Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
Ordeal
After the October 7 massacres, the obituaries of the long political career of Benjamin Netanyahu, published both in Israel and in the West, became orthodox. He was considered as politically inert as Donald Trump once was after January 6, 2021.
The conventional wisdom speculated not if, but only when he would be forced out of office.
Western leaders and the Israeli left, and indeed even the Israeli non-left, as well as American and European pundits, claimed that the laxity of the Netanyahu government was entirely to blame for the grotesque massacre of October 7.
Indeed, last fall, there arose almost a competition of critics to assert all the ways in which Netanyahu was played by Hamas.
Accordingly, Netanyahu’s sweeping Supreme Court reforms had supposedly needlessly split the country, demoralizing the military and eroding Israeli deterrence in the eyes of Palestinian terrorists. Or his purported strategy of playing off the more lethal and toxic Hamas against the Palestinian Authority was supposedly proof of his reckless naivete.
Still, other opponents argued that his 16 years as Israel’s longest-serving prime minister and his age of 75 made him a Joe Biden-like relic of the past, simply too old and too familiar to be any longer effective. He was told it was well past time to step down and let a new generation break out of the old toxic Middle East mindsets.
And indeed, after October 7, Netanyahu faced a bleak regional and global landscape—analogous to what a 65-year-old Churchill faced in June 1940 when all of Western Europe was in the hands of the Nazis and a lonely Britain was without a single wartime ally—with a sympathetic America still hesitant to commit to ensuring its existence.
Massive immigration from the Middle East into Europe and the United States—spiked by hundreds of thousands of oil-subsidized foreign students in Western universities, coupled with the post-George Floyd woke/DEI hysterias—had made European and American political parties unapologetically not just anti-Israel but now increasingly anti-Semitic as well.
Western governments at times seemed far more terrified of their own Muslim citizens, foreign residents, radicalized students, and left-wing activists of their political parties than they were of any terrorist threats emanating from Iran and its surrogates.
So, a shared sense of resignation, if not despair, had swept the West and, in part, Israel too. Armchair strategists and retired generals opined nonstop how it would be virtually impossible to root out Hamas from its vast subterranean labyrinths—given its armories and headquarters were buried deep below Gazan hospitals, schools, and mosques.
The West all but accepted Hamas propaganda that it was more immoral to root out Hamas murderers hiding beneath hospitals than it was for them to murder and then flee beneath them.
Hamas’s own leaders were in no mood to negotiate a return of the hostages. They felt the more collateral damage their own fellow Gazans suffered, the more CNN-fed propaganda about Israeli “atrocities” and “genocide” would neuter the Netanyahu government. Hamas sensed Palestinians were to be the media’s new Ukrainians—fellow underdogs deserving Western support.
The old friendship days of Donald Trump—the Abraham Accords, the move of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, the institutionalization of an Israeli Golan Heights, the withdrawal from the Iran Deal, the crippling oil sanctions on Tehran, and the terrorist designation of the Houthis—were long gone.
In their place emerged the most anti-Israeli American government in memory. Biden-Harris soon put arms holds on Israel, hectored it to be proportionate in responding to some 500 projectiles launched by Iran against the Jewish homeland, and all but resonated the slurs of the left that Israel had become “genocidal.”
By spring 2024, we were further told that Israel could not finally defeat Hamas or remove its leadership from their tunnels. Moreover, Israel also faced 100,000, 125,000, or perhaps even 150,000 Hezbollah ballistic missiles and rockets—along with the full arsenal of Iranian rockets, missiles, and drones—that were ready at last to swarm and destroy Israeli defenses.
So, Israel was hopelessly trapped, we were told, in a brilliantly devilish Iranian “ring of fire.” Accordingly, Iranian appendages in the West Bank and Gaza, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon would wage an on-off again war of attrition against Israel.
Meanwhile, Iran would finalize the production of five or six nuclear bombs. Israel’s civilian and military manpower would be worn down and worn out on multiple fronts and its tourist trade would be destroyed.
The economy would be bled out, as its citizens were ostracized abroad and at home called up to military service. And its only patron, the once reliable U.S., now under the Biden-Harris administration, considered the Jewish state a near embarrassing election-year liability.
Such were the burdens that would supposedly crush Netanyahu as he was forced from office. These challenges would soon lead to a more “realistic” and compliant Israeli government that would stop the ground wars, not retaliate disproportionally against Hezbollah or Iran (“You got a win. Take the win” in the words of Joe Biden), and use the Biden administration as a neutral interlocutor to legitimize Hamas and thereby perhaps ransom the hostages for billions of dollars.
The more Israel knocked down incoming missiles, the more Biden urged them not to respond proportionally, as if to punish Israel for its competence and reward Iran for its ineptitude.
Indeed, not since the infamous days of the 1950s, when the CIA overthrew Latin American regimes, had America so brazenly interfered in the internal politics of a foreign nation as it now overtly sought to replace or undermine the Netanyahu government—by strategic leaks of shared classified information, slow-walking and suspending arms, threats of holding back financial aid, opening back-channel relations with its political opponents, and by nonstop loud jawboning.
Triumph
Yet here we are in autumn 2024, a year after October 7, with Hamas’s leadership virtually liquidated. Its terrorist brigades are decimated and increasingly scattered, and its own battered constituencies now angry that they are suffering the consequences of a self-interested—and, worst of all, losing—Hamas elite.
Hezbollah has launched some 9,000 rockets since October 7. It has made the Lebanese-Israeli border a no-man’s land. Some 80,000 Israelis were forced from their homes. Hezbollah violated all the UN peace accords and used UN deployments as virtual shields. Middle East experts assumed that Hamas were amateur killers compared to Nasrallah’s dreaded Hezbollah—the SS of Middle Eastern terrorist brigades.
Supposedly, its hardened killers, some 100,000 strong, could at any time trump the wickedness and medieval savagery of Hamas by sending at will far deadlier hit teams into northern Israel to repeat the massacres of October 7.
And what of Iran itself, the hub to the spokes of such terrorism?
We were told that it would soon become nuclear and might strike against the proverbial “one-bomb” state. In the mullahs’ eyes, poor Israel was a divine gift to the theocracy of assembling half the world’s Jewry into one easy target.
Did not Iran export deadly drones and missiles to new staunch allies like Russia and China and develop missiles nearly comparable to any in the West?
And yet somehow an embattled Netanyahu, shunned by the Biden administration, demonized by the European Union, and smeared and slandered by the UN, saw opportunity where all others saw only doom.
He understood that the sheer depravity of October 7 gave Israel, at least for a brief window, the moral authority to wage all-out war on its enemies, terrorists whose reputations he sensed were exaggerated, and their leaders’ bloodcurdling threats thus mostly empty.
So, Israel systematically neutered Hamas, eliminating its leadership, destroying its tunnels, and warning civilians this time around to vacate buildings that served as armories, storehouses, and safe houses and thus would be leveled. And so they were.
As if out of some science fiction novel, years ago Israel booby trapped thousands of Hezbollah pagers and walkie-talkies. And when they now finally exploded, they wounded or killed in a few seconds many of its ruling echelon while identifying the terrorists among the Lebanese population and revealing their strategic locations at the moments of their demise.
Netanyahu was told that reentering the Lebanese border was to revisit the graveyard of past failed Israeli incursions. And yet he did just that, though in measure, and thus half of the Hezbollah missile force is now reportedly gone. And with that, he pivoted to Iran.
Iran had sent 500 rockets, drones, and missiles into Israel, Israel heretofore launching a mere handful of missiles in response—until last week when the Israelis had apparently taken out much of the Iranian missile inventory and launch sites, as well as its anti-aircraft batteries.
So Israel without loss has finally retaliated against Iran in force, but in a geostrategically brilliant fashion that for now has taken few lives, avoided a regional war, and again put Iran in a nearly impossible strategic position—and all without further alienating an often hostile Biden administration.
If Iran does not match its murderous eliminationist rhetoric with a third strike, it will continue to lose face abroad and perhaps eventually even its governance at home. And yet Tehran realizes such humiliating quietude is the better of two bad choices, since Israel also gave it a way out, by killing few Iranians and sparing its oil and nuclear facilities.
On the other hand, if Iran foolishly chooses to send more ballistic missiles into Israel, there is a good chance that again few—if any—will get through. And such a third strike will both justify and indeed this time ensure that an unbound (and unstoppable) Israeli retaliation will destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities and its oil infrastructure, rendering it destitute, defenseless, and humiliated—to the delight of the Arab world, the U.S. and even Europe, and the indifference of its supposed allies China and Russia.
Moreover, Netanyahu struck before the election. That sent a message that even if Harris were to be elected, neither she nor Biden in the next few months will veto Israeli strategic options. (And the strike also reminded American voters that the current administration turned a calm Middle East into an inferno). All that said, Israel responded again with restraint, which the Biden-Harris will eagerly claim was due to their own humanitarian pressure.
In sum, Netanyahu has changed the very image of his multifarious enemies—and indeed of the Middle East terrorist himself. The myth of a deadly and inviolate Iran is now shattered, replaced by a neurotic theocracy, its terrorist limbs amputated, its homeland defenseless, and its ultimate fate in the hands of a righteously angry Israel—with the specter of a possible President Donald Trump on the horizon who would end the dangerous American strategic nonsense of promoting a theocratic, anti-Western, Persian/Shiite/underdog as a foil to the moderate Arabs and Israel.
Likewise, exploding pagers and walkie-talkies not only decimated Hezbollah, but it also humiliated it—and made it the butt of macabre global jest.
Targeted assassinations changed the image of the fiery terrorist Iranian, Hezbollah, or Hamas leader, shaking his fist and shouting death to Israel and the West to assembled thousands, into a caricature of a craven and quivering bully—screaming from a reinforced bunker about the unfairness of being on the receiving end of what it has so boastfully for decades dished out.
Western media weekly posts wanted poster-like charts of Iranian, Hezbollah, and Hamas leadership, with x’s over the faces of the deceased. Now no sooner does a Hamas, Hezbollah, or Iranian terrorist implode than there are hushed assumptions that no one wishes to publicly identify as his replacement—and thus join him in eternity
The surreal aspect of the Netanyahu retaliatory tour is that he has done more to neutralize European and American enemies—with decades of Western blood on their hands—than NATO, the CIA, the FBI, and Interpol combined, and yet more often received rebuke rather than gratitude.
Professor Hanson,
I’ve been waiting for realistic, positive commentary in Bibi’s defense from analog media. Alas, I regret my naivety and salute your more than fair assessment of Israel’s determination and results.
Finally, your interview with Bibi’s brother (2022?) is well remembered and regarded in our home and may still portend positive changes in jurisprudence within Eretz Yisrael. Blessings and peace to you and family.
Love Victor Hanson’s work. I’ve always admired the tenacity and resourcefulness of the Israelis, and have come to expect actions that leverage those characteristics. But I must admit, the exploding walkie talkies freaked me out (in an admiring way). I suspect they freaked the enemy out as well. Israel is out there by themselves these days but their enemies underestimate them at their own risk.
Brilliant article. Thank-you
Finally some good news.
Review:
Victor Davis Hanson’s “The Ordeal and Triumph of Mr. Netanyahu” offers a riveting analysis of Netanyahu’s political resurgence following the October 7 massacre. Hanson draws a powerful parallel to Churchill’s leadership in 1940, illustrating how Netanyahu, initially dismissed by critics, leverages Israel’s moral authority to confront terrorism decisively. The essay critiques Western appeasement, arguing that anti-Israel sentiment—fueled by radicalized students, left-wing activists, and the Biden administration—left Israel isolated. Despite this, Netanyahu navigates the crisis with strategic brilliance, dismantling Hamas, humbling Hezbollah, and forcing Iran into a precarious position without escalating into all-out war.
Hanson’s vivid account of innovative military tactics, like Israel’s use of booby-trapped communications devices, showcases how Netanyahu outmaneuvered both enemies and critics. The essay highlights the profound failure of Western leadership, contrasting Biden’s restrained policies with the decisive support Israel enjoyed under Trump. Hanson masterfully portrays Netanyahu’s campaign as both a military and political triumph, neutralizing enemies and reasserting Israel’s strength amid global hostility. The narrative is a bold defense of Netanyahu’s resilience and strategic acumen, making it essential reading for those seeking insight into the complex geopolitical landscape of 2024.
Thank you for the insights. Still curious:
1. Did the all-powerful IDF purposefully allow the October attack?
2. How involved was the US in taking out Iran’s Air defense system, and do they still have formidable rockets, i.e. hypersonic, indefensible and unused?
3. Once the war ended, Bibi allegedly was toast, thus his purported need to prolong the war. Has the domestic calculus changed?
To Jim Reynolds: I must read Dr. Hanson’s observations very slowly and carefully to comprehend the toroughness and brilliance of his insights. You have encapsulated his remarks masterfully. Congratulations and thank you.
To Jim Reynolds: I must read Dr. Hanson’s observations very slowly and carefully to comprehend the thoroughness and brilliance of his insights. You have encapsulated his remarks masterfully. Congratulations and thank you.
I have been through most of the ‘wars’ that Israel has been through since the 1960’s. During that time the support from the United States, its citizens and government was unwavering. But recently I have been shocked but the utter lack of support for the tiny nation. We happened to be in Europe at the time of the October 7th attack and I was amazed at all of the pro-Hamas, anti-Israel demonstrations I saw. We were in Rome at the end of October and thousands were demonstrating for Hamas. The BBC was broadcasting almost non-stop pro-Hamas anti-Israel programs. I unfortunately thought it would be different in the United States when we arrived back. Boy was I surprised! The total disregard for the facts of the barbarism of the Hamas attack and the anti-semitism was astounding. The college campuses were taken over by anti-semites and other radical groups that shut down all activity. The college administrators were weak and rendered useless by their own stupidity and bending to the “woke” policies of the left.
My congratulations to Mr. Netanyahu, and the people of Israel for standing in the face of seemly overwhelming odds and world opinion. They did what was necessary in a way that will be studied for years to come. I especially enjoyed the pager war – brilliant and so targeted.
Thank you for your insights and clarity… Netanyahu is still the strongest leader we have… and I thank God for him… Am Yisrael Chai
Brilliant summary.
What a contrast to our current leadership.
Thank God for some reasonable thoughts on Netanyahu. He is a man for all seasons and his commitment to eliminating all terrorist sccccc………m he should applauded everywhere ( except of course with the latte swiveling cappuccino blathering, weak kneed progressive fools on this earth. )
Kudos to Netanyahu. And Kudos to VDH for acknowledging.
Respectfully
Wonderful assessment brilliantly written. Thank you! As an Australian Jew, I am deeply grateful to you.
Excellent narrative of what the Israelis were able to accomplish! Thank you!
Wonder how Blinken and our Military elite will fare in history.
Such retreat and incompetence (the pier unmoored) not to mention the moral depravity of promoting Hamas and silence and impotence
Regarding UN and Al Jazeera complicity on Oct 7 atrocities
Has been a blood stain on America by these US Administration operatives.
The Arabs have always threatened others and boasted way beyond their capabilities. Now, apparently Iran is revealed to have the same issue. Not a surprise.
MAKE VDH GREAT AGAIN
TRUMP 2024
One of your best to date on this topic. A refreshing respite from a dreary rehashing of history and all the negatives, and instead, documenting actual accomplishments. Thank you.
I used to have a client in Oman, a former banker, of Palestinian descent that produced textiles in Jordon for export to the U.S. The factories were under Israeli management with Palestinian workers. They got along fine and enjoyed a good standard of living.
He said Muslims, by in large, are a peaceful people, maybe, 1 percent radicalized. The problem is, if Israel consists of 9.5 million people surrounded by 550 million Muslims, then 1 percent represents about 5.5 millon potential terrorists, which implies never-ending warfare.
To Craig Jenkins: Smart observation. Thanks.
The key IMHO is jihad, which by definition means all infidels either agree to a caliphate or die. The Abraham Accords signatories are all obviously threatened by cross-border religious ideologies. Obama/Biden/Harris etc. believe liberalism must prevail and jihadists will someday negotiate and compromise. Israel knows better.
This democrat administration has aided a country that regards the United States as the Great Satan and chants “Death to America.”
It makes no sense to benefit an avowed enemy of the United States. This is another self-destructive democrat policy that needs to be stopped. If this was the only reason to vote for Trump, then all Americans should do so.
It is time for democrat voters to wake up and vote for Trump.
Make America Sane Again – Vote for Trump
Good for Israel. Glad to see someone is not afraid to go against the 2 in the white house
Fine words. Well said. Thank you VDH!
To quote William Halsey:
“There aren’t any great men. There are just great challenges that ordinary men like you and me are forced by circumstances to meet.” It’s a crying shame that we do not have ANY ‘ordinary men or women’ in our current administration!! Maybe all this will change if Trump gets elected so pray for divine intervention. God bless America, Israel, our military and our Veterans.
Several of the podcasts I follow are by former CIA operatives; all state how Israel Intelligence far exceeds the USA’s Intel agencies under this administration. The exploding pagers and cell phones was pure tactical genius, “well played” was the gist of each podcaster. The intel needed to place explosives in the room of the terrorist in chief of Hezbollah as well as the successful targeting of subsequent terrorist leaders was more evidence that Israel knows how to play the long game and strike effectively.
The questions left unanswered, but may soon be, is when will Israel take out Iran’s nuclear capability and which government(s) are currently holding them back, Arab or US?
Israel have clearly gone past the point of caring what any other regime think of her. Israel have awakend to the truth that they MUST Take Care of Number One, Israel, as it became abundantly clear that no other nation will.
I well recall reading about prevous Israeli war wonders.. the Six Day War, the Entebbe triumph, . and similar. Some of those accounts almost seemed like fiction. Their ability to turn round their few aircraft, serviced, refuelled and rearmed so quickly their enemies were convinced they had three times as many as they actually did. Their present total command of the intel necessary toferret out the enemy and hit them in their most vulnerable places has read like a spy novel, yet it is reality.
Such an insightful and well written piece. Thank you VDH and thank you Bibb—amazing military mind and grit.
Yet another fine piece about Israel. I have counted at least a dozen similar articles Prof Hanson penned during the past year. However, it comes at the expense of overlooking to the point of ignoring an even more brutal war in Ukraine, and I find that extremely vexing. To appreciate the level of atrocities I invite you to watch the powerful and persuasive conversation with Nobel Prize winner Oleksandra Matviichuk describing the atrocities Russians are committing in Ukraine. If your time is limited begin at the 15-minute mark, and continue to end. Oleksandra also argues convincingly that it was not NATO’s expansion that provoked the war, but Putin’s fear of freedom.
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/event/oleksandra-matviichuk-on-human-rights-and-russian-aggression/
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