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In deeply divided Israel, even the dramatic scenes in the skies on Sunday are open to political interpretation.
For Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s supporters, the demonstration of Israeli defense technology against Iranian salvos, including hundreds of drones and missiles, is a sign that Netanyahu was right about what he had long warned about the Iranian threat. It’s proven.
His opponents don’t like to praise him, and they reserve praise for the Air Force.
“Like everything that has happened in Israel in recent years, this story is divided into two stories,” said Mazar Mualem, Israeli political commentator for Middle East news site Al-Monitor and author of recent biographies of Israeli leaders. talk.
“The division and polarization of Israeli society prevents people from seeing the big picture,” Muallem added.
Sunday’s Iranian barrage, launched after several senior Iranian military officials were killed in an Israeli attack on the Iranian embassy building in Damascus this month, comes at a dangerous time for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Domestically, he is an unpopular leader, with many feeling responsible for government policy and intelligence failures that led to the deadly Hamas-led attack in southern Israel on October 7. This led to Israel entering the war in Gaza. Abroad, Israel’s war effort, which has resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Gazans, has been the focus of international condemnation.
How he ultimately emerges from this episode may depend on what happens next.
Prime Minister Netanyahu now faces a choice. Could he respond with a strong counterattack against Iran, drawing Israel and other countries into a broader war? Or will they follow the coalition forces that absorbed the latest attack, which seriously injured a 7-year-old girl but caused limited damage, and helped defend Israel in the interest of regional stability?
Israel’s allies have called for restraint.
“The question is whether Israel will retaliate immediately or whether it will somehow surprise the Iranians,” said Ephraim Halevi, who served as head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency during the latter half of Netanyahu’s first term. . 1990s.
No Israeli leader has warned about Iran as consistently as Mr. Netanyahu, or for that matter, has been in office for as long. He is Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, having been in power for about 17 years overall.
Since his first year in office in 1996, Prime Minister Netanyahu has warned that Iran’s nuclear arsenal would be catastrophic and that time was running out. For nearly 30 years now, he has been sounding the same alarm.
Iran maintains a network of proxy militias across the region, including the Gaza Strip, and the government funds and supplies Gaza with weapons.Some militias in Yemen, Syria and Lebanon It is fighting Israel during its war with Hamas, distracting the Israeli government and military.
But perhaps more troubling, experts say, is that Iran is closer than ever to acquiring a nuclear weapon. Mr. Netanyahu’s supporters still believe that he was the one who put Iran’s nuclear program on the world’s agenda at the time, giving Israel and its allies, including the United States, a powerful, multi-layered system with vast interception airspace. He still praises the country for investing in air defense systems. The majority of Iranian drones and missiles were shot down this weekend before reaching Israel.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has sometimes resorted to tricks and antics to draw attention to Iran’s progress in its nuclear program, and in the past has made opposition to Iran a key part of his global diplomacy. Once, at the United Nations General Assembly, he held up a cartoon-like drawing of a bomb marked with red lines indicating enrichment levels. Another time, at the Munich Security Conference, he waved around the remains of an Iranian drone sent from Syria and shot down by Israel.
“Everywhere he went, he talked about it,” said Jeremy Issacharoff, a former Israeli ambassador to Germany and a longtime Foreign Ministry point person coordinating diplomatic efforts on regional security and the Iranian threat. Reminisce.
Although Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s campaign against Iran has at times significantly strained relations between Israel and the American president, bipartisan support for Israel in the United States has long been considered a strategic asset.
Around 2012, Mr. Netanyahu infuriated the Obama administration by urging President Barack Obama to set a clear “red line” against Iran’s nuclear program, which would encourage the United States to launch a military attack. Before that, the Israeli prime minister had been planning a unilateral attack on Israel in the face of stiff opposition from Washington and public criticism from a series of former Israeli security chiefs. It is by no means clear whether Prime Minister Netanyahu is bluffing, and the possibility of an imminent attack has receded.
And in 2015, Obama delivered an impassioned speech to a joint session of Congress denouncing what he called the “bad deal” the United States and other world powers are negotiating with Iran to curb its nuclear program. I challenged Mr.
When President Donald J. Trump took power, Mr. Netanyahu encouraged Israel to withdraw from the deal, a move many Israeli experts called a grave mistake and a failure of Mr. Netanyahu’s Iran policy. I’m here.
“Since then, there have been no constraints on the program,” Issacharoff said, adding: “We have never made so much progress.”
But it was also on Mr. Netanyahu’s watch that Israel established diplomatic relations with more Arab countries considered part of the moderate, anti-Iranian axis, including the United Arab Emirates.
Regardless of what happens next, Netanyahu’s biographer Muallem said, “Bibi is still active,” referring to him by his nickname. “He’s a central figure, but he’s not done diplomatically or politically. And he plays the long game.”
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