“People who can’t be happy when something important happens for the country just because it gets Netanyahu good polling — their priorities are off.” So said the Israeli Prime Minister’s most reliably ferocious critic. Opposition Leader Yair Lapid has worked tirelessly for years to unseat Netanyahu, but even he fundamentally supported the strikes on Iran. This shouldn’t, however, come as a surprise. It’s not about shared politics or flag-rallying in wartime — but about the unique threat that Israelis believe Iran poses to their very lives.
Israelis are famously disputatious, but not on one issue: Iran. A major regional power, whose government is openly sworn to, and invests immense efforts in, Israel’s literal destruction. Unlike the conflict with the Palestinians, Israel’s conflict with Iran is between states — not between peoples, not over independence, and not over territory. Israelis do not see Iran’s people as enemies but rather as a society groaning under a theocratic police state. In fact, Israel’s good relations with Iran before the Revolution are still a living memory. (Israel’s Iranian expats have their own radio station, alongside Israel’s public radio’s daily programme in Farsi.) One of Israel’s most famous singers, Rita, is just one of any number of Iranian-Israeli artists who draw on the Iranian culture they grew up in.
Crucially, Israel and Iran are sovereign states, with all that that entails. Certainly, both see themselves as part of larger, more complicated projects beyond their own territories — Israel as a Jewish and democratic nation-state and Iran as regional successor to the Persian Empire, leader of global Shiism and, hopefully, of Islamism’s theocratic universalism too. But these adjectives jostle on top of a foundational basis that is the hallmark of sovereignty — they both are states which, by Max Weber’s celebrated definition, hold a territory’s monopoly of legitimate violence. It is this lowest common denominator that makes international law among states of wildly differing cultures, religions, world views, because they can justifiably hold one another to account.
Iran, then, is a state, large and powerful, with the avowed aim, and material and political resources, to wage a decades-long campaign for the elimination, pure and simple, of another state. Iran’s target is far away, and so it has for decades made use of skilful proxies — the Assad regime in Syria, and above all Hezbollah and Hamas, who, as non-state actors have worked to destabilise the region as a whole and were able in their struggle to adopt the language of resistance and liberation. October 7 made clear to everyone in Israel what this “liberation” means. Nobody can doubt anymore that the armed Islamist groups calling for death to Israel are saying exactly what they mean.
This fundamental consensus on Iran runs through Israeli society. It also overwhelmingly shapes the approach of its long-running Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and goes a long way towards explaining how a man, so truly despised by so many proud and patriotic Israelis, has stayed in power for so long.
Netanyahu’s signature style is strategic caution and tactical audacity in the service of grim realism. His father Benzion, opponent of the UN Partition Plan of 1947 and historian of the Spanish Inquisition, imparted a stark and pessimistic worldview to his son: that Jews would never be accepted in non-Jewish society and that for Jews, optimism is suicidal.
A keen student of policy and history and astute observer of societal and economic trends, the younger Netanyahu, educated in the US, before and after his military service came to prominence in the Eighties as a government spokesman and UN Ambassador, mixing cosmopolitan eloquence with hardline militancy and ruthless ambition. His mix of caution and volubility has served him well, keeping generations of rivals off-balance and guessing. He has always been reluctant to make large decisions, wage full-fledged wars or pursue diplomatic gambits and their inevitable risks, preferring endlessly to tack between statesmanship and partisanship, making confederates, religious and secular, wealthy and poor, who all agree that he is their man, even if he is never to be trusted. This has been crucial to his remarkable political longevity as time and again he dances to the brink of outright extremism without ever quite stepping over, speaking the languages of diplomacy and rabble-rousing with equal fluency. Outlasting all his rivals and most of his proteges, he has come to see himself as Israel’s indispensable leader, the only one with the Churchillian vision, skill and world-class stature capable of confronting the uniquely existential threat of a nuclear Iran.
“His mix of caution and volubility has served him well, keeping generations of rivals off-balance and guessing.”
Netanyahu is not a religious man. His creed does not teach about redemption, whether religious or socialist, but about apocalypse, and his destiny in trying to forestall it. And that’s clear from his mission, which has an urgency to it: to prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapon at all costs, a theme of his for decades (as when, in 2009, he stood at the rostrum of the UN, holding up the blueprints for Auschwitz, and castigating Iran’s then-President and chief Holocaust denier, Mahmous Ahmanadinejad, “have you no shame?”. His disenchantment with anyone’s vision of redemption has given him plenty of room to manoeuvre. The end has for him justified every means. He has made and broken conventions with the religious and the secular, with Left and Right, even flirting with bringing Arabs into a coalition. He has been willing to exploit and abandon supporters and friends, to court dictators from Russia to Qatar, and to tolerate Hamas’s hold on Gaza until October 7. He, alone among the leaders responsible for that day’s catastrophic failure and the decisions leading up to it, has consistently refused to take responsibility; his legendary pettiness, arrogance and grandiosity aside, his justification, one openly shared by his his fervent followers and tacitly by many others, is that only he was capable of taking on Iran.
His dogged avoidance of big moves and hard decisions has, the truth be told, well-suited an Israeli polity, whose defining dilemmas as a Jewish and democratic state in a treacherous neighbourhood, fated to share with Palestinians a tortured past and radically uncertain future, can seem insoluble. And a polity which has become used to being roundly condemned in international fora and opinion for almost anything it does.
Netanyahu was never an idealist, but his early public decades were nonetheless marked by genuine commitment to neo-conservative democratic principles and free market reforms. But these gave way as his legal troubles mounted. Facing multiple charges of corruption, self-dealing in arms purchases and illegally seeking to control the media, he resolved to control the judiciary to make sure he could stay in power with any challenges. He increasingly characterised reasonable debates over necessary judicial reforms as threats to Israeli democracy by fifth columnists, knowing that only the fear of Iran could give such accusations any public traction.
Embracing a turbocharged Israeli version of the populism sweeping the democratic world, stoking resentments and appealing to sentiments of patriotism and self-sacrifice he became a charter member of the post-liberal democratic club, helping Viktor Orbán as well as Donald Trump. Over the years, he built a TV network and army of internet to hurl accusations of treason and worse against the judiciary, civil service and academia — and the military, intelligence and security services too.
The last vestiges of his earlier, genuinely held free market beliefs vanished when he aligned himself with the growing ultraorthodox bloc whose overwhelming issue is securing the military exemptions that keep their young men, along with the rest of their constituents in their own carefully insulated educational, social cultural institutions and out of the work-force as whole. Similarly, deeming it necessary for political survival, he gave senior cabinet positions to fire-breathing religious ultranationalists, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich — the kinds he had avoided being seen or working with for years.
It all came to a head in 2023, well before October 7. His firebrand Justice Minister, Yuval Levin, put forward a stunning array of sweeping legal changes that would give the governing Coalition permanent control over the judiciary and media and much else.
The country was rocked for months by massive demonstrations, against this perceived assault on the rule of law. They were attended by former generals, massive numbers of military reservists and even Netanyahu’s own former Likud Party colleagues, who saw him hijacking legal processes and institutions for partisan, personal, authoritarian ends and found themselves, too, denounced as traitors by Netanyahu’s spokesmen. In the days after October 7, Israelis rallied across partisan lines, broadly supporting the two aims of removing Hamas and returning the hostages and enabling civilians driven from the South by terror and the North by Hezbollah’s rockets, to return to their homes. The devil was, however, in the details: removing Hamas would require creating some sort of Palestinian governing authority in Gaza, and returning the hostages would prioritise the lives of individual hostages over a national collective interest which some cabinet members defined as Judaising Gaza. What’s more, Netanyahu’s ultraorthodox coalition partners demanded legislation that would enshrine their collective draft exemption and state welfare once and for all. Not surprisingly, the prewar protests began to return, featuring exhausted reserve soldiers and the wretched families of hostages — for whom Netanyahu didn’t hide his annoyance and disdain.
In recent months, the country had been shaken even further by revelations that Qatar had been financing not only Hamas, but members of Netanyahu’s staff, including, one deeply knowledgeable observer told me, the same one responsible for creating his legion of trolls. In response, he fired the head of the General Security Services, for putting loyalty to state institutions above his loyalty to him.
What, then, after all this could lead nearly the entire Israeli political spectrum, lead people like me who week after week demonstrated against Netanyahu, who truly see him as a would-be authoritarian and a mortal threat to Israel’s future as Jewish and Democratic state, to support his military campaign in Iran? It is the sheer threat of a nuclear Iran. The measure of the distance how many of us have to travel to say that we support Netanyahu in this war is the measure of the undeniable threat of a nuclear Iran, to Israel, to the Jewish people, and to the world.
“Deeming it necessary for political survival, he gave senior cabinet positions to fire-breathing religious ultranationalists.”
Over the past year, the military and intelligence services whose patriotism Netanyahu regularly devalued, effectively disarmed the Syrian Army and Hezbollah, making it possible to turn, in a brief, stunningly successful campaign to turn against their patron, as the nuclear clock was ticking down.
Netanyahu is perhaps Israel’s greatest living sociologist, and has, for decades, played Israeli politics like a fiddle. Everything that he has done has been born of his utterly sincere conviction that his political interest and the Israeli national interest truly are one and the same. And so anything that keeps him in power is justified. His moral justification has been the very real threat of Iran. Whether others could have done the same, or whether he could have done this without tearing Israeli society apart, is something we and historians will be trying to figure out for years to come.
Now there is a ceasefire, Israel and Iran are licking their wounds and thinking of what comes next. Netanyahu’s sagging poll ratings have been ticking up, though the public still hopes to replace the current government. During the pre-war protests over the judicial overhaul, Israel’s centre-left parties and civil society, after years of drift, found their voice, and it was thunderous. If, indeed, the immediate threat of Iran has for now passed, one hopes they will assert themselves and offer a weary public a patriotic, principled alternative. But it won’t be easy.
Netanyahu was in some ways a harbinger and one of the progenitors of the new, post-liberal world taking shape before our eyes. This new dispensation has arisen on the ruins of a liberal order that in many ways lost touch with its own deepest commitments, and its nerve. The proven courage and fortitude of the Israel’s centre-left is facing a historic opportunity, and a new test.
