Netanyahu deserves significant credit for Israel’s wartime successes. But those successes don’t prove that he was uniquely responsible for them and they don’t erase the failures that led to October 7th and complicated the war that followed in its wake. **********************

In a previous post, I argued that Benjamin Netanyahu’s attempts to deflect blame for October 7 don’t hold up under scrutiny. That raises a different question: even if he bears responsibility for the failures that led to the massacre, do his wartime successes since then outweigh those failures?

Whenever I discuss this with Likud voters, this is one of the main points I hear. Whatever one thinks about the state of the various fronts today, Israel’s enemies have suffered devastating setbacks. Hamas and Hezbollah have been severely degraded. Bashar al-Assad is living in exile in Moscow. Iran’s nuclear and missile programs have been set back. The Israeli economy has proven far more resilient than many expected.

Netanyahu’s message is simple: You can blame me for October 7, but I kept Israel safe in a way no other prime minister could. Like it or not, I’m still the only person qualified to lead.

It’s a serious argument. But it rests on an equally serious assumption: that Netanyahu alone could have made the decisions that positively influenced the conduct of the war, and that alternative leaders were incapable of similar or better strategic performance. When you look at each front, the claim that Netanyahu is irreplaceable becomes hard to defend.

Over the past year, Israel fought two major campaigns against Iran alongside the United States, culminating in Operation Roaring Lion. Iran’s nuclear program suffered significant damage. Ballistic missile production was disrupted. Senior IRGC commanders were eliminated, and launch infrastructure was badly degraded.

Netanyahu deserves credit for authorizing those operations and for maintaining a workable relationship with Donald Trump.

But were those successes uniquely his?

The operational work was carried out by the Mossad and the Israeli Air Force. More importantly, there is good reason to believe that another government with a similarly hawkish view of Iran could have pursued much the same........

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