War is not inevitable, unless you’re Binyamin Netanyahu

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has consistently chosen war over diplomacy, particularly regarding the conflict with Iran.

Netanyahu’s preference for military confrontation over diplomatic engagement is not a recent development but a strategic philosophy decades in the making. This approach is often traced to a 1996 policy paper titled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” prepared for Netanyahu by a group of US neoconservative strategists. The document reportedly argued that Israel should abandon the traditional “land-for-peace” diplomacy framework and instead pursue a strategy of regional fragmentation—weakening or removing hostile regimes in places like Iraq and Syria to reorder the Middle East in Israel’s favor. This is the shift from Land for Peace to ‘Creative Destruction’.

This joint US-Israel war against Iran is not a war of necessity; it is a culmination of Netanyahu’s long-held vision. Most importantly to Netanyahu is that it is all part of his political lifeline, not as a gateway to peace. His claims leading up to the 12-day war in June have always been that Iran is an existential threat to Israel. Following the 12-day war, his and Trump’s bombastic claims were of great scales of victory and destruction of the Iranian Nuclear and missile programs. They both presented the war as a decisive blow to the Iranian threat for the foreseeable future. Netanyahu’s exact words were calling the achievements of those 12 days a “historical victory’ that would “stand for generations.” I understand that Netanyahu’s perspective of time is very different than mine. Eight months may be generations for a mosquito but not for us.

It has become too clear that these two “leaders’ “assertions were not only highly exaggerated, they were downright lies.

“US President Donald Trump has no problem inventing an imaginary reality, spreading baseless assessments, lying, and then performing a backflip to retract all his declarations, statements, and falsehoods. He proved this prior to the war with Iran in June 2025 and continues to prove it repeatedly since the start of the current war against Iran, which today marks its thirteenth day with no end in sight”. (https://www.the7eye.org.il/579247)

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is also leading the Israeli public into a false mirage but his mirage is being received very differently in Israel than Trump’s mirage and lies are in the US and around the world.

As a Political Lifeline, following the devastating Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, and the subsequent war in Gaza—which damaged Israel’s international image and left unresolved security issues—the war with Iran serves Netanyahu to shift the national conversation. It allows Netanyahu to pivot the public’s focus away from the failures of October 7, the ongoing crisis in Gaza, and his own corruption trials, and back onto the emotional and political terrain where he feels strongest: confronting an “existential” Iranian enemy. His recorded addresses to........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)