Benjamin Netanyahu Deserves Credit for Israel’s Stunning Triumph—and for Its Stunning Failures

Arthur Herman’s sweeping essay about Israel’s multifront war makes a convincing case that Israel has achieved a major strategic victory in the two years of fighting that followed the catastrophe of October 7, 2023. Herman attributes a large measure of this victory to Israel’s prime minister. “With Netanyahu’s leadership,” he writes, "Israel had just finished its greatest comeback from pain, adversity, and existential danger since the Yom Kippur War.” Is he right?

With the exception of five years at the beginning of the 2000s, internal Israeli politics for the last three decades has been obsessed with the person and personality of Benjamin Netanyahu. This has always struck me as odd, as for some reason or other I simply struggle to see him as a historically important figure in his own right. His apparent political success is almost entirely attributable to the inability of his opponents to formulate any kind of coherent alternative in the face of the twin failures of the Oslo process of the 1990s and the unilateral withdrawals of the 2000s.

For most of the last two years, I haven’t thought at all that much about Netanyahu, something that has severely limited my ability to publish any kind of strategic analysis in Hebrew that people might want to read. I’ll be the first to concede that it’s very possible, likely even, that I am wrong and everyone else is right. But it’s a fact that I just haven’t seen him as all that important.