Netanyahu’s last war?

As Israel wages what is expected to be a weeks-long campaign against Iran, the stakes are sky-high – not only for the people of Israel and the rogue regime in Tehran but for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself.

Netanyahu – Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, known by some as “King Bibi” – has spent decades locked in a shadow war with Iran, carefully managing covert operations and calibrated strikes to avoid an all-out conflict.

But now, at age 75 and likely in his final term in office, Netanyahu appears to be going all in – gambling his political legacy on a definitive victory over Iran.

The October 7 massacre profoundly damaged that legacy – a catastrophic intelligence and security failure that led to the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. Once hailed as “Mr. Security,” Netanyahu is now blamed by much of the Israeli public not only for the attack itself but for a drawn-out war that has so far failed to eliminate Hamas or bring all of the hostages home.

Since the 1990s, Netanyahu has repeatedly warned that Iran poses an “existential threat” to the State of Israel. His warnings were so persistent that in 2012, former IDF Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz accused him of being driven by a “messianic conviction to bomb Iran.” Still, for most of his career, Netanyahu held back – believing he had too much to lose by striking the head of the Iranian octopus.

That calculus has now changed. After 20 months of war and political upheaval, Netanyahu has little left to lose – and everything to gain – from defeating Iran.

“For Netanyahu, this is personal,” Nadav Shtrauchler, a former advisor to the prime minister, told The New York Times. “This is the big picture that he has been aiming for. This is his legacy.”

On Friday, Netanyahu released a video message reminding the public that he has been warning about a nuclear Iran for 40 years – and in this case, he was telling the truth. 

He spoke about the threat as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations in the 1980s, again during his first term as prime minister in the 1990s, and made it his signature issue when he returned to office in 2009.

Netanyahu would often say that his top three concerns were “Iran, Iran, and Iran.” Some have said that he believed he had been put in power for one primary mission: to stop Iran’s nuclear ambitions – and, by extension, to prevent the destruction of the State of Israel.

He clashed publicly and frequently with former U.S. President Barack Obama over Iran. 

Netanyahu famously pushed for harsh U.S. sanctions after standing at the United Nations in 2012 with a cartoon drawing of a nuclear bomb and a red marker, drawing a literal red line below the fuse. In 2015, he went a step further, defying Obama by addressing Congress, urging lawmakers not to support the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). This Iranian nuclear deal was ultimately signed.

Netanyahu reportedly planned a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities in 2012, but the Obama administration managed to stop him. Over time, even Iranian officials began mocking Netanyahu as all talk and no action.

When Donald Trump entered the White House in 2017, Netanyahu seized the opportunity. He lobbied the new president to withdraw from the JCPOA, which Trump did in 2018, reimposing crippling sanctions on Iran.

The Biden administration, however, attempted to re-enter the U.S. into the nuclear deal, but the effort ultimately fell apart. More recently, as Trump returned to the political stage, Netanyahu pushed him to work with Israel on a military operation against Iran. But even Trump seemed to prefer a diplomatic solution.

Trump had given the negotiations with Iran a 60-day window – a window that expired on Thursday.

Now, after decades of sounding the alarm and avoiding direct confrontation, Netanyahu made a fateful choice. A prime minister who for decades took a cautious, risk-averse approach to national security suddenly decided to act. He authorized a preemptive Israeli airstrike to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction that could be used against the Jewish state.

To be fair to the prime minister, this move wasn’t solely about his political legacy. On Thursday, all the stars aligned – making the strike both strategically and practically viable.

First, the situation had “reached the point of no return,” according to IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN’s nuclear watchdog, warned that Iran had significantly accelerated its uranium enrichment program and violated its non-proliferation commitments.

In his address, Netanyahu claimed that Iran now possesses enough enriched uranium to build nine nuclear weapons – a figure some experts say may be an understatement. And as Israelis have seen since Friday night, Iran already has missiles capable of hitting every part of the country. According to Netanyahu, the regime was planning to produce thousands more over the coming years.

At the same time, many of the deterrents that may have previously stopped Israel had been weakened or had disappeared.

Iran’s regional proxies are weaker than ever. In response to Hamas’ brutal October 7 attack, Israel has taken control of large areas of Gaza and eliminated much of the terror group’s leadership. In Lebanon, the IDF has pummeled Hezbollah. The Houthis in Yemen are weakened, and the Syrian regime fell.

In April and October of last year, Israel responded to two Iranian attacks with limited strikes that reportedly crippled much of Iran’s air defense network. As a result, Iran’s nuclear facilities are now more exposed than ever, giving Israel “the opportunity to achieve our most important goal – to thwart and eliminate the existential threat,” Defense Minister Israel Katz said in November.

While the Trump administration had been pursuing a diplomatic deal with Iran and had advised Netanyahu against taking military action against the regime, even that obstacle had begun to fade. Trump himself began expressing doubts about the prospects of reaching a new agreement.

On the day of the Israeli strike, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio emphasized that Israel had acted “unilaterally” and that the United States was “not involved in strikes against Iran.” That was true. But shortly afterward, Trump told Reuters, “We knew everything, and I tried to save Iran humiliation and death. I tried to save them very hard because I would have loved to have seen a deal worked out.”

Israel has already achieved significant tactical success in Iran, but military experts in multiple briefings have cautioned that dismantling the country’s nuclear program will not be easy. Israel successfully struck Iraq’s nuclear reactor in 1981 and Syria’s in 2007 – but Iran’s program is far more advanced, heavily fortified, and widely dispersed. That’s why this operation could take weeks, not days.

Moreover, even if Israel succeeds in destroying large portions of the program, it’s unclear whether Iran couldn’t simply rebuild. Israel has also targeted more than a dozen key nuclear scientists, but it remains uncertain how deep Iran’s institutional knowledge runs.

Still, Netanyahu is banking on a decisive victory – one that might erase the stain of his failure to prevent the October 7 massacre and instead cement his legacy as the prime minister who stopped Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

“We can’t leave these threats for the next generation,” Netanyahu said. “Because if we don’t act now, there will not be another generation.”

He added, “History will record that our generation stood its ground, acted in time and secured our common future.”

What Netanyahu clearly wants is for history to remember him as the generational leader who did precisely that.