The military campaign that Israel and the United States launched last Saturday against Iran may be a joint operation. But the two countries’ experiences of the war—and its leaders’ strategic calculus—are very different. Half a world away, the U.S. public and its politicians are divided over basic questions of principle and policy: whether the strikes are legal, whether Congress needs to authorize the use of force, and whether the risks are commensurate with the potential gains.

In Israel, by contrast, the war has temporarily united a divided and fatigued public. While Americans debate the merits of eliminating the Islamic Republic, Israelis see regime change as the only outcome tantamount to victory. And they are confident that the military operation—which has removed or degraded large swaths of Iranian command nodes, missile infrastructure, and senior figures, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei—is already achieving tremendous success. They feel safer, their leaders are triumphant, and for the first time in years, many can imagine a region free of the malign influence of Tehran or the network of proxies it has cultivated and financed for decades. The Islamic Republic constituted an undeniable menace to Israelis, who have lived under the shadow of Iranian threats since 1979 and suffered rocket barrages and terror attacks by its many proxy militias. Watching their tormentor’s leadership be systematically eliminated feels like the ultimate vindication of the country’s security doctrine.

For Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the war constitutes a gift at a crucial moment. In January, he was facing down growing calls for a reckoning with his government’s security failures ahead of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack; a corruption trial; and polls suggesting that his coalition was likely to lose parliamentary seats in an election scheduled for later this year. The campaign against Iran may not only save Israel from an imminent threat but also salvage Netanyahu’s hold on power. Throughout his three-decade political career, Netanyahu made Iran central to his messaging and cultivated an image as the only leader who could protect Israel from the regime. Now his efforts have come to fruition. Recently, his government has sought to reframe all of Israel’s military operations since October 7 as a triumphal “war of redemption” that culminates in the defeat of Iran, transfiguring Hamas’s assault into the opening chapter of a larger heroic tale—and eliding success in this campaign with the still-elusive victory in Gaza. Netanyahu’s ability to claim he killed Khamenei and changed the Middle East forever could be his wining electoral card.

Yet the euphoria in Israel also feels hauntingly familiar. Just eight months ago, after the so-called 12-day war badly damaged Iranian nuclear facilities, decimated the country’s air defenses, and took out major rocket and missile capabilities, Netanyahu declared from the Knesset podium: “We have removed the Iranian sword hanging over our heads.” On Saturday, after the initial successes of Operation Epic Fury, his language was nearly identical: “The Iranian regime’s ability to threaten Israel has been permanently degraded.”

War-weary Israelis long for a definitive victory against Iran. But it remains uncertain how the Israeli government will manage an unpredictable escalatory spiral—or that it can truly abandon a “mowing the grass” strategy that helps keep Israel mired in constant conflicts in its neighborhood. Whenever Israel addresses one security problem, it seems to only create another. The election is likely to come soon enough for Netanyahu to leverage the war to consolidate his position, regardless of long-term negative consequences. The domestic problems it is serving as a distraction from, however, will not go away—and Israelis who hope that this war will foreclose future conflict and lead to the normalization of ties with the wider Arab world could end up bitterly disappointed.

For Israelis, Iran has long represented the ultimate threat—a theocracy that has persistently called for their country’s destruction, attempted to construct nuclear weapons, and built thousands of short- and long-range ballistic missiles as well as........

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