Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went to war on Feb. 28 promising that Israel and the United States would “remove the existential threat posed by the terrorist regime in Iran.”
Two weeks later, though Israeli and U.S. fighters own the skies over Iran, Mr. Netanyahu’s war aims have been brought sharply down to earth. Israel, he says now, is seeking merely to degrade the Islamic Republic as a nuclear and ballistic missile threat.
As for regime change, Israel continues to target Iran’s internal security forces, Mr. Netanyahu said on Thursday in his first news conference of the war. Beyond that, it can do little more than hope for the best, he said: that the Iranian people find a way to overthrow their government someday, perhaps even soon.
It is a striking shift, pointing not only to the difficulty of trying to achieve challenging political objectives with air power alone, but also to an irony of the Israeli leader’s position. More than 30 years after he first publicly identified Iran and its nuclear ambitions as a singular menace to his country, Mr. Netanyahu seemed to have finally gotten the war he always wanted when the mighty United States joined the fight shoulder to shoulder with Israel.
But the war is being fought on President Trump’s terms.
The United States is exerting influence over what Israel may destroy in Iran. It demonstrated that a week ago, when American politicians expressed displeasure with Israel for attacking fuel-storage depots in and around Tehran, filling the skies with huge clouds of black smoke.
“Please be cautious about what targets you select,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and a Trump ally, wrote on social media the next day, stressing the need to preserve such infrastructure to give the Iranian people a chance at a functioning economy, should they manage to overthrow their government.
The scolding fueled speculation in Israel that, Mr. Netanyahu’s hopes aside, the Trump administration may have a grander strategy in mind than merely removing a threat to Israel. Should the United States come away from the war with influence over Iran’s oil industry, the thinking goes, it would gain leverage with China, Iran’s biggest oil customer, in a future showdown over Taiwan.
Israelis, who overwhelmingly support the war, also now take it as a given that the United States will decide when it ends — both in the fight against Iran and in the second front that Israel has opened up against Hezbollah in Lebanon, where that country’s government enjoys U.S. backing.
“Israel is in the war, but is not leading it,” the columnist Nahum Barnea wrote in the Yediot Aharonot newspaper on Friday. “It is operating in the dark. Over every one of its actions hangs a large question: When will Trump, the supreme leader on our side, decide to declare victory and stop the fire?”
Mr. Netanyahu has tried to mitigate this impression. In his Thursday news conference, he assured Israelis that he and Mr. Trump speak “almost every day, openly and without holding back.”
“We focus together, exchanging ideas and advice, and making decisions together,” he said.
But he also seemed to be preparing the public for an end to the war, whenever that might come — and for the idea that it will not be a war to end all wars with Iran or its proxies.
The war has weakened Tehran, Mr. Netanyahu said, to the point that “it no longer threatens as it once did.” Still, he cautioned, “If we must defeat them again and again, we will defeat them again and again.”
“You cannot say things will be finished,” he said, adding: “It requires more blows and more blows. But these blows weaken our enemies enormously.”
To Israelis, who were promised total victories in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran over the past few years — none of which materialized as advertised — the lowering of Mr. Netanyahu’s rhetorical sights, from decisive triumph to the latest in a series of rounds, had a familiar ring.
“If we look at the Netanyahu doctrine, it’s hit, degrade, declare victory, build up, prepare, and then do it again,” said Yaakov Katz, an Israeli analyst and a founder of the Middle East-America Dialogue. “And that’s probably what Israel will continue to do because we refuse to ever follow any military action with a political resolution.”
For a prime minister who long sought comparisons with Winston Churchill, it has also been striking how quiet, how absent from center stage, Mr. Netanyahu has been as a wartime leader so far.
Until Thursday, he had delivered only a few video messages and sat for a single interview — in English, with Sean Hannity, on Fox News. That interview, on March 2, was hastily arranged after Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters in Washington that the United States had attacked Iran because Israel was going to strike regardless, which would have brought Iranian retaliation against American forces.
“There are people that say, ‘Wow, the prime minister of Israel dragged him into it,’” Mr. Hannity said.
Mr. Netanyahu laughed. “That’s ridiculous,” he said. “Donald Trump is the strongest leader in the world. He does what he thinks is right for America.”
Of course, it would be foolhardy for Mr. Netanyahu to openly take credit for persuading Mr. Trump to join the fight. Mr. Trump has come under pressure from many allies within his MAGA movement to pull away from his close support for Israel.
Then again, Mr. Netanyahu does not need to boast to Israelis that he persuaded Mr. Trump to attack Iran. He has allies to do that.
On Israel’s Channel 14, which cheers on Mr. Netanyahu even more than Fox News boosts Mr. Trump, leading commentators like Yaakov Bardugo have credited the prime minister with outdoing even Churchill. The British prime minister, Mr. Bardugo said, persuaded Roosevelt to stand by Britain in World War II, but Mr. Netanyahu got America to enter this war from the start.
Polls show that the Israeli public broadly approves of Mr. Netanyahu’s management of the war. But so far, that has not benefited him politically where it counts most, and where he had to be expecting better news: in his prospects for an election that must be held by October.
The latest survey, published Friday in the Maariv newspaper, found that Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition of right-wing and religious parties would win only 50 of 120 seats in Parliament if the vote were held now — roughly the same poor position it has been in for years. The opposition’s Jewish parties would win 60 seats, putting them on the cusp of a majority, and the Arab parties, who align with the opposition, 10.
However much the war has united Israel behind its military, Mr. Netanyahu has also given his domestic opponents new material to use against him.
In pushing through a spending increase on Tuesday to cover the war’s costs, his government also authorized hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of new aid for ultra-Orthodox Jewish institutions. That comes as the military struggles with a manpower shortage while, to the outrage of thousands of reservists and their families, many ultra-Orthodox men avoid the draft.
All of which is a reminder that the comparisons to Churchill have a double edge: As much as they may flatter Mr. Netanyahu, they also cheer his opponents. Churchill, after all, was ousted before World War II had even ended.
Ronen Bergman contributed reporting.
David M. Halbfinger is The Times’s Jerusalem bureau chief, leading coverage of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. He also held that post from 2017 to 2021. He was the politics editor from 2021 to 2025.
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