Victor Davis Hanson Netanyahu's actions have neutralized more Western adversaries responsible for decades of bloodshed than NATO, the CIA, FBI, or Interpol, combined, yet he’s often met with rebuke rather than gratitude.
Ordeal: "After the October 7 massacres, the obituaries of the long political career of Benjamin Netanyahu, published both in Israel and in the West, became orthodox. He was considered as politically inert as Donald Trump once was after January 6, 2021."The conventional wisdom speculated not if, but only when he would be forced out of office.
"Western leaders and the Israeli left, and indeed even the Israeli non-left, as well as American and European pundits, claimed that the laxity of the Netanyahu government was entirely to blame for the grotesque massacre of October 7.
"Indeed, last fall, there arose almost a competition of critics to assert all the ways in which Netanyahu was played by Hamas.
"Accordingly, Netanyahu’s sweeping Supreme Court reforms had supposedly needlessly split the country, demoralizing the military and eroding Israeli deterrence in the eyes of Palestinian terrorists. Or his purported strategy of playing off the more lethal and toxic Hamas against the Palestinian Authority was supposedly proof of his reckless naivete.
"Still, other opponents argued that his 16 years as Israel’s longest-serving prime minister and his age of 75 made him a Joe Biden-like relic of the past, simply too old and too familiar to be any longer effective. He was told it was well past time to step down and let a new generation break out of the old toxic Middle East mindsets.
"And indeed, after October 7, Netanyahu faced a bleak regional and global landscape—analogous to what a 65-year-old Churchill faced in June 1940 when all of Western Europe was in the hands of the Nazis and a lonely Britain was without a single wartime ally—with a sympathetic America still hesitant to commit to ensuring its existence." . . .
Triumph: . . ."And what of Iran itself, the hub to the spokes of such terrorism?
"We were told that it would soon become nuclear and might strike against the proverbial “one-bomb” state. In the mullahs’ eyes, poor Israel was a divine gift to the theocracy of assembling half the world’s Jewry into one easy target.
"Did not Iran export deadly drones and missiles to new staunch allies like Russia and China and develop missiles nearly comparable to any in the West?
"And yet somehow an embattled Netanyahu, shunned by the Biden administration, demonized by the European Union, and smeared and slandered by the UN, saw opportunity where all others saw only doom.
"He understood that the sheer depravity of October 7 gave Israel, at least for a brief window, the moral authority to wage all-out war on its enemies, terrorists whose reputations he sensed were exaggerated, and their leaders’ bloodcurdling threats thus mostly empty." . . .
