In November, 2023, “Eretz Nehederet,” Israel’s popular satirical television program, excoriated Benjamin Netanyahu, portraying him in a bunker where he was visited by the ghost of Golda Meir. Golda thanks Bibi for eclipsing the failures of her administration at the outset of the Yom Kippur War and becoming the most reviled Prime Minister in Israel’s history. Bibi swears that he will find a way out of his mess, to which Golda retorts that his only saving grace is that someday they will name a chain of stores mala-Bibi, a play on malabi, a cream pudding mixed with rose water.
In December, 2024, the portrayals on television are no friendlier, but the inescapable truth is that Benjamin Netanyahu is once again the most formidable figure in the Middle East. After playing rope-a-dope with Hezbollah’s missile barrages for close to a year, Netanyahu ordered one of the most audacious attacks in memory by activating explosive devices in Hezbollah pagers and walkie-talkies.
The follow-on aerial assault and invasion of Lebanon decimated Hezbollah’s leadership and military capability so quickly that a window was opened for the Lebanese government to actually take back control of its own territory and the terror group was rendered unable to come to the rescue of Bashar Assad.
The Iranian missile barrages launched at Israel after the pager attack failed to do meaningful damage but Israel’s retaliatory strike on Iran apparently significantly eroded Iran’s fighting capability. Iran’s weakness, coupled with Hezbollah’s weakness, in the midst of Russian weakness, led to a spectacular downfall of the Assad regime in a matter of days.
The collapse of Assad’s government is a clear warning to dictators in the region that without the aid of an Axis of Evil to abet their use of torture and chemical weapons to cow their subjects, their countries are hollow shells where terrified quiescence is, at the peril of the regime mistaken for loyalty.
The breaking of Iran’s hold over Lebanon and Syria and its leaders’ increased worry about their fate at the hands their own restless population is a profound shift in the Middle East that was hardly envisioned a little more than a year ago.
While Netanyahu remains one of the globe’s most despised people and is reportedly afraid to go to Poland for the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz because of the threat of arrest on an ICC warrant (what a great look that would be for a Polish government that outlawed statements implicating Poland as complicit in the Holocaust), it is impossible to argue that he is not the power behind the changes now in motion throughout the region.
Fortune is a fickle mistress and just as Netanyahu was poised to be tossed ignominiously from the premiership amid demands for his ouster following Oct. 7, his recent historic success and the rebounding of his poll numbers in Israel could vanish just as quickly.
Exchanging the evils of the Assad-Hezbollah-Iran-Russia axis for a new evil axis led by Turkey could turn out to be far worse. Russia’s role as supplier of armaments to Israel’s enemies was to Israel’s strategic advantage because of the inferior quality of those weapons. For proof, see Ukraine, where superior Western weaponry has leveled the battlefield. In contrast, Turkey has the ability to provide superior firepower and NATO-style training after its many years as the Achilles Heel of the alliance.
Turkey is already making its play for influence in Syria both as a backer of the rebels who took control of the country and with its now eight-year-old military presence fighting historically US-allied Kurds. A jihadist, Turkish client state in Syria with Turkish weapons and bases combined with Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s previously-stated belief that military action should be taken against Israel might make the security situation much worse than before Assad’s fall.
Faced with a perilous new reality on its borders, security issues will remain Israel’s top priority and Israelis’ political choices will be heavily influenced by concerns about which leaders can most capably defend them. Netanyahu was in office on Oct. 7, but the government that preceded him led by Naftali Bennet, Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz cannot pretend that they were not also asleep at the wheel.
Netanyahu’s enemies have been trying for a year to tar him with responsibility for Oct. 7 while he has been just as busy deflecting blame, but the truth is that when every potential successor is equally tainted, will the Israeli electorate in the end choose to stick with the man who laid low Hezbollah and Iran?
Over the many years that Netanyahu has been prime minister, there have been numerous highs and lows to his standing. It can be hard to remember that after he lost the premiership the first time in 1999 and Ariel Sharon left Likud in 2005, the party was in danger of becoming an afterthought.
By 2009, “King Bibi” returned and has held power for 15 years aside from the brief interregnum of 2021-2023 when he still arguably dominated Israeli politics, causing the country to careen from election to election before it threw up its hands in exhaustion and returned him to the prime minister’s office.
Do not mistake an assessment for an encomium. Netanyahu’s alliance with Betzalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir is a stain on the integrity of the Jewish people. His Faustian bargain with haredi parties stonewalling the draft in the middle of a war and raiding the treasury for their benefit is deplorable. Judicial reform, both pre- and post-war is an assault on Israel’s democratic foundation with the sole purpose of advancing Netanyahu’s political future at the expense of the rights of Israeli citizens.
And, as Golda’s ghost aptly stated about Oct. 7, “After 50 years, my failures aren’t the biggest in history.” There is, frankly, almost nothing about Benjamin Netanyahu to like.
That said, if you would like to know where the baddest dude in the Middle East is to be found, look for the mala-Bibi shop on Balfour Street in Jerusalem.
