Bibi’s Empty Victory Lap

Opinion|Bibi’s Empty Victory Lap

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has been busy proclaiming victory in his country’s war against Iran. It’s a win that he seems to believe will secure his political future. For the moment, Israel has been swept up in a victory narrative that puts Mr. Netanyahu’s colossal failures surrounding Oct. 7, 2023 — and his longstanding legal woes — into the distant past.

Riding on that high, Mr. Netanyahu arrived in Washington on July 7, hoping to further capitalize on his rekindled affair with President Trump. The prime minister came into the White House fawning over Mr. Trump, handing him a nomination letter for the Nobel Peace Prize and talking up peace in the region, even as the future of Gazans, Israeli hostages and Iran’s nuclear program all hang in the balance.

Since the cease-fire between Israel and Iran went into effect on June 24, American and Israeli leaders have used their purported win as a basis for dangling the prospect of an end to the Gaza war, the expansion of the Abraham Accords to countries like Syria, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, and, astoundingly, as a way to cancel Mr. Netanyahu’s drawn-out corruption trial. Outside of ending the trial, which would constitute yet another blow to the shaky rule of law in Israel, these would be largely positive developments albeit it once again overlooking the Palestinians all together.

And yet the tangible impact of the 12-day military campaign remains uncertain. The Israeli military claims that Iran’s nuclear program has been set back several years, but admits it is too early to know for sure. The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, who is in a better position than most to know, said Iran could resume uranium enrichment in “a matter of months.” But now he, too, is in the dark, after Iran suspended cooperation with his watchdog group last week. Even the most generous assessment — that Iran’s nuclear facilities have been “obliterated” as Mr. Trump claimed — does not factor in what the war might have done to the Iranian regime’s internal calculations about moving toward the creation of a bomb, perhaps covertly.

Mr. Netanyahu’s success since the Oct. 7 attacks in neutralizing the power of Iran’s proxies, especially Hezbollah in Lebanon, alongside the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, has created an opportunity for real strategic change for Israel. But without further dialogue between the United States and Iran, and a viable agreement governing and allowing for inspections of Iran’s nuclear program, the 12-day war could just be another salvo in a never-ending series of Israeli attacks to curb Iranian reconstruction of its nuclear and conventional powers. This approach of conducting low-grade, sporadic military campaigns — which the Israeli military calls “mowing the lawn” — would only duplicate the manner in which Israel attempted to periodically degrade Hamas capabilities in Gaza in the years before the Oct. 7 attacks, a strategy that clearly proved ineffective.

This recent war, while short, left its mark. Over 1,000 Iranians were killed, and some 28 Israelis. Iranians showed that they could halt Israel’s daily life: closing down its air space; shuttering businesses; hitting strategic assets like military bases, energy infrastructure and scientific centers; and causing large-scale damage to residential areas. Thousands in Israel have been left homeless. And while some of this damage has been made public, much has been kept tightly under Israeli censorship, with foreign sources relying on radar data reporting several direct hits on military bases.