Netanyahu certainly has personal motivations to prolong the war as much as possible — the fractiousness of his coalition, his own deep unpopularity, and the still realistic prospect of ending up in jail on corruption charges. He has also been fixated on Iran for decades — virtually alone among Israeli politicians, until 7 October — and has infamously fetishised Winston Churchill, with the War on Terror years melding this hodgepodge into a single delusional narrative where he himself is Churchill and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is Hitler planning to subjugate the West entirely (the complete opposite of Iran’s uber-conservative, anti expansionist foreign policy.)
Netanyahu with a graphic of a bomb used to represent Iran’s nuclear programme at the United Nations General Assembly in New York in 2012 (Photo: Lucas Jackson/ Reuters)But raising the stakes simply for fear of leaving the table is not a good enough explanation. Netanyahu doesn’t feel his pockets for any last coins among the lint balls. He bets the house — never his own house, of course — repeatedly, enthusiastically, with gusto.
The simplest answer to the question of what Netanyahu wants is: whatever I can get away with. The good news is that he does understand pushback when he meets it, especially if it’s unequivocal and offered up by a stronger actor than himself; as was the case when he was all but bullied, reportedly, into agreeing to the ceasefire in Gaza in December, ahead of Donald Trump’s inauguration. The bad news is that he’s extremely good at coaxing small compromises from anyone who could offer that pushback — now including, it seems at the time of writing, Trump .
Smoke rises following an Israeli attack in Tehran, Iran (Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA via Reuters)
What of these is achievable? There are many scenarios to play through. It would appear that Netanyahu sold Trump on the idea that Israel can achieve the first or even second objectives alone, and then have Iran immediately crawl back to the negotiating table. Total destruction of the programme was always fib — Israel lacks the munitions required to do deep and lasting damage to Iran’s nuclear programme without heavy American bombers, and now it depends if Trump will go along with the war he obviously didn’t want — and one that would define his presidency — or if he tells Netanyahu to cash it in. This is one endgame.
And finally, there is one endgame that would appeal peculiarly to Netanyahu as he appears through his actions, not through his rhetoric. It is this: no endgame as such. Nothing as tidy. Destroy Iran’s infrastructure, decapitate but not eliminate the old regime, instil a new regime but then leave it to hack it alone: foment permanent instability and civil war (and in the meantime, build trade alliances with the Arab states autocratic enough to eventually absorb popular disgust at Israel’s actions in Gaza and beyond.)
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This is a dangerous and terrible game to play for everyone in the region – the demolition of Iraq, a far lesser potential for chaos than Iran, produced Isis, among sundry other ills we’re only starting to come to terms with. It would also mire America permanently in a much larger forever war abroad, whether it wants to or not (or force it to retreat ignominiously, which is almost the same thing), signalling the final and fatal decline of American power.
Dimi Reider an Israeli journalist and editor, co-founder of +972 Magazine, founding editor of the Lead, and a senior fellow at the Othering and Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley
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