US President Donald Trump’s announcement of a two-week ceasefire between the United States and a battered but still defiant Islamic Republic has calmed the Iranian battlefield.

But it has had the opposite effect in the Israeli political arena, with party leaders heading into an election season jockeying to parlay the public’s perception of the war into points for themselves or against their opponents.

In a televised address Wednesday evening, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted that the 39-day war was a success that had “undermined the foundations” of the Iranian regime.

In his own televised speech, Opposition Leader Yair Lapid called the war a “strategic debacle” and a “diplomatic disaster on a scale I don’t recall ever seeing.”

Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, considered Netanyahu’s most potent rival in the upcoming vote, was quick to warn that the prime minister’s handling of the war left Israel vulnerable to a “vengeful Iran,” which will be even more determined to go nuclear. And Yair Golan, who leads The Democrats, accused the prime minister of orchestrating “one of the gravest strategic failures Israel has known.”

Netanyahu “came out and said he had a great victory and achieved everything,” said pollster Mitchell Barak of Keevoon Research Strategy & Communications. “And all of the opposition people said it was a failure. Election season is starting now.”

When the war was getting underway in early March, many believed Netanyahu saw it as a way to boost his standing among the electorate, with Israelis set to go to the ballot box in October, though the vote may still be earlier. The election will be the first time Israelis will get to vote on their national leaders since the October 7, 2023, attack, and Netanyahu was thought to be keen to scrub the security debacle and ensuing diplomatic isolation over the war in Gaza from his record.

Netanyahu was hoping that a “narrative of a win over Iran would boost the PM’s reelection chances and shift the narrative away from October 7,” one coalition insider argued at the time.

The Prime Minister, the source said at the time, said that “regime change [in Iran] plus a Saudi [normalization] deal could be........

© The Times of Israel