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak and former intelligence chiefs like Ya’akov Peri, who disagree with Bibi on that, and reckon he’s been manipulating and prolonging the Gaza war to maintain his grip on power. They also complain that Bibi is a war-maker and incapable of being a peacemaker.
But when it comes to Iran developing a nuclear bomb, there’s a widespread Israeli consensus that a nuclear-armed Khamenei regime would indeed constitute an existential danger to the Jewish state.
Of course, success breeds success. Who’s going to take too much public issue with Netanyahu over what Israel’s military and intelligence agencies have achieved with their offensive so far: killing the top four leaders of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the commander of Iran’s air force as well as a half-a-dozen top nuclear scientists; hitting Iran’s ballistic missile sites and further wrecking the country’s already weakened air defenses; and damaging Iranian nuclear production sites, though to what extent is yet unclear.
The Iranians played their hand poorly in the lead-up to Israel’s offensive by stringing out the nuclear negotiations with U.S. President Donald Trump’s team, providing Netanyahu with an opportunity to seize.
“An attack on Iran had become inevitable,” said retired Gen. Yossi Kuperwasser, a former member of Israel’s Iran nuclear negotiating team and now head of The Jerusalem Institute for Strategy.
“Tehran openly rejected the American proposal and refused to cooperate with the IAEA’s demands for information. Meanwhile, it amassed large quantities of highly enriched uranium and began advancing weaponization efforts,” he said.
Trump may have had his doubts too about the impact of Bibi’s Iran war and how the Gulf Arabs might react. Hence Secretary of State Marco Rubio rushing to assure the world that the United States hadn’t been involved in the strikes and insisting Israel’s decision had been unilateral.
But if Trump had been totally opposed, he could have been much more outspoken, privately and publicly, as other U.S. presidents have been with Israeli leaders when they have gone against Washington’s wishes. Trump seems to have been happy to hedge his bets — making clear he prefers jaw-jaw with the Iranians rather than war-war, but, oh well, they brought it upon themselves.
And again, success breeds success.
Trump, as we know, hates losers. Bibi looks like a winner right now. And Trump is ready to exploit Israeli muscle to try to bring Iran to heel and agree to a nuclear deal that satisfies him. Whether that’s the way it works out remains to be seen now that Iran has retaliated beyond a limited scale and opted to fire ballistic missiles, drawing in the U.S. to help defend Israel. Wars have a nasty habit of spinning out of control, causing effects no one has foreseen.
From Iran’s perspective, Trump is playing a double game, and that could well harm the prospects for nuclear negotiations.
“In Iran’s view, there is no way that the Netanyahu government acted without a U.S. green light,” said Ellie Geranmayeh of the European Council on Foreign Relations.
The hardliners in Tehran may well be strengthened by the Israeli attack, she added.
“Over the past year an internal debate took place in Iran on whether the country had made a strategic mistake in not responding more harshly to previous Israeli attacks,” Geranmayeh said.
But the problem for Iranian hardliners is that Israel has the military cards stacked heavily in its favor. The Iron Dome air defense system, American and Jordanian assistance and Israel’s superior intelligence capabilities severely limit what Iran can do. With Hezbollah so smashed, it is unlikely Iran can bank on their Lebanese allies throwing much at Israel.
And as the Iranian regime’s weakness and incompetence is exposed day after day to its own people, a bigger question comes: Will a nuclear deal satisfy Bibi?
Surely, his ambition is much bigger — namely to crush the theocratic regime in Iran for good and to shape the circumstances for regime change. He has made clear over the years that his goal is to undermine Tehran’s clerical leadership, touching on that theme last year as he mounted the campaign against Hezbollah. The decapitation strategy worked in Lebanon, emboldening him to think in grand terms of recasting Middle East in terms more favorable to Israel.
“The breadth and scale of these strikes — against senior Iranian officials and other military facilities in addition to nuclear sites — suggest this operation is intended to not just dissuade Iran from pursuing nuclear weapons, but also cripple any potential military response and even to destabilize the regime,” said Matthew Savill of the Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank.
Crushing Hamas and Hezbollah and exposing their sponsor, Iran, as a tattered paper tiger with cracked claws would go some way toward redeeming Netanyahu for the security lapses many Israelis hold him responsible for in the lead up to the Oct. 7 massacre spearheaded by Hamas.
To survive, the Iranian regime’s best friend might turn out to be Trump’s offer of a deal. Just sign here.
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