In a deeply divided Israel, even the dramatic scene that unfolded over the country’s skies on Sunday is open to political interpretation.
For supporters of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s demonstration of defensive technologies against an Iranian, with the exception of hundreds of drones and missiles, proves that Mr. Netanyahu was long right to warn of the threat posed by Iran.
His adversaries are reluctant to give him any credit, reserving their praise for the air force.
“Like everything that has happened in Israel in recent years, the story is divided into two narratives,” said Mazal Mualem, an Israeli political commentator for Al-Monitor, a Middle East news site, and author of a recent biography of the Israeli leader.
“The division and polarization of Israeli society prevents people from having a holistic view of the problem,” Ms. Mualem added.
Sunday’s Iranian barrage, launched in response to an Israeli attack on the Iranian embassy building this month in Damascus that killed several high-ranking commanders of Iran’s armed forces, came at a perilous time for M .Netanyahu.
At home, he is an unpopular leader who many hold responsible for his government’s policy and intelligence failures that led to the deadly Hamas attack in southern Israel on October 7, which incited Israel to go to war in Gaza. Abroad, he is the subject of international criticism because of Israel’s continuation of this war, which has resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Gazans.
How he ultimately emerges from this episode may depend on what happens next.
Mr Netanyahu must now hold elections. Will it respond to Iran with a forceful counterattack and could it draw Israel and other countries into a wider war? Or will it absorb the attack, which seriously injured a 7-year-old girl but caused only limited damage, and defer to the coalition that helped defend Israel in the interests of regional stability?
Israel’s allies have called for restraint.
“The question is whether Israel will retaliate immediately, or surprise the Iranians in some way,” said Efraim Halevy, who served as director of Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, during the latter part. of Mr. Netanyahu’s first term. 1990s.
No Israeli leader has warned against Iran as consistently as Mr. Netanyahu or, for that matter, spent as much time in office. Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, he has been in power for around 17 years in total.
Since his first year in office in 1996, Mr. Netanyahu warned that a nuclear Iran would be catastrophic and that time was running out. For almost three decades, he has been sounding the same alarm.
Iran maintains a network of proxy militias throughout the region, including Gaza, which the government funds and supplies with weapons. Some of these militias in Yemen, Syria and Lebanon have fought against Israel, creating distractions for the Israeli government and military amid the war with Hamas.
But perhaps more troubling, experts say, is that Iran is closer than ever to obtaining a nuclear weapon. Mr. Netanyahu’s supporters still credit him with putting Iran’s nuclear program on the global agenda then, and they praise him today for investing in the powerful, multi-layered air defense system that enabled Israel and its allies, including the United States, to intercept the vast majority of Iranian drones and missiles this weekend before they reach Israel.
Sometimes resorting to tricks and antics to draw attention to Iran’s nuclear progress, Mr. Netanyahu has in the past made opposition to Iran a key part of his global diplomacy. Once, at the United Nations General Assembly, he held up a cartoonish drawing of a bomb marked with red lines representing enrichment levels. Another time, at the Munich Security Conference, he held up a piece of what he said was an Iranian drone sent from Syria and shot down by Israel.
“Everywhere he went, he talked about it,” recalls Jeremy Issacharoff, former Israeli ambassador to Germany and for years responsible for coordinating the Foreign Ministry’s diplomatic efforts on regional security and the Iranian threat.
At times, Mr. Netanyahu’s campaign against Iran has seriously strained relations between Israel and American presidents, even though American bipartisan support for Israel has long been seen as a strategic asset.
Around 2012, Mr. Netanyahu infuriated the Obama administration by pushing for President Barack Obama to set clear “red lines” on Iran’s nuclear progress that would prompt the United States to undertake a military strike. Before that, the Israeli prime minister was considering a unilateral Israeli strike in the face of strong opposition from Washington and public criticism from a series of former Israeli security chiefs. It was never clear whether Mr. Netanyahu was bluffing, and the prospect of an imminent strike receded.
He further challenged Mr. Obama in 2015 in an impassioned speech to a joint meeting of Congress, denouncing what he called a “bad deal” negotiated by the United States and other world powers with Iran to curb its nuclear program.
When President Donald J. Trump came to power, Mr. Netanyahu encouraged him to withdraw from the deal — a decision that many Israeli experts called a grave mistake and a failure of Mr. Netanyahu.
“Since then, there have been no constraints on the program,” Mr. Issacharoff said, adding: “It has never been this advanced.”
But it was also under Mr Netanyahu’s leadership that Israel established diplomatic relations with more Arab states seen as part of the moderate anti-Iran axis, including the United Arab Emirates.
Regardless of what comes next, Ms. Mualem, Netanyahu’s biographer, said, “Bibi is still in the game,” referring to him by his nickname. “He is a central actor, and it is not over, neither diplomatically nor politically. And he plays a long game.
