As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sipped his coffee Monday morning and opened his copy of The Jerusalem Post, he probably allowed himself a brief moment to smile. Monday marked his 75th birthday, and Israel’s longest-serving leader has had a year that has seen him come back from the brink.
Just as he has fended off many pretenders to his crown over the 17 years he has held power (over three different terms), the past few months have seen Netanyahu watch Israel’s enemies disappear into the ether.
In a series of audacious and meticulously executed operations, Israel took out three of its most notorious enemies in a matter of months, cementing its reputation for high-level intelligence and bold military strikes.
On July 13, Mohammed Deif, the elusive head of Hamas’s “military” wing, was killed in Gaza after an Israeli airstrike targeted his location. On July 31, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh met a similar fate, assassinated by an explosive device remotely detonated in his guesthouse during a visit to Iran. Israel’s ability to carry out such an operation deep within Tehran shocked the world.
But the hits didn’t stop there. In September, Israel orchestrated a massive beeper operation targeting Hezbollah terrorists, causing explosions that crippled the group’s communication systems and claimed the lives of 42 fighters and wounded thousands. Days later, a strike in Beirut killed Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s long-standing leader, in a precision airstrike on his underground command center.
Biden and Harris were wrong
These blows culminated last week in the killing of Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of the October 7 attack, as the leader was discovered running away through the streets of Rafah. Each assassination revealed the depth of Israel’s intelligence and the sheer audacity of its military strategy, shaking the very foundations of Hamas, Hezbollah, and their allies.
Netanyahu has also had to deal with the US administration and its perceived mixed support for Israel throughout the war. Despite the replenishment of dwindling military supplies and the arrival of the US’s THAAD anti-missile system recently in anticipation of further escalation with Iran, the Biden administration has at times been prickly towards Israel’s conduct of the war. Most noticeably when it came to Rafah.
President Joe Biden stated in May that he would halt some shipments of American weapons if Netanyahu ordered a major invasion of Rafah. Vice President Kamala Harris also told interviewers that she had “studied the maps” and that a ground invasion of the southern Gaza Strip city would be “a mistake.”
As the death of Sinwar proved, Biden and Harris were wrong. Bibi was right.
He has also seen a political revival within Israel. The assumption over the past year was that Netanyahu, who built his reputation as the no-nonsense leader who would keep the country safe both from Palestinian terrorists and Iranian nukes, could not survive the biggest security failure in the country’s history. However, he has not only survived. His party is now almost back to pre-October 7 strength according to polls.
A Channel 13 survey held since the killing of Sinwar showed Likud reclaiming its position as Israel’s largest party.Netanyahu is benefiting from an uptick in Israel’s success in the war, along with the lack of anyone out there who can pose a real challenge. Benny Gantz, Yair Lapid, and Avigdor Liberman are doing nothing to enthuse the nation or rally it around their leadership – simply slamming Netanyahu, which is Lapid’s and Liberman’s default mode, is not doing the trick.
It is only natural that the popularity of the leader of a nation at war falls and rises with the fortunes of that war, and right now, Netanyahu’s numbers are on the rise as the war is going better than it was a few months ago. He still has a large percentage of the population angry with him; angry at the lack of a hostage deal; angry that responsibility for October 7 has not yet been taken; angry that thousands of citizens still cannot return to their homes, but Netanyahu has been around the block before and knows how to play the political game.
What Bibi has done is buy time, both hoping and gambling that his political fortunes will change as the tide of the war turns – from the very outset, he said this would be a long war. It seems the tide may have turned for the prime minister.