Netanyahu rebounds after political and military successes
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had a spectacular and dramatic week.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attends a debate at the Knesset on the inclusion of MK Gideon Sa’ar as a minister in the government, Sept. 30, 2024. Photo: Yonatan Sindel/Flash90.
On Sunday, he scored a political achievement when New Hope Party chairman Gideon Sa’ar decided to join the government coalition.
Also on Sunday, a poll released by Channel 14 and conducted by Direct Polls showed that if elections were held today, Netanyahu’s Likud Party would emerge as the largest, garnering 31 Knesset seats, and Netanyahu’s right-religious bloc would win 61 mandate. It was the first poll since the war began on Oct. 7 to show the government coalition winning an absolute majority.
Sa’ar, a former member of the Likud Party, will become a minister without portfolio, and will also join the Security Cabinet.
His entrance into the government, with his party of four lawmakers, changes the political playing field.
The coalition’s two far-right parties, the Religious Zionism with seven MKs led by Bezalel Smotrich and Otzma Yehudit with six MKs led by Itamar Ben-Gvir, can no longer threaten the coalition’s majority and veto government decisions.
With Sa’ar, Netanyahu now has enough Knesset mandates—68 out of 120—to function even without Ben-Gvir, should the public security minister decide to leave the government as he has threatened to do in the past.
According to Ilana Shpaizman, from the Department of Political Studies at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, from a political perspective, Sa’ar’s entrance accomplishes two things.
First, she said, since it increases the government’s majority, the opposition will now find it more difficult to find a member of the Knesset who will vote to dissolve the legislature.
“Therefore, the possibility of early elections becomes very unlikely,” she said.
The second thing is that it “also does damage to the opposition because it shows how fragmented it is,” Shpaizman said.
She said there “might be several implications” for Sa’ar joining the government, “but it depends on Netanyahu’s plans.
“He can use Sa’ar to go for a hostage deal, because now he has a larger majority and therefore more leverage over Ben-Gvir,” she said, adding however, that Sa’ar had previously expressed his objection to the hostages-for-ceasefire-in Gaza-and-terrorists-release agreement on offer and Netanyahu “does not want a deal anyway, because it will end the war, so this scenario is unlikely.”
Shpaizman said a “more likely scenario” is that Netanyahu now has enough votes to pass a bill that will exempt ultra-Orthodox men from being drafted to army service.
“This will further strengthen the coalition and prevent it from falling until the end of the term in October 2026,” she said.
Shpaizman said the important question to ask “is not whether this move was politically smart or not, but rather what is the goal of this move in policy terms.
“Does it make the lives of the Israelis better? Does it promote some strategic goal with the ongoing war? Does it contribute to the economy, security and, most importantly, the returning of the hostages?
“We should remember that politics is a means and not an end of itself,” Shpaizman said.
Military success
Netanyahu’s other great successes took place over the last two weeks.
First, on Sept. 17 and 18, thousands of Hezbollah terrorists were killed or maimed when their pagers and handheld radios exploded. The attack was widely attributed in foreign reports to the Mossad, though Israel has not taken credit.
Days later, on Sept. 20, Israel assassinated Hezbollah commander Ibrahim Aqil, a terrorist responsible for thousands of Israeli, European and American deaths over several decades. The U.S. State Department placed a $7 million bounty on his head. In addition to Aqil, 15 other Hezbollah terrorists were killed in the strike, including senior members of the Radwan Force chain of command.
Even after Israel eliminated nearly the entire upper echelon of Hezbollah’s command structure, on Sept. 25, the official social media account of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei stated, “Hezbollah is the victor.”
But then, as part of a broad deception plan to lure Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah into a false sense of security, Netanyahu traveled to New York, as the Israeli Air Force bombed Lebanon, to deliver his annual address before the U.N. General Assembly. Just before his speech, he authorized Nasrallah’s assassination.
In his speech, Netanyahu said, “I have a message for the tyrants of Tehran: If you strike us, we will strike you. There is no place—there is no place in Iran—that the long arm of Israel cannot reach. And that’s true of the entire Middle East.”
The prime minister added, “And I have another message for this assembly and for the world outside this hall: We are winning.”
And then Israel assassinated Nasrallah as he met with other commanders in a bunker underground in Beirut.
The massive strike, which leveled six apartment buildings, also killed Ali Karaki, Hezbollah’s highest-ranking remaining commander following the targeted killing of Aqil, and IRGC deputy commander Abbas Nilforoushan.
Changing the strategic reality
In a statement on Sunday, Netanyahu said Israel is “changing the strategic reality in the Middle East.
“We crushed Hamas in Gaza. We eliminated most of its chain of command,” he said.
“We forcefully struck Hezbollah, we eliminated Nasrallah, and we are systematically eliminating the top of his command, including another [targeted killing] today in Lebanon,” the prime minister continued.
With all of his faults and shortcomings—and there are several—Netanyahu deserves credit for taking the reins after Israel’s greatest failure in recent history on Oct. 7, and turning tragedy into triumph.
Over the past year, he consistently rejected the Biden-Harris administration’s pressure to end the war prematurely and allow Hamas to survive. Israel has delivered decisive victories that will be taught for generations in military academies and reviewed in political and diplomatic discussions for years to come.
Netanyahu is on the right path to redefining his legacy. For years, his election campaigns portrayed him as “Mr. Security.” In the eyes of many Israelis, on Oct. 7, that perception disappeared.
For months, many Israelis and Jewish Americans alike were furious at Netanyahu either for folding to the Biden-Harris administration and not entering Rafah in southern Gaza earlier, or for not agreeing to a ceasefire to get the hostages held in the Strip released.
Netanyahu was not seen by either side as making the right decisions.
But in the last few weeks, he has demonstrated his alignment with the thinking of most Israelis, which is to reject the appeasement and defeatism of the Western world and act the way the sole Jewish state in the world must act to defend itself. This includes the decisive use of force, the restoration of deterrence, and the demonstration of military supremacy.
Israel is preparing the Middle East for a better future—multiple targeted killings at a time. Now, Israel is preparing for Iran to retaliate, even as the Biden administration has (again) warned Tehran against doing so.
But Iran still believes it can use Hezbollah to attack Israel.
Challenge for Tehran
Joe Truzman, an analyst specializing in Palestinian terrorist groups and Hezbollah at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said Iran has invested “considerable time and resources into its Lebanese proxy as a safeguard against a potential Israeli attack on its nuclear sites.”
The new dynamic Israel has imposed in the region is a significant strategic challenge for Tehran, prompting it to act swiftly to rehabilitate the crown jewel of its proxy forces,” he told JNS.
Except that Israel will no longer tolerate this and Netanyahu has finally taken the decision to destroy Hezbollah once and for all before it can launch a war. By dismantling Iran’s proxies and rendering them dysfunctional, Israel will soon have the ability to confront Iran directly without fear of attack from the Houthis, Hezbollah or Hamas.
Truzman pointed to Israel’s demonstrated capacity “to confront not only the enemies of the Jewish state but also those who threaten the United States.”
With its weak-kneed leadership, fear of conflict and eagerness to appease terrorists, America is no longer the leader of the free world; Israel is.
Richard Goldberg, a senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said, “On the same day the U.S. was begging Hezbollah for a ceasefire, Israel took out Hezbollah’s command center. The contrast brings the current state of American weakness into sharp relief.”
Considering Netanyahu’s pivotal successes against Hamas and Hezbollah, Truzman told JNS, “Now is the time for the United States to stand firmly with its ally and work together to counter the forces that seek the destruction of both Israel and the U.S.”
