What has the Israeli PM’s whirlwind of violence achieved? His closest ally now turning against him – and an emboldened Iran
Donald Trump may survive the humiliation of the Iran deal.
Netanyahu will not
The lawless violence that invariably made matters worse.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the biggest loser in last week’s preliminary deal to halt the US-Israel-Iran war, will be remembered – and reviled – as the man who put the Middle East to the sword.
Whether the “problem” was Hamas in Gaza,
illegal West Bank land seizures,
supposed Israeli-Arab fifth columnists,
peace campaigners’ aid flotillas,
Hezbollah in Lebanon,
hostile militias in Syria, Iraq and Yemen, or Tehran’s hardline Islamic regime, the Israeli leader’s “solution” was always the same: extreme, often lawless violence that invariably made matters worse.
His political obituary reads like a criminal indictment.
For decades, Netanyahu resisted a two-state solution with the Palestinians. He failed to prevent the terrible Hamas atrocities of 7 October 2023, then visited genocidal vengeance on Gaza.
"He clung to power by giving far-right politicians key government roles, to his country’s lasting chagrin and shame. He undermined the internationally endorsed 2015 nuclear pact with Iran, whose subsequent repudiation by a credulous Trump led directly to this year’s disastrous, self-defeating conflict," says Simon Tisdall in 'The Guardian'.
"The unprovoked, illegal war against Iran was the ultimate expression of the Netanyahu doctrine – the disproportionate application of brute force.
Predictably, it too, has failed. Donald Trump is desperately arguing that the ceasefire memorandum he signed in Versailles (of all places!) is not the lame capitulation it so self-evidently is.
But while the US president may survive this humiliation – despite global scepticism and mockery – the likely consequences of the debacle for Netanyahu, his brother-in-harms, are career-ending serious."
Yet the main reason Netanyahu is now hurtling towards political oblivion, even as autumn elections approach, is none of the above. It’s because he has poisoned and perhaps fatally weakened the vital US-Israel “special relationship”.
He and Trump are barely on speaking terms. Fairly or not, the White House, and an American public already shocked and alienated by Israel’s war on Gaza, blame him for drawing the US into an unwinnable fight on the basis of glib predictions of easy victory and regime collapse.
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