Why has Netanyahu decided to attack Iran now?

BarcelonaIsraeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has spent over thirty years of his political career warning that Iran was on the verge of developing nuclear weapons. A master of political communication, Netanyahu had used every trick in the book to stage this: on more than one occasion, he displayed a poster with a drawing of a huge bomb during his speeches before the UN General Assembly, or he exhibited a shelf full of files and CDs that supposedly contained secret material about the nuclear program. But after the Twelve-Day War last June, both Israel and the United States had asserted that the Iranian nuclear program had been "totally destroyed," and there is no evidence that it has been reactivated. So why has Netanyahu decided to launch the war right now?

Trump and Netanyahu have shown that they share the same vision of a world with no rules other than the law of the strongest. It is no coincidence that the Israeli prime minister was the world leader who was invited to the United States most often during Trump's second term. The Republican, in turn, was the fourth US president in history to be received at the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset, where he was cheered when he came to the rescue of an Israel mired in the Gaza conflict. Both leaders, however, face elections this fall.

In the November midterm elections, Trump risks losing control of the legislature. And Netanyahu must call a general election before the end of the year, an election that will determine his political survival, as it will be the first election since the Palestinian attacks of October 7, 2013, which were the worst security failure in Israel's history—a failure he has refused to take responsibility for. Thus, the safest option for Trump and Netanyahu to avoid electoral scrutiny was to set a date for the second war against Iran—which was supposed to be the final one—between the winter and spring of 2026. According to Washington and Tel Aviv, the date of the attack, February 28, was chosen because Iranian sources, Ali Khamenei, his family, and other high-ranking regime officials, presented a golden opportunity to decapitate the regime in one fell swoop.

A window that was closing

As Yousef Munnayer, a Palestinian researcher with Israeli citizenship at the Arab Center in Washington, writes, "Netanyahu faced the possibility that his long-awaited dream—to see the US military bombing Iran—might never come true. As the new generation of Americans grows older, the more likely they are to return to someone as prevalent as a new Trump in the Oval Office. It was now or never."

Netanyahu has Jewish Israelis—not so much Palestinians with Israeli citizenship—on his side. Most believe that Iran poses an existential threat to their country, and that there is only a military solution. But what is becoming less clear every day is what winning this war means, at a time when Netanyahu's objective is no longer to eliminate the Iranian military threat but to bring about regime change. A strategy to which the entire Zionist opposition has subscribed. If the war is short and doesn't carry a high cost for Israel, Netanyahu could possibly avoid prison and save his career. In fact, this week he again requested a presidential pardon for the corruption scandals for which he is being prosecuted, using the pretext that he now needs to focus on the war. As Yossi Mekelberg, a researcher at Chatham House, points out, "Netanyahu has asserted that starting this war will increase his chances of political survival. More worrying is that he is also gambling with his country's long-term security and its international standing." Mekelberg adds that the Israeli prime minister is also betting that "Trump will support him until the threat of the Iranian nuclear and military program is eliminated and regime change is achieved. And that is risky." It wouldn't be the first time Trump has declared victory without a political and military resolution: that's what he did in Gaza. Furthermore, if this war were to go badly and cost the Republicans the US midterm elections, the alliance with Netanyahu would be damaged. The researcher concludes: "Israel has entered this war quite isolated internationally, led by a prime minister who is not welcome in many of its allies' capitals, and with no guarantees of achieving all its objectives without plunging the Middle East into chaos. Netanyahu can only hope that the gamble of his life pays off."