How Bibi Buggered On to Victory
Edward N. Luttwak
Through sheer tenacity, the Israeli prime minister fended off unremitting pressure from Washington and reshaped the regional map. But his most critical test still lies ahead.
BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images
When you’ve worked long enough in the field of strategy, you eventually come to the depressing realization that victory in any major war is not won by some brilliant strategy, feats of generalship, or even superior technology. Rather, it’s won by sheer tenacity.
Tenacity is the most important virtue of national leaders at war, which allows them to press on with no assurance of victory, fending off tremendous political pressures to fold. Winston Churchill displayed this quality in 1940. In June of that year, Germany appeared unstoppable. Paris and the entirety of Western Europe had fallen. The Luftwaffe was grinding down the grossly outnumbered British pilots, and German invasion barges were being assembled in Belgian ports. Even then, with Britain desperate for U.S. support, the American national debate on interventionism, prompted by the outbreak of war in September 1939, continued to break decisively in favor of the isolationists.
Exploring an accommodation with Germany appeared as the eminently reasonable and prudent course of action because of Herr Hitler’s generous offer to leave Britain and its vast empire intact. When British parliamentarians pressed Churchill to explain his plan, he confessed to his intimates that he had no plan at all. He was determined to just keep buggering on.
Then the situation became bleaker still for the British and for Churchill personally. In June 1941, the German army smashed its way into Russia, advancing rapidly toward what looked like an imminent victory. Although the Wehrmacht’s swift conquests promised to wholly remedy Germany’s only weakness—its lack of petroleum—the isolationists in the U.S. Congress remained dominant. Meanwhile, at home, London was abuzz with talk of Churchill’s heavy drinking, his personal dependence on gifts from his Jewish friends to pay for his extravagant tastes and, above all, his utter lack of strategy—he had failed to offer any path at all that could conceivably lead to victory.
Things looked grim all around. In North Africa, the brilliant German tactician Erwin Rommel was outmaneuvering British forces with ease. Much worse were the first reports of Germany’s astonishing technological progress: the world’s first jet fighter that could easily outfly every single British and American fighter; the world’s first air-to-surface missile (Fritz X) that, in September 1943, would sink the Italian battleship Roma (to prevent it from surrendering to the Allies); and the Tiger tank that could crush British armor.
Nevertheless, the isolationists in Congress refused to fund even a prosaic piston-engine fighter project—the P-51 Mustang, the war’s best Allied fighter—which was developed with fast-dwindling British funds.
Churchill’s answer? Just keep buggering on.
With a remarkable array of forces, external and internal, bearing down on him, Netanyahu’s tenacity was the only thing that mattered.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long advertised his admiration for Churchill; the British leader’s portrait hangs in his office. He shares Churchill’s taste for cognac and cigars and has been in trouble with Israel’s exceptionally stringent political gift laws for years because he accepted gifted cognac from a gent who neither asked for, nor received, any government favors.
But it’s in his handling of Washington during his war that Netanyahu has earned the comparison with his role model. Whereas Churchill’s problem was an isolationist Congress that constrained a generally sympathetic president, Netanyahu enjoyed ample support on the Hill but faced an American administration determined to cut Israel down to size and to remove him from power.
As Israel fought a major, multifront war in October 2023, key U.S. officials encouraged domestic uproar against Netanyahu and worked to constrain him and even collapse his government.
That was not all the president’s doing, but Joe Biden’s administration was stacked with Barack Obama’s leftovers, who ran the gamut of pathological Israel haters, from Samantha Power to Robert Malley—the red-diaper baby of Stalinist Jewish parents in Paris whom I met in my youth when they were working for Algeria’s National Liberation Front, which was not merely fanatically anti-Israel but also declaredly anti-Jewish, much like Yemen’s Houthis today. With the CIA mostly very hostile (as it has been since it was established in 1947, as declassified documents fully reveal), only the Pentagon harbored some friends of Israel—although that hardly stopped the administration from using every trick in the book to delay mid-war weapons supplies to Israel.
Netanyahu faced a concerted campaign, directed from Washington, that brought together Israeli nonprofits and Netanyahu’s political opponents. Almost from the get-go, Netanyahu had to overcome calls and protests by well-educated—and some even well-meaning—Israelis and American Jews, as well as all the usual suspects in European capitals and almost every other world government incessantly demanding a cease-fire, not as a pause, but as an end to the war.
Worse still, several of Israel’s retired and barely retired generals threw their weight behind the cease-fire push. Some did so with the authority of true heroes, such as Yair Golan, the head of the unsubtly named The Democrats (a merger of the left-wing Labor and Meretz Parties) and former IDF deputy chief of staff no less. Golan jumped into his small car on Oct. 7 to successfully rescue people with his handgun, as did the former head of the IDF’s Operations Directorate Israel Ziv, now a very successful security contractor overseas after distinguished service, who became the guru of an entire cabal of retired generals, including some who served in Netanyahu’s government until they left it to oppose him. Then, inevitably, there were tawdry time-servers who somehow became generals without doing much other than talking, like Amos Gilead, who’s well known and much-favored in U.S. officialdom because of his hostility to Netanyahu.
All those former generals demanded the same thing, albeit at different times: to stop the war with no way of recovering the Israeli hostages and no way of forcing Hamas to accept supervised disarmament, therefore allowing it to use a cease-fire to reconstitute.
Furthermore, these generals offered no solution whatever to the Hezbollah dilemma in the north. The day after the Oct. 7 attack, Hezbollah started launching rockets against Israel. If Israel did not attack, Hezbollah forces, then assuredly the most powerful non-state army in the world, was certainly capable of burning every Jewish town and village north of Haifa with countless rockets (the number 110,000 that was widely circulated turned out to be simply invented) while targeting power stations, Ben Gurion Airport, port facilities, every chemical plant and refinery, and every air base with thousands of guided missiles. If Israel were to attack, those massive barrages would immediately begin.
As Netanyahu pondered this dilemma, he had to deal not only with his security establishment but also with unremitting pressure from Washington. A mere few days after Oct. 7, the Biden administration intervened and made clear its opposition to an Israeli preemptive strike against Hezbollah—a position it would maintain over the next year. In fact, when Israel finally eliminated Hassan Nasrallah in a strike on his bunker on Sept. 27, 2024, Biden’s reaction was an irate “Bibi, what the fuck?”
The Biden administration displayed a similar hands-off attitude toward Iran’s proxy in Yemen, allowing Tehran to pile more pressure on Israel. The Houthis joined the fight with their skirts, sandals, and Iranian supplied anti-ship missiles and drones that not only deprived Israel of its secondary Red Sea sea port access but also targeted commercial vessels, blocking navigation in the area and forcing shipping companies to find longer, more expensive routes, thereby augmenting U.S. and international pressure on Israel to end the war. Washington allowed Iran to stop maritime traffic in the Red Sea and Suez Canal without any retaliation against Tehran and its own maritime traffic, while Western disarray was compounded by the spectacle of very expensive European navies doing nothing much even as their Mediterranean ports lost all their Asian traffic.
This shameful passivity reinforced the Israeli conviction that France, Italy, and Spain, unable and unwilling to defend even their own direct material interests, would only yield to Muslim demographic and political pressure in other respects as well. Only the British joined the United States in eventually striking the Houthis, though mostly symbolically and nowhere near the sustained and targeted campaign required to destroy Houthi capabilities.
Between American permissiveness toward Iran’s multipronged campaign and Washington’s support for Netanyahu’s domestic opposition, calls for a Gaza cease-fire intensified and became the default position across the political landscape, from Israel’s left and even moderate center to most European governments, in addition to the Biden administration.
It is against this backdrop that Netanyahu’s pure resolve must be understood. With this remarkable array of forces, external and internal, bearing down on him, his tenacity was the only thing that mattered.
Having withstood this unrelenting pressure over the course of a year, Netanyahu had maneuvered into a position where, in the second half of 2024, Israel was able to turn the tables and reshape the entire geopolitical picture in a historic sequence of events. The Mossad and the IDF brilliantly wrecked Hezbollah with the awe-inspiring three-part takedown of exploding pagers, which forced the use of booby-trapped field radios, which in turn forced the in-person meeting of senior Hezbollah commanders, who were then eliminated in a precision strike that left the group totally paralyzed, nullifying its vast rocket and missile arsenal. Because he had monopolized Hezbollah’s command and control, Nasrallah’s death shut down the organization.
Although the Biden administration would succeed finally in imposing a cease-fire in Lebanon, after reportedly threatening to sponsor a Security Council resolution that could lead to international sanctions on Israel, by then the die was cast. As a consequence of Hezbollah’s demolition, Iran’s Syrian vassal, Bashar al-Assad, found himself defenseless, having long become dependent on Hezbollah and Iranian militias for manpower. In early December 2024, the half-century rule of the Assad family came to an end. With the fall of their fiefdom in Syria, and with the IDF in control of the Gaza-Egypt border, the Iranians lost the ability to rebuild Hezbollah and Hamas, giving Israel its most conclusive victory since 1949.
Israel’s astounding technical prowess and the fighting spirit of its military are, of course, integral to this victory. But none of the above could have happened had Netanyahu not held out against an unfriendly American administration and an accompanying assortment of authoritative figures and institutions, as well as howling mobs in Israel and around the world that demanded a cease-fire and the Israeli prime minister in handcuffs.
Netanyahu still faces a major test. With the Houthis now in the crosshairs of the new friendly and engaged U.S. administration and its British ally, only Iran itself still stands, now on the verge of machining fissile material for a bomb. Israel destroyed Iran’s best air defenses in precision strikes last October, leaving it vulnerable to Israeli attacks on its nuclear sites as soon as Israel’s new air refueling tankers arrive. But without the large bomb loads of American B-2 and B-52 long-range heavy bombers, the targeting must depend on hitting exactly the right building in the right base. The penalty of imperfection is too great, for it would allow the obscurantist regime to have a nuclear device, even if not missile-delivered warheads. That is not an acceptable risk. Netanyahu has no option but to keep buggering on.
Edward N. Luttwak is a contractual strategic consultant for the U.S. government and an author.
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