Victory has arrived. Benjamin Netanyahu’s 30-year dream has been realized, and only a fool would belittle this triumph’s strategic scope and political address.
Iran’s nuclear program is a shambles. Scores of top generals and nuclear scientists are dead.
The antiaircraft batteries, which were supposed to fend off our fighter jets, are gone, along with some two-thirds of Iran’s ballistic missiles.
Defensively, the most massive missile attack ever waged on a Western country has failed.
Yes, 28 citizens were killed, and several dozen apartment buildings were hit, along with a hospital, an oil refinery, and a power station – but 90% of the missiles were intercepted, and only one of more than 500 explosive drones managed to hit a target.
Strategically, what began with the decimation of Hezbollah and Hamas, and then proceeded to the downfall of Iran’s Syrian outpost, has now been punctuated with a devastating blow to the anti-Israeli alliance that Iran had built and fueled for years.
The defeat of this scourge took decades of diligent work by the Mossad, Military Intelligence, the air force, and the military industries – all of which now restored the deterrence that Israel had lost in October 2023.
As this column predicted and recommended, retribution for the surprise attack on the western Negev reached its spiritual source and strategic backbone – the Islamic Republic of Iran.
HISTORIANS WILL debate the ownership of Operation Rising Lion’s two parts: the planning of the attack, and the decision to wage it.
The planning, they will agree, harks back to Ariel Sharon, who appointed in 2002 a bellicose head to the Mossad – Meir Dagan – who ignited the proactive spirit with which the spy agency has treated the Iranian threat ever since his arrival.
The painstaking work that demanded the killing of so many generals and scientists was the collective accomplishment of Dagan, his three successors, and the thousands of agents they recruited, trained, and assigned.
The same, of course, goes for the air force, whose performance astonished the world.
The air superiority Israel’s pilots established in Iran in 48 hours is what the mighty Russian air force has not established in Ukraine over more than three years.
The same goes for the defensive effort, which can be expected to be further improved after the past two weeks’ lessons have been learned.
Kudos for the attack’s planning must therefore go to thousands of people in multiple outfits over nearly a quarter of a century.
That cannot be said about the decision to attack, a daunting task that fell on the shoulders of one man: Benjamin Netanyahu.
FEW DECISIONS ever taken in this country can be compared with what deciding to attack Iran involved.
The two that come to mind are Levi Eshkol’s decision in June 1967 to attack the three armies that besieged Israel, and David Ben-Gurion’s decision in May 1948 to declare Israel’s establishment.
Other grand decisions, like Menachem Begin’s order to attack the Iraqi reactor in 1981 or Yitzhak Rabin’s to send troops to Entebbe in 1976, were militarily much less complex, and strategically not nearly as risky as attacking a power like Iran.
Netanyahu's correct move with Iran
Netanyahu made the right decision, Israelis across the political spectrum agree, and he took it pretty much alone.
It took courage, vision, and resolve, and for that he will forever be credited, regardless of the attack’s results, but doubly so considering its success.
Moreover, Netanyahu – and his loyal aide Ron Dermer – skillfully harnessed Uncle Sam for the attack, in all its dimensions: strategically, politically, and, for good measure, militarily, as American stealth bombers minced Iranian nuclear plants.
This attack’s geopolitical implications are huge. American resolve, a fading memory in this neighborhood since Barack Obama’s hollow threats on Syria when it gassed its people, has returned with a fury.
From Cairo and Riyadh, to Moscow and Beijing, all now realize that Washington has lost none of its might and is prepared to use it to defend its allies.
Understandably, then, Netanyahu is now reportedly considering cashing in on his victory by calling a snap election. It’s a good idea, but for reasons entirely different from what Netanyahu might assume.
Netanyahu's past mistakes cannot be forgotten
NETANYAHU’S HOPE is that Operation Rising Lion will erase the memory of the October 7, 2023, debacle and impress swing voters so deeply that they will hand him a landslide victory.
That won’t happen.
Yes, Netanyahu’s victory in Iran is remarkable and will surely be recalled as his career’s crowning achievement. However, just like this accomplishment is his, the fiasco that preceded it is also his.
As initial postwar polls indicate, some one-fifth of Netanyahu’s voters have abandoned him, and his current coalition of 68 lawmakers is set to shrink by some 30%.
The reasons for this avalanche are three: Netanyahu failed to grieve with this grieving country; he waged war on the judiciary; and he defended ultra-Orthodoxy’s draft dodging even when most Israelis lost patience for what they see as gross injustice, hypocrisy, and abuse.
Netanyahu possibly doesn’t feel the scorn Israelis feel when he waltzes with draft dodgers, the shame they feel when he libels judges, the despair they feel when he blames others for his own failures, and the wrath they feel in the face of his failure, to this day, to visit the kibbutzniks whose loved ones were the main victims of the October 7 massacre by Hamas.
Your failure to feel us, Bibi, is what the next election will be all about. That’s why a snap election, after all you have put us through, is a great idea; a poll that will finally make you feel what we feel as we hand you the defeat that will end your career, unless you do before that election what you would anyhow have to do after it: retire.
www.MiddleIsrael.net
The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is the author of Ha’Sfar Ha’Yehudi Ha’Aharon (The Last Jewish Frontier, Yediot Sefarim, 2025), a sequel to Theodor Herzl’s The Old New Land.