Netanyahu took a giant gamble in confronting Iran – it paid off
The normally risk-averse Israeli leader struck Iran without the promise of US aid but with a shrewd sense of Trump’s likely reaction.
Benjamin Netanyahu has spent three decades sounding the alarm about Iran’s nuclear program. With the ferocity of a biblical prophet, he warned that Iran was an existential threat to Israel. But his dire rhetoric was always balanced by a wily tactician’s caution, especially in gauging the military and political ramifications of acting against Iran.
On June 12, that calculus changed. Netanyahu made what was undoubtedly the biggest gamble of his long political career, ordering the Israeli air force to strike Iran alone, without any assurance that the US would join and help him finish the job.
So far, the decision appears to have paid off. The operation has proved Israel’s military and intelligence supremacy over Iran, shifting the balance of power in the Middle East and confirming Israel’s place as the superpower of the region.
More than that, Netanyahu seems to have anticipated with uncanny insight the likely reaction of Donald Trump to Israel’s gambit. For the first time in the long history of the two countries’ close relationship, US forces joined an Israeli military campaign, providing the massive firepower needed to complete the attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
President Trump’s support was a mind-spinning turnaround in Netanyahu’s recent relations with the US In April, Trump had made a surprise announcement in front of Netanyahu at the White House, declaring that the US would engage Iran in direct nuclear talks, something the Israelis have long said would bear no fruit. A month later, Trump appeared to have sidelined Israel, visiting only Gulf allies in the Middle East in his first trip abroad since returning to office.
Netanyahu was born in 1949 in Tel Aviv and raised in Jerusalem. The future prime minister spent many years of his childhood living in the US and ultimately studied architecture and business at MIT.
He rose to prominence for his gifted oratory skills and perfect English, defending Israel on news stations across the US while working at Israel’s embassy in Washington, DC. His public profile in Israel was helped by the fame of his older brother, Yonatan Netanyahu, who led Israel’s most elite commando unit before falling in battle in a famous hostage rescue operation in Entebbe, Uganda, in 1976.
Netanyahu has cast his father, the late Benzion Netanyahu, a noted historian of medieval Jewry and right-wing Zionist, as the figure who imparted to him the mission to prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons and the will to do so. On June 20, Netanyahu posted on X an old speech by his then 100-year-old father, in which he warned of the existential threat a nuclear Iran posed. The elder Netanyahu also spoke of how Israel must meet that threat: “Stare unflinchingly at the danger, calmly consider what needs to be done, and be ready to enter the fray when the chances of success are reasonable.”
Netanyahu has been warning of the nuclear threat posed by Iran since at least the early 1990s. But it wasn’t a foregone conclusion that he would ever pull the trigger. Within Israel, he has the reputation of being risk-averse, a trait his critics say is driven by his own political calculations and drive to stay in power. His years of warning about Iran without ever making a move were exhibit A that he was incapable of being decisive.
Netanyahu seriously considered attacking Iran in 2010, 2011 and 2012. But he couldn’t get his military or intelligence chiefs on board with the plan. Deciding it was too risky to try to go ahead without their approval, he backed off.
What transformed the strategic situation for Israel was the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas, considered the worst intelligence failure in Israeli history, when thousands of militants infiltrated southern Israel from Gaza, killing around 1200 people and taking another 251 hostage. In the shock and outrage that followed, Netanyahu was able to lay the groundwork for a campaign not just to eliminate Hamas, a longstanding Iranian client, but to mount a multi-front war against Iran’s network of allied militias in the region, its so-called “ring of fire.”
In September 2024, Israel launched a bold military and intelligence operation targeting the Lebanese militia Hezbollah, which had been firing missiles at Israel since the Oct. 7 attack, saying it wouldn’t stop until the Israelis retreated from Gaza. Hezbollah eventually caved after Israel succeeded in killing its senior leadership, including longtime chief Hassan Nasrallah.
By November, Israel and Lebanon had agreed to a ceasefire that required Hezbollah to pull its forces back from the border with Israel. The group has refrained from attacking Israel since then, even as Israel continues to strike Hezbollah assets despite the ceasefire.
It was that same month, in the wake of President Trump’s re-election, that Netanyahu made the decision to strike Iran, Netanyahu said in a speech this month. After years of tension with the Biden administration, he decided the political winds had shifted in his favour. Israel had also knocked out most of Iran’s aerial defences in an exchange of missiles that October. Netanyahu decided to strike Iran around April, he said.
Developments in Syria added to his confidence. In December, anti-Assad forces, emboldened by Israel’s weakening of Hezbollah, marched on Damascus and overthrew the Syrian regime, eliminating one of Iran’s key allies and cutting off a route for Tehran to resupply Hezbollah.
It seemed that Netanyahu’s vision of a new Middle East, with a weakened Iran, was taking shape. All that remained was Israel’s biggest foe, Tehran itself.
It was now only the US standing in Netanyahu’s way. Israel was facing a growing isolationist wing in the Republican Party that called for the president to stay out of foreign entanglements and showed an increasingly hostile attitude toward Israel.
“For different reasons it wasn’t able to happen exactly on this date,” Netanyahu said of his plan to strike Iran around April. That was the same month that President Trump surprised Netanyahu in a White House meeting by saying he was beginning direct negotiations with Iran.
Tensions between Israel and the US abounded in the period leading up to the June offensive. The US struck a deal with Yemen’s Houthi rebels to refrain from attacking American ships while allowing the group to continue hitting Israel. Deadlocked negotiations between Israel and Hamas were also a source of frustration for Trump, as Netanyahu refused to end the war in Gaza. In May, the US struck its own deal with Hamas for the release of the last living American hostage in Gaza, sidelining and worrying Israel.
But Netanyahu persisted. He gave his closest confidant, former ambassador to the US Ron Dermer, the task of convincing the Trump administration that the only way to stop Iran’s nuclear ambitions was an Israeli military strike. In a phone call with Netanyahu on June 12, Trump relented, according to officials familiar with the call, saying that Israel could proceed on its own but the US wouldn’t get involved.
Overnight, as Trump watched Israel land successful opening blows, he changed his tune. He expressed admiration for the strikes on social media and hinted in calls to reporters that the US had played a bigger role than known, even though hours earlier Secretary of State Marco Rubio released a statement saying that Israel had acted alone.
The riskiest part of Netanyahu’s bet was proceeding with an Israeli operation without any assurance that the US would join and use the bunker-buster bombs that could destroy Iran’s most important nuclear facility. An Israeli effort to try to take out a site like Fordow, built hundreds of feet into the earth, would have required Israeli commando units and put soldiers’ lives at risk, say Israeli military analysts. And without the US, Israel would have had no clear exit strategy for the operation.
The American strike on three Iranian nuclear facilities on the 10th day of the conflict was the moment when Netanyahu’s gamble truly paid off. It was the first time that US forces had ever joined in an Israeli offensive. No Israeli or American soldiers were killed in the 12-day operation against Iran.
It was ultimately Netanyahu’s willingness to go it alone against Iran, at great political risk to himself, that helped convince President Trump that Israel was fully committed to the operation, said David Friedman, former US ambassador to Israel in Trump’s first term. “Once he saw that, and the overwhelming dominance of the Israeli air force, he was prepared to enter into an unprecedented partnership with Israel, both in terms of its success and its scope.”
“To take such a decision is a huge risk,” said Israel Ziv, a former senior Israeli general who is usually a critic of Netanyahu. “The credit should go to Netanyahu for making that decision while the United States was not fully behind him.”
Netanyahu still faces the challenge of turning the military success into a diplomatic victory that might avert another Iran-Israel confrontation in a few years. “In the short run it worked very well,” said Michael Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to the US. “The battle now moves from the battlefield to the negotiating table.”
It’s also still unclear how far the Israeli-American attack has set back Iran’s nuclear capabilities. It may simply drive Tehran’s program further underground, making it more difficult for Israel and the US to monitor.
The more immediate problems for Netanyahu are political. In an effort to capitalise on the Israeli public’s broad support for the attack on Iran, he is considering calling snap elections, according to a person close to the Netanyahu family. In recent days, he’s made traditional campaign stops, including at the Western Wall, where he donned a traditional blue and white prayer shawl and skullcap.
He also visited a falafel shop in the working class town of Bat Yam, a Netanyahu stronghold, which was hit by an Iranian ballistic missile during the war. After largely avoiding the public since the Oct. 7 attacks, he walked through crowds of people chanting, “Bibi the king of Israel, long may he live.”
But he’s still facing an uphill battle, both domestically and internationally. Already a deeply divisive figure in Israel, his popularity took a massive hit after the Hamas attack.
Before the Iranian offensive, polls showed that his current coalition would lose power if an election was held now.
And he’s become a global pariah due to growing international opposition to the war in Gaza, which has killed over 56,000 Palestinians, according to local health authorities, who don’t say how many were combatants. He’s facing an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The war in Gaza scuttled what would have been a groundbreaking deal to normalise relations with Saudi Arabia. Netanyahu has continued to defy demands from would-be Arab allies that he agree to a pathway toward a Palestinian state, something that could put normalisation back on track.
Most Israelis want the war in Gaza to end and for Netanyahu to strike a deal that would bring the living hostages and the bodies of the deceased home. Israeli troops are exhausted after 20 months of war, and there’s growing frustration that the offensive has turned into a quagmire.
There are early signs that the Iran offensive may have helped stabilise Netanyahu’s standing in the polls, although Israelis still by and large distrust him, said Tamar Hermann, a pollster at the Israel Democracy Institute think tank in Jerusalem, who conducted a poll on Monday that has yet to be published. Netanyahu, who is Israel’s longest-serving leader, has faced mass protests calling for his ouster ever since 2020. He was indicted for corruption, fraud and breach of trust in 2019, charges he denies, and began testifying in his trial several times a week in December.
“I don’t think we will have a substantial change,” Hermann said. “It strengthened his standing among his supporters, and it didn’t strengthen his status among those who oppose him.”
The soonest Netanyahu can hold elections in Israel is in three months, but it could take even longer due to the Knesset recess, Hermann said. That leaves a lot of time for things to change on the ground. An Israeli Channel 12 poll taken on Tuesday showed that Netanyahu still couldn’t form a coalition even after the Iran war.
But Netanyahu could potentially win over more voters if he produces a deal to end the war in Gaza and bring the remaining hostages home or if he clinches regional normalisation deals with countries like Saudi Arabia. For both, he would likely have to commit to some long-term plan for Gaza that would include Palestinian leadership and probably a pathway to statehood, something he has promised he would never allow to happen.
Over the course of his long career, Netanyahu has swung back and forth between the roles of right-wing hawk and bridge-builder to the centre and left, said Aviv Bushinsky, a former chief of staff to the prime minister.
“Netanyahu can reinvent himself, and now he has enough leverage to do it,” she said.
Wall Street Journal
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