The smile on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s face was impossible to hide.
Minutes after President Donald Trump announced that the US had bombed three of Iran’s nuclear facilities, Netanyahu effusively praised the American leader as someone whose decisions could lead the region to a “future of prosperity and peace.”
Since Israel launched its attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities and other targets, Netanyahu and the country’s other political echelon had been careful not to be perceived as dragging Trump into another war in the Middle East. In the end, the US joining the campaign – and taking credit for the results – is arguably an even bigger success for Netanyahu, who brought the world’s superpower into what had been Israel’s mission.
Netanyahu has talked about the threat of Iran for much of his political career, parading out visual aids on occasion – like a cartoon of a bomb at the UN General Assembly in 2012 – to help his audience. But the longstanding criticism was that Netanyahu’s rhetoric was all bark, no bite.
For all the talk of the threat Iran posed to Israel and the wider region, Netanyahu never pulled the trigger on a major military operation. Instead, he authorized sporadic high-risk, high-reward operations from Israel’s Mossad spy agency, including the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists and the stealing of the country’s nuclear archive.
But Iran’s nuclear program survived largely unscathed, and Netanyahu was left for years with no measurable achievement against an issue he came to see as an existential threat to Israel.
The last 10 days rewrote the script.
Aviv Bushinsky, who worked with Netanyahu during his first term in the late-90s, called the attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities “no doubt his greatest accomplishment.”
Israel’s initial waves of attacks and its establishment of air superiority over Iran began a clear string of military successes, which the Trump administration ultimately joined.
The scale of the success is so great that Bushinsky argued it made Netanyahu’s one of the country’s top two or three leaders since the country’s founding in 1948. The “stain” of failing to stop the Hamas-led attack on October 7 remains with Netanyahu, Bushinsky said, but the attack on Iran has immediately become part of his legacy.
“Netanyahu has a signature of taking down the nuclear capabilities of the Iranians,” he said.
Now Netanyahu immediately faces another challenge: deciding what to do next. At least publicly, the US has made it clear that it sees the Iran strikes as finished as long as Iranian forces don’t attack US troops in the region.
But after starting the campaign alone, Israel is still pressing its advantage. Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesman Brig. Gen. Effie Defrin said Sunday that Israel was preparing for the “campaign to prolong.” Before the weekend, Israel had conducted the military campaign against Iran on its own, and it has since carried out more strikes after the US bombing of the nuclear facilities.
“If the war was designed to obliterate Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, and the president of the United States says they destroyed the three facilities, then why isn’t Israel announcing mission accomplished?” former Israeli consul general Alon Pinkas asked rhetorically. “This military solution for everything is fine, as long as you understand that it is aligned with political goals. And I don’t see them.”
Since the start of the Trump administration, the friction between Trump and Netanyahu has been on full display as the White House pursued a series of steps in the region that left Israel sidelined. Trump’s first trip to the Middle East blew right past Israel without stopping, the American president signed a ceasefire deal with the Houthis in Yemen that cut out Israel, and he surprised Netanyahu in April by announcing nuclear negotiations with Iran.
The US decisions raised questions about whether Netanyahu was able to handle a second Trump administration, especially one with a far more vocal isolationist wing.
All of those questions disappeared in a puff of bunker buster smoke in the aftermath of the US strikes as the two leaders heaped praise on one another
The issue of Iran had broad consensus among much of Israeli society, with a majority of the country viewing a nuclear Iran as an existential threat.
According to a survey from the Israel Democracy Institute done before the US strikes, approximately 70% of Israelis supported the campaign against Iran, while nearly as many believe it was right to launch the strikes without a guarantee of US involvement.
That level of support has drawn accolades for Netanyahu even from his detractors.
“You don’t have to like Netanyahu in order to admit yes, he achieved something,” said Ben-Dror Yemini, a political analyst for Israel’s prominent Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper.
But the current moment – one in which Israel and the US have carried out punishing strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities – requires sensitive diplomacy and a willingness to back off the military successes that appear to have come so easily, Yemini said.
The decision to act and the decision to wait each involved its own elements of risk, according to former US Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro.
“There’s risk in any use of forces and certainly in a major decision like this one from the United States,” Shapiro said. “But there was risk in not acting and leaving Iran within weeks of a nuclear bomb at the time of their choosing.”
But having made the critical choice to go after Iran’s nuclear facilities, Shapiro said it would be a grave mistake to assume the conflict is over.
Asked if the Middle East was safer now than it was before US involvement in the strikes against Iran, Shapiro said it depends on whether the bombing campaign destroyed or significantly damaged Iranian nuclear facilities. It also depends on how Iran chooses to respond, which he said requires the international community to lead Iran away from escalation.
“It’s too early to celebrate the achievement.”