Why Netanyahu went to war

Eliminating Iran’s nuclear threat was long overdue, and I pray that the United States accomplished that last Saturday night, because Israel could not have done so.

Despite its assertions that doing so was its sole objective when it unilaterally launched its air attack on Iran’s three nuclear enrichment sites, Israel lacked the only airborne weapon that was built to accomplish that task, and it had no way of knowing for certain that the United States would do it for them.

That is true even if, as some are saying, President Donald Trump had assured Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as far back as their White House meeting on February 4 that the U.S. would finish the job if Israel started it, something Trump hinted at in his speech last Saturday night. There is a reason that Financial Times columnist Robert Armstrong gave Trump the nickname TACO” in his May 2 column. TACO stands for Trump Always Chickens Out, and it refers to the recurring Trumpian pattern of making aggressive threats, only to back away from them later. Armstrong was referring to Trump’s tariff threats, but that pattern pervades almost everything Trump has done since January 20.

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For example, Trump suspended certain federal aid program disbursements in late January, then reversed himself two days later. He did the same three days after he suspended providing legal representation to unaccompanied migrant minors. He announced and then canceled plans to house as many as 30,000 migrants at Guantánamo Bay.

Regardless of any promises Trump may have made to Netanyahu, relying on them is not the wisest course.

Here is why I believe that Israel’s airborne campaign was the wrong approach — and also why it took that approach, knowing it would not succeed.

Iran’s covert nuclear weapons program, Project Amad, began in the late 1990s, disguised as an extension of the peaceful-use program Iran had begun in the late 1960s. Syria launched its own covert program at about the same time. On the night of September 5-6, 2007, Israeli bombers flew undetected across Syrian airspace to the country’s northeast and destroyed Syria’s al-Kibar nuclear site.

This led Iran to move its nuclear weapons facilities deep underground, where ordinary bombs cannot reach. Iran’s main (and most heavily fortified) weapons-grade facility is the Fordo Fuel Enrichment Plant, which is buried more than 262 feet below a mountain near Qom, about 100 miles south of Tehran. Most of Iran’s “crown jewel of uranium enrichment,” the Shahid Ahmadi Roshan Nuclear Facility, is buried 164 feet under a mountain in Natanz, about 135 miles southeast of Tehran. It is also protected by thick concrete walls. Iran is also building a third underground facility near Natanz that is believed to be more than 300 feet below ground.

The bunker-busting GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) bomb is the only airborne weapon capable of eliminating these sites, and only the U.S.-built and highly classified B-2 Spirit Stealth Bomber is able to carry and deploy the 30,000-pound bomb. From all indications, the B2s and their deadly payload lived up to the task last weekend.

Given all this, why did Israel launch an offensive destined to fall short of its objective? Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu surely knew that without U.S. B-2 Spirit Stealth Bombers doing the bunker-busting, Israel would not be able to eliminate Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

The timing of the attack strongly suggests that he cynically ordered it to stay in power. The order was given just one day after he narrowly escaped a preliminary vote in the Knesset to dissolve his government and hold a new election, which he possibly could have lost.

The vote was 61 opposed and 53 in favor, with 61 votes being the minimum needed for a majority in Israel’s 120-seat parliament. Among those who voted in favor were two members of Netanyahu’s coalition.

Another indication that the motive was political is Netanyahu’s statement about when he ordered the military to plan the attack — in November 2024. He said he did so because Israel had just killed Hassan Nasrallah. However, the Hezbollah leader was killed several weeks earlier, on September 27.

Netanyahu had more personal concerns that November, however. He was trying to keep his contentious coalition in line and was facing large weekly demonstrations fueled by the hostage crisis and other factors. Netanyahu’s legal troubles added to his woes. In November, he was preparing to testify in December at his bribery, fraud, and breach of trust trial.

By a wide margin, Netanyahu holds the record as the person who has served as prime minister far longer than anyone else. His goal to make that record unbreakable was now at serious risk.

Netanyahu and his right-wing coalition took office in the last days of 2022. By March 2023, it was already beginning to deteriorate because of two issues. The first was his proposed overhaul of the judiciary, which had led to demonstrations throughout Israel on a scale never before seen there, including by large numbers of military reservists who said they would not report for duty if called if the overhaul went through. When Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, a member of Netanyahu’s own Likud party, publicly demanded on March 25 that the overhaul be scrapped, Netanyahu fired him, only to rehire him 15 days later, after he, too, abandoned the judicial overhaul.

Then there was this. In 2017, the High Court of Justice declared that the blanket military service exemption given to charedi yeshiva students was unconstitutional. In March 2024, Israel’s attorney general announced that the blanket exemptions would end on April 1. When that did not happen by November 2024, Netanyahu’s secular coalition partners demanded its immediate implementation. The charedi parties — Shas and United Torah Judaism (UTJ) — then threatened to bring down the government unless a new exemption law was passed to replace the unconstitutional one.

Netanyahu could not allow that to happen. Instead, he kept the parties at bay by opening negotiations on a compromise, which was finally reached earlier this month. That agreement basically puts the issue on hold once again, at least for up to six years.

Meanwhile, the nationalists — HaTzionut HaDatit (Religious Zionists) and Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) — kept pushing Netanyahu into more aggressive policies towards Gaza and the West Bank. They also prevented him from agreeing to several ceasefire proposals and from making concessions to bring home all the hostages. In one case, this not only delayed the release of Edan Alexander by six weeks, but it was the United States that accomplished the release, to Netanyahu’s embarrassment.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, national security minister and leader of Otzma Yehudit, also forced Netanyahu to finally adopt a plan he first proposed on X on October 17, 2023. “The only thing that needs to enter Gaza are hundreds of tons of explosives from the Air Force, not an ounce of humanitarian aid,” he posted. Adopting the plan outraged the world and pushed support for Israel to its lowest point ever.

National opinion surveys also were pointing to trouble for Netanyahu. One poll showed that former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett was favored over Netanyahu 46 percent to 39 percent as better suited to be prime minister.

By the end of 2024, Netanyahu’s government was still standing, but tenuously.

He had built his career on being Mr. Security. That image began to erode on October 7, 2023. It took a further hit within weeks of that massacre, when first Haaretz and then the New York Times reported on the contents of a year-old 40-page document codenamed Jericho Wall.

The Haaretz article, published on November 24, 2023, reported that Israel had “detailed information” a year before “Hamas’ plan to breach the Gaza border at dozens of points and attack dozens of communities and army posts…, [yet] Israel didn’t properly prepare for the threat….”

It said that instead, he did just the opposite. The IDF was ordered to weaken the Gaza Division’s forces and to withdraw many of the troops who were protecting kibbutzim near the southern border—all because Netanyahu, under pressure from his nationalist coalition partners, wanted to bolster Israel’s control of the West Bank in order to advance the nationalist agenda of a “Greater Israel.”

As the Times reported on December 2, 2023, Jericho Wall “outlined, point by point, exactly the kind of devastating invasion” Hamas carried out a year later “with shocking precision.”

Netanyahu’s inability to secure the release of all the hostages throughout 2024, coupled with his refusal to establish an independent commission to investigate what happened on October 7 and why Israel ignored the intelligence in the Jericho Wall document and numerous other intelligence data, harmed his image severely. By November, it was clear to him that he needed something dramatic to decisively restore that image. An attack on Iran fit that bill and he ordered planning to begin.

Netanyahu knew Iran would retaliate and that some of its missiles would get past Iron Dome’s defenses, raining death and destruction over Israel. He also knew that without B-2 Spirit bombers and their GBU-57 MOP bunker-busters, even a well-planned unilateral attack on Iran from the air could not completely eliminate the nuclear threat it posed.

However, he also knew that such an attack could help him stay in power. In the end, it was all that mattered. Netanyahu’s self-interest once again came before the national interest.

Shammai Engelmayer is a rabbi-emeritus of Congregation Beth Israel of the Palisades and an adult education teacher in Bergen County. He is the author of eight books and the winner of 10 awards for his commentaries. His website is www.shammai.org.