From tragedy to triumph? Netanyahu stakes legacy on stopping Iran - analysis
Netanyahu’s critics have said that his legacy will forever be stained—blackened—by the failure of October 7.
In one of the early press conferences after October 7, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was asked whether he would resign. His answer was telling: No one asked US president Franklin D. Roosevelt to resign after Pearl Harbor.
Indeed. History, when looking back at Roosevelt’s tenure, does not judge him based on the failure to anticipate the Japanese attack.
Rather, it views him as the president who successfully led the United States through the most brutal war in human history.
Pearl Harbor happened on his watch, but it did not define his watch.
The PM in office during the worst tragedy for Jews since the Holocaust
Netanyahu’s critics have said that his legacy will forever be stained – blackened – by the failure of October 7,a failure that happened on his watch and for which he bears a great deal of responsibility – just as Roosevelt bore responsibility for not anticipating Pearl Harbor.
The prime minister’s critics said he will forever be known as the prime minister under whose watch the greatest tragedy to beset the Jewish people since the Holocaust took place.
Netanyahu begged to differ, and if the current campaign against Iran continues to be successful and Israel succeeds in setting back or even neutralizing Tehran’s nuclear capabilities, he will likely be proven right.
His legacy, though inevitably intertwined with the trauma of October 7, will not be defined by it. The defining chapter in his legacy will be thwarting Iran, not failing to stop Hamas.
Netanyahu, as he said in a video message to the public on Friday afternoon, has been warning about an Iranian nuclear weapon for more than 40 years. He wrote about it in 1982, he spoke about it as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, and when he became prime minister for the first time in 1996, he lobbied world leaders to take it seriously.
When he returned as prime minister in 2009, he made this his cardinal issue. He pressed for crippling sanctions, he planned an attack in 2012 that the Americans under US president Barack Obama did everything to prevent, he fought Obama over the 2015 Iranian nuclear deal, and he lobbied US President Donald Trump during his first term to withdraw from the Iranian agreement.
He would often say that his top three concerns were: “Iran, Iran, and Iran.” And for years, he was mocked for it. Critics said he was obsessed, alarmist, hysterical – that he exaggerated the threat, perhaps even for political gain.
Yet through it all, Netanyahu persisted. He never stopped warning that Israel could not and would not allow a regime that openly calls for its destruction to acquire the means to carry it out. He seemed to view it as something close to a divine mission.
Not a religious man, Netanyahu nonetheless often gave the impression that he believed he was placed in power for this purpose: to stop Iran.
He saw himself as a lone figure on the hill, watching the storm clouds gather while others looked away – warning that action was needed and vowing to take it if no one else would.
He viewed himself as a man on a mission. Now, if the mission is achieved – if Iran’s nuclear program is indeed set back in a meaningful, lasting way – that mission will become his legacy.
And all the rest – October 7, his ongoing legal troubles, the judicial overhaul, the years of division that marked much of his tenure – will all be subsumed under this overarching achievement.
If this campaign succeeds, this – more than anything else in his long reign – is what Netanyahu will be remembered for.
