Yair Golan, leader of the left-wing Democrats, said “a strong people, a determined army and a home front behind them, that is how we were always victorious, and that is how we will win today.” And Avigdor Lieberman, leader of the right-wing Yisrael Beytenu party and a former deputy prime minister, who last week was excoriating Netanyahu for arming criminal militia-turned-clans opposed to Hamas in Gaza, quickly posted on social media: “The eternal people are not afraid.”
Netanyahu has been widely accused of gaslighting Israelis into thinking that striking a deal to end the fighting in Gaza now would leave Israel with existential threat on its border. There are plenty of Israelis, including former prime ministers Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak and former intelligence chiefs like Ya’akov Peri, who disagree with Bibi on that, and reckon he’s been manipulating and prolonging the Gaza war to maintain his grip on power. They also complain that Bibi is a war-maker and incapable of being a peacemaker.
But when it comes to Iran developing a nuclear bomb, there’s a widespread Israeli consensus that a nuclear-armed Khamenei regime would indeed constitute an existential danger to the Jewish state.
Of course, success breeds success. Who’s going to take too much public issue with Netanyahu over what Israel’s military and intelligence agencies have achieved with their offensive so far: killing the top four leaders of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the commander of Iran’s air force as well as a half-a-dozen top nuclear scientists; hitting Iran’s ballistic missile sites and further wrecking the country’s already weakened air defenses; and damaging Iranian nuclear production sites, though to what extent is yet unclear.
The Iranians played their hand poorly in the lead-up to Israel’s offensive by stringing out the nuclear negotiations with U.S. President Donald Trump’s team, providing Netanyahu with an opportunity to seize.
“An attack on Iran had become inevitable,” said retired Gen. Yossi Kuperwasser, a former member of Israel’s Iran nuclear negotiating team and now head of The Jerusalem Institute for Strategy.
