Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s scheduled speech in front of the joint Houses of Congress today will be his fourth congressional address since 1996. His upcoming speech will mark the most critical moment in Netanyahu’s 30-year campaign to warn the West of Iran’s intention and capability, under a nuclear umbrella, of destabilizing Israel, the Middle East, and the West. This time, Netanyahu’s address touches America personally with Iran’s Hamas proxy still holding Americans hostage in Gaza.
Today, Netanyahu’s challenge is to convey the Islamic Republic of Iran’s hybrid warfare strategy to the American people. Iran uses perception warfare and terror proxy warfare, exploiting the Palestinian issue as the ultimate weapon against both Israel and its US ally. Iran’s propaganda machine has penetrated the United States’ political and public discourses, flooding social networks with bots and avatars to influence the American people against Israel and in favor of Hamas, on direct orders from Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
Iran is racing to the nuclear finish line while influencing international public opinion by attacking Israel and dividing other Middle Eastern states.
Netanyahu’s existential mission is to convince and mobilize the West to align with Israel against Iranian aggression.
In 1996, 28 years ago, he first warned the West that the Iranian rulers constituted the world’s most dangerous despotic regime and that its nuclearization would threaten the Mideast region and the world. Fifteen years later, in 2011, Netanyahu held Obama’s feet to the fire on his promise to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. In 2015, Netanyahu intensified his admonition of the Iranian ayatollah government, forecasting its terror proxies’ strangulation of the region: “Iran’s goons in Gaza, its lackeys in Lebanon, its revolutionary guards on the Golan Heights, are clutching Israel with three tentacles of terror. Backed by Iran, Assad is slaughtering Syrians. Backed by Iran, Shi’ite militias are rampaging through Iraq. Backed by Iran, Houthis are seizing control of Yemen, threatening the strategic straits at the mouth of the Red Sea. Along with the Straits of Hormuz, that would give Iran a second choke-point on the world’s oil supply.”
In 2024, Netanyahu’s forecasts are playing out.
The US-led Western approach is still falling into the Iranian regime’s hybrid warfare trap. The West is witness to Iran’s terror proxies circling Israel in a ring of fire from Hamas in Gaza to Hezbollah and Syrian militias to Houthi killer drones in Tel Aviv.
Houthi drones and rockets have virtually shut down traffic in the third choke-point, the Suez Canal.
Iranian trickery
Yet, the Iranian regime has successfully blinded the West into believing that a ceasefire in Gaza – and resolving the Palestinian conflict in general – is key to calming strife across the region.
Netanyahu’s challenge today is to unmask the Iranian regime’s ideological and religiously-driven commitment to destroy both Israel and the US.
There are decades of evidence. As recently as 2022, the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) planned to assassinate both former national security advisor and ambassador to the UN John Bolton and US secretary of state Mike Pompeo. Iranian assassins penetrated the US, attacking author Salman Rushdie and other well-known opposition activists.
Iran’s proxies continue to attack. Yet, the West has still been hesitant to change its approach.
In 1979, ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini called America the “Great Satan” while defining Israel as “America’s watchdog” and “a tumorous cancer.”
In 2024, the US and the Western alliance called on Israel to stop its counteroffensive against Iran’s Hamas proxy following the October 7, 2023, atrocities, the worst one-day mega-terror event since 9/11.
Evidence abounds that those Hamas atrocities were planned with the Iranian regime.
Netanyahu’s mission is not a simple one. Iran continues to attack the US Navy and civilian shipping in the Red Sea, where 12-15% of global trade and 20% of international container shipping passes.
Despite the Islamic dictatorship of the Iranian regime and its terror proxy jihad, it still succeeds in convincing and dominating Western discourse, claiming that the solution remains a Palestinian state. This mantra has been repeated by President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and other US and Western European leaders, reflecting the success of Iranian political and psychological warfare aimed at its enemies’ public audiences.
The Iranian regime continues the tradition of Nazi, Soviet, and Chinese Communist Party strategies in its “long war” against the West.
In addition, America’s weakness in failing to confront Iranian aggression has even resulted in driving the US’s critical Saudi ally, close to normalization with Israel, into the arms of its archenemy Iran through Chinese mediation.
Netanyahu understands, together with neighboring Arab leaders, that it is Iran that is driving terror, instability, and subversion across the region and throughout the world. Israel’s Arab neighbors also understand that the Palestinian issue is not the cause of instability, but an Iranian foil that has plagued Arab governments for decades.
His challenge to US leaders, including Congress, is to help them, the American people, and the West understand that Israel and its allies must work closely together to defeat Iran’s terror proxy network. No less important, they must work towards regime change in Tehran.
The writer is president of the Jerusalem Center for Foreign Affairs.