Netanyahu, Ignoring Allies and Defying Critics, Basks in a Rare Triumph

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Netanyahu, Ignoring Allies and Defying Critics, Basks in a Rare Triumph

Israel’s strike on Hassan Nasrallah was the culmination of several startling moves that suggest the Israeli prime minister feels unconstrained by foreign criticism.

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By Patrick Kingsley

Reporting from Jerusalem

Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to assassinate Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, capped an increasingly brazen sequence of escalatory moves that reflected the Israeli prime minister’s renewed confidence in Israel’s military strength as well as in his own ability to navigate and defy foreign criticism, analysts said.

Mr. Netanyahu’s authorization of the strike came a day after the United States, Israel’s main benefactor, called for a cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah. It occurred minutes after foreign diplomats walked out of his speech to the United Nations General Assembly, protesting the conduct of Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon. And it came amid growing pressure on judges at the International Criminal Court to order his arrest on war crimes charges.

Last October, Mr. Netanyahu canceled a similar attack against Mr. Nasrallah following American pressure to call it off and internal doubts about Israel’s ability to fight on two fronts in Gaza and Lebanon after its failure to prevent Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel. His popularity plummeted after the Hamas raid, with polls repeatedly suggesting that he would easily lose power if a snap election was called.

Nearly a year later, Mr. Netanyahu appears far less deterred by either foreign pressure or domestic frailty. Fighting in Gaza has slowed, allowing the Israeli military to focus on Hezbollah, while Mr. Netanyahu did not even consult with the United States before authorizing the strike on Friday, according to U.S. officials.

“King Bibi is back,” said Nachman Shai, a former cabinet minister, referring to Mr. Netanyahu by his nickname. “If you compare Bibi now to Bibi 10 months ago, he’s a different person. He’s full of confidence.”

The attack on Mr. Nasrallah followed Mr. Netanyahu’s similarly risky decisions to strike a group of senior Iranian generals in April; kill Hezbollah’s top military commander in July; assassinate Hamas’s political leader on the same night; detonate thousands of Hezbollah pagers and radios this month; and mount one of the most intense and deadliest bombardments in modern warfare last Monday in Lebanon.

These devastating blows have yet to translate into clear strategic gains. Israel’s main aim is to allow more than 60,000 displaced Israelis back to their homes near the border, but Hezbollah is still firing brief rocket barrages there, preventing Mr. Netanyahu from achieving that goal.

Still, his moves have defied — and, at least for now, undermined — warnings by allies and foes alike that an escalation risked setting off a broader regional war involving Iran, Hezbollah’s benefactor, and its other Middle Eastern proxies.

Instead, each attack significantly harmed Hezbollah without provoking unmanageable responses from the militia or Iran, at least for the time being. Hezbollah has not yet responded with an avalanche of long-range missile attacks that analysts and officials had predicted would overwhelm Israel’s air defenses and destroy its power grid and other key infrastructure. Daily life in Israel continued on Sunday morning while Hezbollah was in disarray.

Mr. Netanyahu’s sense of achievement could ebb quickly if Hezbollah or Iran does suddenly respond with much deadlier rocket strikes, Mr. Shai said.

“But for the time being,” he said, “Bibi feels at the height of his power.”

Mr. Netanyahu’s growing confidence, some analysts say, has been partly fostered by the Biden administration’s reluctance to rein him in at earlier stages in the war.

Since October, President Biden and his aides have sometimes criticized Mr. Netanyahu’s government for the conduct of its campaign in Gaza, for failing to conclude a cease-fire deal with Hamas and for being too slow to send aid to Gazans. The United States also successfully deterred the planned attack on Beirut, Lebanon’s capital, last October.

But apart from briefly freezing one shipment of arms, Washington has rarely followed its criticism with practical consequences, continuing to provide Mr. Netanyahu’s government with diplomatic cover at the United Nations and billions of dollars’ worth of arms. Israel has strong bipartisan support in the United States, with both Democratic and Republican leaderships wary of criticizing Israeli policy, particularly in the run-up to the presidential election.

“Netanyahu feels he can continue manipulating them because, other than expressing their dissatisfaction, they’re doing nothing,” said Alon Pinkas, an analyst and former Israeli consul-general in New York.

“It’s worsened or intensified as we got closer to the U.S. election,” Mr. Pinkas said, adding that Mr. Biden seemed wary of taking any measure that might damage Kamala Harris’s chances of defeating Donald J. Trump in November.

Mr. Netanyahu’s moves also occurred against the backdrop of growing domestic pressure to act against Hezbollah.

The conflict between Israel and the Lebanese militia began during Israel’s occupation of south Lebanon in the 1980s. This round of fighting started in October, when Hezbollah began firing on Israeli positions in solidarity with Hamas, which had just raided Israel. The Israeli military fired back, leading to a low-intensity border war that both sides have so far avoided turning into an all-out ground conflict.

Still, the fighting displaced hundreds of thousands of people on either side of the border, including more than 60,000 in northern Israel. And the plight of those displaced Israelis led to growing calls for the prime minister to authorize a more decisive military campaign, including from a far-right party that holds the balance of power in Mr. Netanyahu’s fragile coalition government.

The day before the strike on Mr. Nasrallah, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the leader of that party, threatened to quit the government if Mr. Netanyahu agreed to a truce with Hezbollah instead of defeating it by force.

“When your enemy is on his knees, you do not allow him to recover,” Mr. Ben-Gvir said in a statement.

Some analysts also believe Mr. Netanyahu was spurred by a desire to atone for his government’s failure to prevent Hamas’s atrocities last October. The attack on Oct. 7 was the deadliest day of war in Israel’s history, ruining Mr. Netanyahu’s self-image as the guardian of Israel’s security. For years, Mr. Netanyahu had sought to contain Hamas instead of seeking its ouster, facilitating a deal with Qatar that helped the group survive financially, making it easier for Hamas to prepare for the surprise attack.

Mr. Netanyahu is “convinced that the only way to absolve himself, potentially, for Oct. 7 is to do something spectacular in Lebanon,” Mr. Pinkas said.

Others say that Mr. Netanyahu has long been wary of military adventurism. On Sunday morning, Israeli columnists speculated that he was in fact reluctantly cajoled into action by the military and intelligence leaders who masterminded and promoted the attacks on Hezbollah, as well as by fortuitous circumstances.

For example, the decision to explode hundreds of Hezbollah pagers this month was expedited by the fear that the militia was about to discover that the devices were compromised. That forced Mr. Netanyahu to choose between using the method immediately or losing it forever.

Just a day earlier, Mr. Netanyahu had been considering whether to fire the defense minister who oversaw the operation, Yoav Gallant, before postponing that move on the afternoon of the attack. For some, that chaotic dynamic created the impression that Mr. Netanyahu was making last-minute moves rather than enacting a carefully planned strategy.

Past Israeli leaders may have been swifter to act, according to Michael Stephens, an expert on the Middle East at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based foreign affairs research group.

“The situation in the north is something no Israeli leader would have tolerated,” Mr. Stephens said. “Standing firm against international pressure while aggressively pursuing Israel’s security interests is just very Israeli. It’s not uniquely Bibi.”

Whatever his prior motivations, the risk now for Mr. Netanyahu is that he becomes hubristic, pursuing even grander military aims that ultimately backfire, analysts said.

In particular, Mr. Netanyahu faces calls to invade southern Lebanon and destroy the group’s border fortifications, which threaten Israeli communities close to Lebanon. Such a move could capitalize on Hezbollah’s weakness, but it also risks sucking Israel’s infantry into an unwinnable ground war on unfamiliar enemy territory.

Despite its losses, Hezbollah has yet to collapse. It could still claw back the initiative with support from Iran.

“These are all shifting moments,” said Itamar Rabinovich, a former Israeli ambassador to Washington. “What looks good today may not look good tomorrow.”

Victories in Lebanon will also have little direct effect on either the negotiations between Israel and Hamas for a cease-fire and hostage release deal in Gaza, or the fighting on the ground there. Israeli soldiers have decimated Hamas but are struggling to deliver a winning blow. The remaining Hamas leaders are believed to be surrounded by hostages, making them difficult to attack and conclusively defeat.

And the killing of Lebanese leaders in Lebanon will not resolve Israel’s longest-running challenge: its conflict with the Palestinians, who still seek a sovereign state regardless of Mr. Netanyahu’s moves against Hezbollah.

“Israeli governments have been carrying out assassinations for decades,” wrote Ayman Odeh, a Palestinian Israeli lawmaker, in a social media post after Mr. Nasrallah’s assassination. “It did not promote security and did not stop any war,” he added.

Ronen Bergman contributed reporting.