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It is a record of abject failure. I am not speaking of Donald Trump, though I could be. Instead, I am talking about his partner in this terrible war.
Naturally, Trump has been the star of the show. He has been the face of the 40-day war on Iran, whether dialling up the threats against the country in foul, bloodthirsty language – “a whole civilisation will die tonight” – or announcing on his own social media platform a two-week ceasefire and the talks that are supposed to begin this weekend in Islamabad. But Trump has had an ally at his side, who only now is entering the spotlight. That ally is Benjamin Netanyahu.
He is the focus of global attention because, if the guns were meant to have been stilled across the Middle East, the Israeli prime minister apparently did not get the memo. Israel’s assault on Hezbollah – launched in response to the missiles fired at northern Israel by the group, an Iranian proxy that has long functioned as a shadow army inside Lebanon in defiance of the government in Beirut – has not paused. On the contrary, on Wednesday, hours after Trump had hailed his breakthrough with Tehran, Israel unleashed one of the deadliest single bombing offensives ever inflicted on Lebanon, a country that has already endured so much. Over the course of just 10 minutes, Israeli jets struck 100 targets across the capital and far beyond, killing at least 303 people and wounding more than 1,150 others, many of them civilians.
Israel argues that Trump’s deal does not cover Lebanon; Iran and the Pakistani mediators say it does. JD Vance says it’s all a “legitimate misunderstanding”. If so, it is one that needs to be resolved fast. For now, Netanyahu is trying to have it both ways, simultaneously bowing to pressure by agreeing to talks with the Lebanese government while vowing that the attacks on what Israel insists are Hezbollah launch sites will continue with “full force”.
There are two ways of judging Netanyahu: the view from abroad and the view at home. Often those diverge sharply. In the court of world opinion, Netanyahu was convicted long ago of the war crimes for which he remains wanted by the international criminal court in The Hague; he is the architect of the destruction of Gaza, Trump’s equal, or worse, in villainy. Domestically he has enjoyed a different, if far from universal, reputation: his supporters see him as Mr Security, the hawkish, seasoned operator who – say what you like about his ethical shortcomings and ongoing trial on corruption charges – protected his country against myriad enemies. Of the two reputations, it was the latter one that mattered, and matters, to him most. Protesters at Columbia or in Camden don’t vote in Knesset elections. It is the Israeli public that holds Netanyahu’s fate in its hands, at this moment especially: elections are due by 27 October at the very latest.
And what record will he be able to present to that domestic electorate, the one that judges him by his own lights? The central fact is that it was on his watch, while this supposed Mr Security sat in the prime minister’s chair, that Israel suffered the worst terrorist attack in its history on 7 October 2023. That day – when hundreds of Hamas men were able to cross from Gaza, unimpeded by a barely guarded boundary fence, and kill and torture Israeli civilians – that day alone should disqualify him from office. In most political systems, he would have been driven from power long ago.
But look what happened next, again from the point of view of the Israeli voter. Netanyahu promised “total victory” over Hamas, meaning the group’s removal from all power in Gaza, if not the organisation’s complete destruction. Despite a two-year campaign of the most brutal bombardment, causing the deaths of about 70,000 people, Netanyahu achieved nothing of the sort. In the part of Gaza that is not occupied by Israeli troops, Hamas is still master.
During that same war, Israel’s PM boasted that he had vanquished Hezbollah, destroying the group’s ability to menace northern Israel with rocket fire, so that tens of thousands of Israelis who had fled their homes in the north were now safe to return. Return they did, only to come under Hezbollah attack all over again once the militia decided to join Iran in this latest war – a war of choice, let us not forget, that was started by Netanyahu and Trump. For more than a month, it has been made painfully clear that claims of Hezbollah’s demise were greatly exaggerated. Yes, Israel killed the group’s leader, but the group itself lived on, able to rebuild its arsenal.
The war on Iran tells the same story. Last June, the US and Israel struck Iran in a 12-day confrontation that Trump claimed had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear programme and which Netanyahu described as a “historic victory that will stand for generations”. Maybe he was thinking in terms of the life cycle of fruit flies rather than people, because those generations lasted all of eight months. At the end of February, Tehran was once again said to pose an existential threat, the same threat that had supposedly been obliterated.
And what has been the result? Iran still has a stockpile of enriched uranium. It still, evidently, has a serious supply of missiles, because it was targeting its Gulf neighbours and Israeli cities right until the ceasefire was announced. And its rulers remain in place, more hardline than before, despite Netanyahu’s promise of regime change, and in a stronger position. Tehran has demonstrated to the world that, even without a nuclear bomb, it currently wields a mighty deterrent – a chokehold on the global economy in the form of the strait of Hormuz. If shipping traffic flows again, it will be at the pleasure of the Iranian regime, who will demand a hefty fee.
In other words, after the best part of 40 years warning of the danger posed by the Iranian regime, making that the leitmotif of his career, Netanyahu’s big achievement is to have fought a war that has left Tehran more capable of terrorising its neighbours and the wider world. Haaretz’s military affairs analyst, Amos Harel, captures it succinctly: “This is now the fourth time in a row – in Gaza, once in Lebanon and twice in Iran – that [Netanyahu’s] boasts of total victory and the removal of existential threats have been exposed as empty promises.”
But the failure runs deeper. It has become Netanyahu’s animating creed that Israel’s security is assured by one means only: hitting the country’s enemies and then hitting them again harder. But that approach only ever brings temporary respite. He cuts off the head of the snake, as he puts it, only for the head to grow back, often very quickly.
That’s because, in the words of the Israeli opposition politician and former general Yair Golan, Netanyahu “does not know how to turn military achievements into political security”. There is no attempt to seize on the clear, if tricky, diplomatic openings, no effort to turn Israel’s enemies’ enemies into friends. One example: the Lebanese government, and much of its people, are desperate to be rid of the Hezbollah cuckoo in their nest; but Netanyahu speaks to them only through bombs from the sky.
Netanyahu-ism has gained nothing, and it has come at a monstrously high price. Most obviously, in the lives of all those killed, whether in Rafah or the Bekaa valley or Israel itself. But it has also inflicted perhaps irreparable damage on Israel’s standing in the world. Every day Netanyahu remains in post, he makes his country more of a pariah. Witness last week’s grotesque scenes in the Knesset, as his government passed a racist law that will, in effect, impose the death penalty on Palestinians convicted of terrorist murderers, but not Jews. The bill was driven by the far-right minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, but Netanyahu went out of his way to turn up and vote for it.
Few outside Israel will care that Israelis spent every night of the past six, sleepless weeks in bomb shelters, while the days saw the schools closed and the country in a state of Covid-style semi-lockdown – but Israeli voters will. If Netanyahu loses this year’s election, polls suggest he will be replaced by a figure of the right arguing, in essence, that Netanyahu’s approach was the correct one, it just wasn’t executed properly. But there is a broader and deeper case to be made, one that says that Netanyahu has pursued the wrong strategy for decades; that, because security will never come by force alone, ultimately Israel will have to reach an accommodation with its neighbours, the Palestinians above all. Maybe, after Netanyahu’s serial failures have been so vividly exposed, Israelis will, at last, be ready to hear it.
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Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
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