What aims are you referring to?
The Prime Minister was conveying rather clearly, even if not always explicitly, that he wanted the Iranian regime to collapse. And the aim of Israel’s military actions against Iran has always been to destroy its nuclear-weapons program, which the Prime Minister takes for granted, and to destroy its ballistic-missile capabilities. And there was often the goal of incapacitating Iran’s “axis of resistance”—what we often call its proxy network. He didn’t talk about the last one as much this time, but it’s sort of implicit in a lot of people’s minds because he had talked about it so much in the past, and because Hezbollah joined the war very quickly, probably at Iran’s request, which gave Israel the excuse it needed to unleash a much more severe assault against Hezbollah. None of these aims have been achieved.
Looking at a recent U.S. public opinion poll, I noticed that the ceasefire was popular while the war is not. I imagine many Americans would like the war to stop because they think it is failing. You seem to be saying that Israel has also not achieved its aims but that people want the war to continue at a similar or greater intensity. Is that accurate?
It’s as accurate as I can say. I haven’t had time to do focus groups and really find out what’s behind this. It’s a completely new situation. But the way I see it is that it is a bind for Netanyahu because we already saw that, after one month of the war, support for it was falling in Israel. It was still very high. Remember, the war started with practically a consensus among the Jewish population. The average level of support from the Israeli population over all was over eighty per cent because the Arab population supported it at much lower rates. But the Jewish population had a sweeping consensus of over ninety per cent support in the first two weeks.
But, by the end of a month, that support was declining. Even among Israeli Jews, it was below eighty per cent. And the over-all weighted average was only about two-thirds.
When you say weighted average, you mean the whole population, Jewish and Muslim and everyone else?
Yeah, I use those technical terms only because the Jewish and the Palestinian citizens of Israel are so different on this issue. If there were minor variations, I would just say “Israelis.”
So you’re saying that the popularity of the war is falling, perhaps as a reflection of the war not being successful, but at the same time, support is still pretty high and most people don’t want a ceasefire?
Exactly. That’s what I’m calling Netanyahu’s bind, because, on the one hand, he was losing support for the war, and it also was not reflecting well on him. Personally, he got no political boost—not him, not his party, not his government. There was a very, very slight lift for his party in the beginning, but not for his coalition. And then, by the fourth week, he wasn’t doing well.
Their solution was to at least continue the war because maybe it would achieve its goals. It is almost as if Israelis don’t think or know about any other option besides war for how to achieve political or strategic security aims, because there has been a complete delegitimation and undermining of diplomacy to the point where most Israelis don’t even think that it exists.
So, if you are Netanyahu, you are in a bind. If you’re just some other Israeli politician and you want to be a leader, you could try to transform that attitude by relegitimating diplomacy or some other vision, whatever it may be. But that would take leadership, that would take courage, that would take bold vision, that would take somebody who is willing to take political criticism for the sake of standing by his or her convictions. And, so far, we don’t have any political leaders who have suggested anything like an alternative path on Iran.
How is Netanyahu’s coalition polling in the upcoming election, and who are his main opponents likely to be?
The election is probably going to be in October. Ever since October 7th, there were expectations that it would be held early, that the government couldn’t survive, but the government did survive, and it basically lasted its term. It passed a budget a few weeks ago, and with the war in Iran, it was able to pause the one lingering toxic issue that might have collapsed the government, which had to do with drafting the ultra-Orthodox, who have a long-term exemption from Army service.
