Like a lot of people of center-right/center-left political leanings, I’ve spent the past few decades detesting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, especially as he has grown increasingly authoritarian, bellicose and inhumane.
And yet those of us in the Bibi critics’ club do have to confront an uncomfortable fact: Especially over the past 10 months, Netanyahu has impressively followed through on his aim to remake the face of the Middle East. He’s degraded Hamas and Hezbollah, two of the vilest terror regimes on the planet. He has made the Iranian theocracy look pathetic and decrepit. Israel has demonstrated its vast military and intelligence supremacy over its enemies, establishing total freedom of the skies over much of Iran. It has shown that its agents can penetrate enemy organizations and find and kill their militant leaders. Netanyahu’s actions have contributed to the toppling of the Assad regime in Syria and have helped the legitimate Lebanese government regain control of its own territory. The Axis of Terror is in shambles.
This includes the Israeli-U.S. assault on Iran’ s nuclear program. We don’t yet know how much damage that assault has done. An early Pentagon report found that the attacks set the Iranian project back only a few months, which was picked up big-time on one side of the internet. But several other reports, including one from the Institute for Science and International Security, found that the attack “effectively destroyed” Iran’s enrichment program.
We may know in time what the bombings accomplished. In the meantime, we do know that Israel and the United States have the will and capacity to attack Iran anytime and anyplace. We do know that if Iran reconstitutes its nuclear program, Israel and America have the capacity to deliver a much more devastating and regime-threatening blow. We also know that Iran and its proxies have made some insanely self-destructive miscalculations since Oct. 7, 2023, and they must know that, too. These are ominous omens for the theocrats in Tehran.
No, I am not saying I support all the ways Netanyahu has responded to the Oct. 7 attack. I supported the aim of the war in Gaza — to degrade Hamas — but the way Israel has done this has often been uncivilized and barbaric, exercising a callous disregard for human life. And I’m not saying Netanyahu and his settler allies have any sensible vision for how to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute in the years ahead, beyond bullying, bigotry and cruelty.
But I am saying that people like Netanyahu and Donald Trump, who I generally regard as forces for ill in the world, turn out to be, at least on the broader issue of the Iranian threat, forces for good. I am saying that those of us who detest Bibi and Trump should show a little humility and do some rethinking.
What do those guys know that led to their success? What can we learn from what just happened?
I think Netanyahu was right to be obsessed with Iran over the past several decades. The 1979 Iranian revolution was a signature event in world history. Iran has been the central source of instability in the Middle East ever since. Other issues in that region are secondary.
I also think Netanyahu was right to go on offense and take a maximalist response to the events of Oct. 7. Over the past few decades, Iran has methodically built a noose around Israel with terror armies and advanced weaponry. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has declared that Israel will not exist in 2040, but he’s been patient about how to achieve his life-defining goal. For example, he’s worked relentlessly to build a nuclear program, but he’s been willing to stay just on the cusp of building the bomb until the conditions are right.
For decades, both Israel and the United States were willing to tolerate the noose. Dismantling it seemed too hard and risky. That changed on Oct. 7. Israel learned, to its shock and dismay, that it lacked the capacity to anticipate and prevent murderous attacks. Suddenly the looming noose began to appear intolerable. Netanyahu, and the Israeli public generally, decided to respond to Oct. 7 not with the limited retribution campaign that many of us outside observers were supporting, but by attempting to dismantle the whole noose, including Hezbollah and the future possibility of Iranian nukes, and that now looks like the right call.
Occasionally I see lawn signs asserting that “war is not the answer,” but here was a circumstance in which war was the answer. Here was a circumstance in which the raw power really mattered. Israel was able to beat the once feared Hezbollah because it is more effective and more powerful. Iran has responded feebly to the bombing raids not because of the kindness of its heart but because it is ineffective and less powerful.
While many people have overestimated Hezbollah’s and Iran’s capacities, Netanyahu and Trump — ruthless bullies both — seem to have some ability to smell weakness. Other American administrations imagined they could neuter revolutionary Iran through some sort of negotiation, but for over 40 years Iran has relentlessly refused a rapprochement with the West.
Netanyahu was also right to understand that sometimes it’s more important to defeat a narrative than to defeat an army. One crucial divide in the Arab world is between those nations that have accepted that Israel is a reality, which they have to deal with, and those still who dream that Israel can be wiped off the map. As Jeffrey Goldberg noted in The Atlantic this week, both President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt before the Six-Day War in 1967 and the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar before Oct. 7, 2023, seemed to believe that Israel was more of a colonial outpost than a real country. The Jews could be pushed out of Israel the way the Belgians were kicked out of their colonies in Africa.
In other words, many of Israel’s enemies in the Middle East actually believed the narrative that gets floated among overheated activists on Ivy League campuses. They paid for their belief in that myth by suffering devastating defeats, and in many cases, such as Sinwar’s, they paid for that false belief with their life. They underestimated Israelis’ desire to live on their ancestral homeland and the degree to which Israel is a legitimate nation like any other.
After the events of the past year, it’s hard to believe that anybody could believe in this colonialist-outpost narrative. If the Middle East is ever going to be a more prosperous and peaceful place, it will be because everybody finally acknowledges, even at Columbia, that Israel is not going to be exterminated from the river to the sea.
The final lesson to be learned, and this is one we seem to have to learn over and over again, is that our enemies are truly our enemies. In the 1930s a great portion of the British establishment traipsed over to Germany and returned claiming that Hitler was a decent enough chap you could do business with. They simply could not acknowledge to themselves the evil inherent in that man, even though he declared it openly in speeches and writings.
This same pattern of denial prevailed in the Western response to Lenin and Stalin, in the way some in the West refused to see Mao as the mass murderer he was, and in the Western response to Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah. There are many people in the West who can’t believe that our enemies believe what they say they believe. They do not want to stare into the abyss and face the consequences of those realities. Netanyahu, for all has manifold moral failings, is willing to call Iranian reality by its true name and draw the obvious conclusions from that.
No, I’m not turning into a Bibi/Trump admirer. But I do miss the days when liberal hawks roamed the earth. There was a tradition — running from Franklin Roosevelt through Harry Truman, Senator Scoop Jackson and Hillary Clinton — made up of people who championed democracy and human rights, but who also understood that in a dangerous world, American power is a necessary force for stability, peace and civilization.
As far as I can see, the liberal hawk tradition died in the wake of the failures of the Iraq war. I look at many of the Democratic responses to the American bombing of Iran and the following thought occurs to me: Many of these people instinctively assume that American power is the primary problem in the world. Many of these people seem to assume that if Trump does it, it must be bad, and no independent thinking is required. Truman and Ronald Reagan believed in using American power to ward off foreign threats. These people, on the other hand, talk as if their mission is to protect the world from the threat of American might. A party beholden to these prejudices is simply unfit to govern what is still the world’s leading superpower.
I’ll say it again: I detest Bibi and Trump. I worry that Team Trump lacks the attention span and competence to handle a complicated international crisis. But it would be a catastrophe if those of us who oppose Netanyahu and Trump concluded that we have to be against everything they are for. That would mean withdrawing from the world and letting the wolves run free.
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David Brooks is an Opinion columnist for The Times, writing about political, social and cultural trends. @nytdavidbrooks
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