Netanyahu’s high-stakes gamble against Iran

TEL AVIV — It was Israel’s Osama bin Laden moment. And much like Americans danced outside the White House after news broke that the author of 9/11 had been shot dead, the assassination of longtime Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was understandably celebrated in Israel last week.

Never one to hold back, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Israeli minister of national security and leader of the far-right Jewish National Front, distributed baklava, saying: “With God’s help, all of the terrorists will die like Nasrallah. Let’s bury as many as we can under the ground.” And he was hardly alone in thinking Rosh Hashanah had arrived a few days early.

For Israelis, Nasrallah was — in the words of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — not just any terrorist but “the terrorist.” A man ultimately responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Israelis, Americans and others during his three decades as Hezbollah’s chief.

And as Israeli TV anchors toasted his death on live broadcasts and the popular song “Come On, Oh, Nasrallah” was belted out by groups of revelers at weddings and nightclubs in Tel Aviv and the Mahane Yehuda market in Jerusalem, it was as though many felt they were responding to the festivities that followed the savage rampage of Hamas attacks on southern Israel last October.

However, Nasrallah’s violent end in an underground Beirut bunker, crumpled by tens of 2,000-pound bombs dropped by the Israeli Air Force’s 69th Squadron, hasn’t just led to Israeli euphoria — it’s also emboldened Netanyahu to think in grand terms of recasting a Middle East that’s more favorable to Israel.

The Israeli leader has already emphasized his ultimate goal is to undermine Tehran’s clerical leadership and upend the Iranians who bankroll Hamas, Hezbollah and Yemen’s Houthi rebels. And what better way to do that than to blunt the sharp end of Iran’s spear — to grind down Hezbollah? But this is a dangerous game.

Netanyahu’s ambitions carry an echo of the once-in-a-generation chance that former U.S. President George W. Bush had talked about when he embarked on, arguably, one of the most ambitious political agendas of any modern U.S. administration — a bold nation-building and democratic reform plan for the Middle East. “The people of Iraq can shake off their captivity. They can one day join a democratic Afghanistan and a democratic Palestine, inspiring reforms throughout the Muslim world,” he had declared at the U.N. in 2002. That all didn’t work out so well, though.

The Middle East has so often been the graveyard of ambitious plans and, all too often, it has mocked those who attempt to implement grand visions — not just foreigners, like the ancient Romans and British imperialists or American oil barons, but also those from the region, including Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and the ideologists of the Arab Socialist Baʿth Party.

For Bibi, of course, crushing Hezbollah and exposing its sponsor, Iran, as a tattered paper tiger with cracked claws would go some way toward redeeming him for the security failures many Israelis hold him responsible for — including those who view these lapses as allowing the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre to happen.

But this path is deeply perilous. Israeli invasions of Lebanon have never ended well. A clean in-and-out incursion of limited scope and geography may well be delusional, and the result may be a quagmire.

This is the worry of former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert — an unrelenting Netanyahu critic. “I don’t understand what’s precisely the strategy here,” he told POLITICO. “There must be something more than just ordering tanks over the border to justify the strategy that lies behind this,” he mused.

Olmert doesn’t naysay Israel’s intelligence-based military achievements over the past three weeks — from the coordinated explosive Hezbollah pagers and walkie-talkies to the targeting of top Hezbollah commanders and then Nasrallah’s assassination. “Nasrallah was a terrorist and the head of a brutal terrorist organization, and he deserved this punishment,” he said. “But now Bibi’s getting carried away.”

He went on questioning: “Where does this incursion lead? No one should doubt that Israeli forces can battle their way to the Litani River or the Awali River. And then what? What is the endgame? Are we going to remain there forever to protect the southern part of Israel? Are we going to contemplate building settlements in the south of Lebanon in the meantime? Some people are starting to talk about targeting the Iranian leaders. This is ridiculous, to my mind. Ali Khamenei is a brutal despot, but he’s a legitimate leader of a member of the United Nations. Israel doesn’t target legitimate state leaders … But people are getting carried away.”

It’s true that Bibi isn’t alone in his grand vision. The Telegram and WhatsApp channels of Israel’s ultranationalists, some of them in Netanyahu’s fractious coalition government, are full of arguments for annexing southern Lebanon. Ultranationalists have long advocated the restoration of a “Biblical Israel.” And one group, Uri Tzafon, has been demanding an invasion of southern Lebanon and the establishment of Jewish settlements south of the Litani, claiming it’s the only way northern Israel would be safe.

Not that Netanyahu has ever subscribed to the messianic quest to annex southern Lebanon. But he has long argued that the real enemy is Iran — the head of the octopus. And Israel Defense Forces commanders have been eager to get at Hezbollah for months now — even keener than on maintaining the war against Hamas in Gaza in fact — and they drafted operational plans for a cross-border offensive months ago.

However, under pressure from an anxious White House, which fears a much wider and even more cataclysmic regional war that would break Lebanon and set back the normalization process between Israel and Gulf states, Netanyahu held off. But Iran’s direct attacks on Israel — predictable retaliations — have given him his opening.

To what end, that remains to be seen.