From Iran to Turkey, Netanyahu Is on the Hunt for New Fronts to Ignite
With elections looming, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has found a useful new strategic rival: Turkey.
The hostility between Israel and Turkey, and notably between Netanyahu and Turkey's president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is longstanding. And the intention of U.S. President Donald Trump to provide F-35 aircraft to his buddy Erdogan is definitely causing concern in Jerusalem. But Netanyahu, as is his wont lately, is going a bit farther.
On Tuesday morning, the prime minister visited the navy base in Haifa. We'll be seeing more visits like this in the coming period, with the Israel Defense Forces being exploited for political purposes, circumventing election rules.
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Because of Netanyahu's weakness, in the eyes of the public, for avoiding responsibility for October 7, he needs to try to revive his image as "Mr. Security." His campaign includes photos with top-ranking navy personnel, and with career and conscript soldiers whose opinion no one bothers to ask.
The visit to the navy, people in Netanyahu's circle explained, was actually meant as a warning to Turkey. The danger, they said, is no less than a Turkish imitation of the Iranian blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, imposing a siege on Israel that will harm its energy supply.
This is deliberate escalation, inflating what is ultimately a genuine threat to proportions unrealistic for the current moment.
Netanyahu says he doesn't see Turkey as an enemy, but is worried that the Turks want to destroy Israel. Somehow, this reminds me of the artificial tension with Cairo that was whipped up two years ago, when pro-Netanyahu journalists started to beat the drums about an impending war against Egypt. Only afterward did it emerge that, according to police suspicions, some close advisors to the prime minister spread deliberately distorted reports in the service of Qatar.
Israel has genuine problems with Turkey. Erdogan loathes Netanyahu and views Israel's military might as a hostile force. At the same time, the Turkish leader is cultivating ambitions of regional dominance in the eastern Mediterranean and is promoting an alliance with the new Syrian president, Ahmad al-Sharaa. Turkey will likely deepen its hold in Syria and upgrade its army equipment. That is certainly not good news for Israel.
No less disturbing is the case of the F-35s. Trump, who's driven by instincts and vested interests but hardly ever pursues an orderly strategic plan, wants to take the deal out of deep-freeze it's been in since 2019, during his first term, when Washington halted the supply of the advanced planes to Turkey.
The original reason for the halt: Erdogan had acquired advanced S-400 surface-to-air missiles from Russia, and the Pentagon was justifiably opposed to a situation in which the Turks would possess both the best of American aerial technology and the only system that might be able to shoot it down.
What's almost never mentioned is that, since the halt, the United States has kept six F-35s designated for Turkey on one of its airbases. In fact, $30 million was budgeted for their maintenance.
In recent weeks, Trump has been scattering declarations about his intention to unfreeze the deal as a token of appreciation to his pal Erdogan (Trump even claimed that thanks to their friendship, his Turkish counterpart refrained at the last minute from joining Iran's war against Israel – a claim that sounds far-fetched). Obviously, Turkey will get a lot more than six planes.
Netanyahu publicly opposed the plan in an interview with Fox News, and took a bit of flak from Trump in response. Israel's chance of torpedoing the deal looks slim, and not only because Netanyahu is leery of getting into a head-on confrontation with Trump.
The fact is that a two-thirds majority is required in both Houses of Congress to override a presidential veto. The administration is also making another point: In the absence of an F-35 deal, Turkey will try to get its highly-advanced aircraft from Russia, thereby greatly complicating NATO's internal politics.
The NATO summit this week isn't going to be remembered as the peak of the U.S. president's cognitive abilities. Trump got more confused than he usually does – between Zelenskyy and Putin, and between Iran and the "Islamic Republic of Japan." He also rambled on uninhibited at length, and seemed to be stuck in an endless loop of back-and-forth insults and affronts with leaders of other countries, both friends and foes.
With a taken-aback al-Sharaa siting to his right (the Syrian president was invited as Erdogan's guest), Trump spoke of his esteem for Netanyahu, while the same time chiding him for intervening in the F-35 deal. It's hard to understand what he's aiming at.
That is more the case, and more urgent, when it comes to Iran. There was another escalation in the Gulf in the middle of this week, and Trump accordingly stepped up his threats against the Tehran regime.
The Iranians, who don't believe the promises made by America in last month's Memorandum of Understanding, are out to impose by force privileges for themselves in the Strait of Hormuz, on a route that passes close to the coast of Oman.
Since then, the U.S. has been attacking Iranian targets for over two days, with Iran launching missiles and drones at some of its neighbors in the Gulf, but not at Israel.
The U.S. still has cards up its sleeve. Earlier in the week, the U.S. Department of the Treasury revoked a waiver on its oil sanctions of Iran – one of Iran's key MOU achievements.
Further escalation can be expected, but for now, despite Trump's escalatory tone, it's unlikely that there has been a change to his core strategy of avoiding a return to all-out war. At some point after the exchange of fire, the sides will return to the negotiation table. At the moment, Israeli involvement doesn't look likely.
As for Netanyahu, he seems to be interested in escalation on Israel's fronts at every possible opportunity. He's tempted by Iran, but that depends on Trump; and the cease-fire in Lebanon is holding, more or less, at America's insistence. The Gaza Strip might be a different story, so there's a daily trickle of media speculation about an imminent war in the Strip.
Eyal Zamir, the IDF chief of staff, was able to curb the government's rampage in the Strip a year ago, on the eve of the last hostage deal. He'll have to be vigilant again this time around.
But despite Netanyahu's belligerent, confident and at times militant rhetoric, he's still having difficulty erasing one fact – a fact that will likely weigh on voters this October: that the inaction in the face of Hamas and Hezbollah's monstrous growth, to the point of massacre, happened mainly on his watch.
Another serious warning
Speaking on Wednesday at the National Defense College's graduation ceremony, Zamir stated that the IDF is "on the verge of its minimum size in relation to the threats facing us. Since October 7, that's been even truer." He continued, saying that "We need to significantly expand the ranks of the IDF, so that it'll be able to carry out every mission assigned to it. The responsibility is on all of us – the IDF needs everyone. We must not exempt [anyone] from the burden of the commandment to defend the country."
His remarks were clearly aimed at the coalition's efforts to legalize ultra-Orthodox draft evasion, the latest in a series of warnings from the IDF about the army's manpower situation.
In the months leading up to the war, Netanyahu ignored explicit warnings from the top ranks of the IDF and the Shin Bet security service about the implications of the political-judicial crisis on how Israel's enemies perceive its strength. The disregard of the current warnings is no less serious, all the more so because of the draft exemption discrimination is one of the issues that upset reservists the most, many of whom have served 100 days this year.
At the same time, Israel's domestic front is heating up as the elections draw closer, primarily over the coalition's war on the High Court of Justice and attorney general, as well as the question of who the security forces and law enforcement would obey in a judicial crisis (a debate who's mere mention would, just a few years ago, have scandalized most Israelis).
Over the past two days, Police Commissioner Danny Levy and Shin Bet head David Zini have made reassuring statements, in particular about accepting the results of the election. But those calming words were preceded by a disturbing comment of Zini's about his loyalty to political decision-makers, which itself joins repeated assertions by Netanyahu that he expects loyalty from the heads of the security forces. In these circumstances, it's very difficult to breathe a sigh of relief.
Meanwhile, the coalition is trying to entrench a narrative meant to extricate Netanyahu from any responsibility for the failures that made the massacre possible. In one of his interviews this week, Netanyahu raised the possibility that senior IDF and Shin Bet officials didn't wake him up that morning because they were afraid of him taking over-vigorous action against Hamas.
Simultaneously, the Knesset has passed the first reading (out of three) of a bill to establish a politicized commission of inquiry on the October 7 massacre, with votes from a majority of the coalition. It won't be completed before the election, but its goal is obvious: to delay for as long as possible the procedure to establish an independent state commission of inquiry, and to block a thorough investigation of the facts.
This week, near my home, I saw a new sticker on an old car. "Rock 'n' roll will never die," it said, alongside a photograph of one of the last soldiers to fall in the war, a young man who on October 7 hadn't even begun his army service.
I don't know what the fallen combat soldier's family thinks about the need for an exhaustive investigation of the war. But what is clear, as is evident also from many meetings with bereaved families and residents of the western Negev, is how urgent such an investigation is for a great many of them.
Opinion polls of Israel's public are also attesting to the existence of a salient majority that supports the establishment of a state commission. Nevertheless, the government is making any and every effort to prevent it, and will wage a rearguard battle to block any such committee until the elections. It's not surprising that the atmosphere around the families is so highly charged.
A question of deterrence
This week, the excellent podcast of journalist Amir Oren, "Afarkeset" ("Receiver"), held a rare interview with Maj. Gen. (res.) Udi Adam, who was head of Northern Command in the 2006 Lebanon war. Adam, who has rarely spoken about the war since retiring in its wake, told Oren, "I had a bad feeling from the first minute I took over. That there might be a war here, that the command wasn't sufficiently prepared."
"There was no up-to-date order for the situation after the Syrians withdrew from Lebanon," Adam continued. "From the first day in the post I knew the next kidnapping was coming. We just didn't know where – and we didn't get enough [drone] hours or 8200 hours [referring to a unit in Military Intelligence]. Everything was aimed at Gaza. Two weeks before the war, [IDF soldier] Gilad Shalit was abducted there."
July 12, will mark the twentieth anniversary of the outbreak of the 2006 war. It began with the abduction of two reservists, Eldad Regev and Udi Goldwasser, and the death of eight combat troops. Since then, Israel has been hit by a worse disaster: the massacre in the western Negev. Addressing the Lebanon war as a failed and disappointing conflict has been pretty much pushed to the bottom of the media's agenda. Moreover, among large swaths of the media and the public, an erroneous narrative has become rooted, to the effect that the 2006 war was actually a major success which simply didn't get sufficient appreciation at the time.
The truth was far from that. The 2006 war in Lebanon erupted as a result of an operational surprise that stemmed in part from an intelligence failure – the abduction by Hezbollah at reporting line 105, close to Moshav Zar'it – and concluded in a disappointing stalemate after 34 days of fighting.
In the final push, which lasted 60 hours after the cease-fire that was declared by the United Nations Security Council, IDF divisions were sent to execute a ground operation in southern Lebanon, in which 33 combat troops were killed and which effectively achieved nothing. The ground maneuver was halted after the crossing of the Litani River, without the forces getting anywhere close to their assigned goals.
That was the straw that broke the back of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert' government. It never regained public popularity, even though Olmert survived in power for two and a half more years (he was compelled to resign in the face of criminal proceedings against him, and thereby behaved fittingly, in complete contrast to Netanyahu).
There's no comparison between the number of casualties in 2006 and in 2023. In the former war, 165 Israeli soldiers and civilians were killed. Apparently, that's the number of losses Israel suffered within the first hour of the massacre in the western Negev.
There are many similarities in the shortcomings and failures revealed in the wars. Both featured arrogance and exaggerated confidence about the IDF's capabilities, disparagement of the enemy, cabinet ministers' ignorance about what was happening inside the IDF and about strategic developments, long-term neglect of the land army, its training, and especially the fitness of the reserve units, and large disparities in defensive deployment along Israel's varying borders. During the current war, I received a few calls from reservists who had been rereading books about the 2006 war. They claimed that almost nothing has changed since then.
Israel's generous attitude to the 2006 Lebanon war is, in retrospect, connected to two matters (and indirectly connects to the hostility to Netanyahu found in some of Israeli media).
First, Olmert made a courageous move a year later, when he decided to bomb Syria's nuclear facility, a major military and strategic achievement – for many, it made up for his failures in the war to a certain extent.
Second, in the years after the war, the border with Lebanon was quiet, explained by the blows the IDF gave Hezbollah, and was described as the result of successful Israeli deterrence.
The reality is, as always, more complicated. Deterrence, as was demonstrated again on October 7, is a highly elusive phenomenon. It's impossible to measure it, and it's difficult even for the most sophisticated intelligence systems to penetrate the mind of the enemy leadership and understand what their thoughts and beliefs about Israel's strength are. In practice, successful deterrence can only be recognized after the fact, once it dissolves completely and the other side begins to attack again.
After all, Israel believed that it restored deterrence over Hamas in the 2021 Gaza conflict. Its intelligence community boasted that Hamas' decision not to take part in two rounds of fighting initiated by Islamic Jihad was proof of Israel's advantage. In reality, Hamas would build up its capabilities and wait for a strategic and operational opportunity, which came over two years later.
As for the status of the Lebanon border after 2006, Hezbollah's several years of restraint was due in part to Iranian considerations.
Iran initially built up the Lebanese organization as a deterrent and response force, which would operate from relatively close range against Israel if the latter dared to attack Iran's nuclear sites. In the 2010s, Iran focused the organization on Syria's civil war, sending thousands of Hezbollah fighters into the fray in order to salvage the Assad regime, a higher priority for Tehran than the conflict with Israel.
Israel's 2006 bombing of the Shi'ite Dahiyeh neighborhood in Beirut did apparently make an impact on Hezbollah's secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah, contributing to his hesitation to joining Hamas' war against Israel on October 7. Yet, in the 17 years between 2006 and 2023, Hezbollah managed to build up a large and lethal military machine.
Luck, and then diligence and seriousness, worked in Israel's favor twice on the northern front. First, when Nasrallah hesitated on October 7, and then with Israel's implementation of operational plans in Lebanon, with maximum success, in the summer and fall of 2024.
But the fact that Hezbollah grew to such dimensions also stemmed from Israel's hesitation to act during the years leading up to 2023. The deterrence was mutual, and influenced both sides similarly.
What have we learned since then? In his latest declarations, Netanyahu is returning to his vision of a forever war. He's saying that, after the massacre, Israel under his leadership isn't waiting any longer for threats to develop, but is instead taking preemptive action and hitting the enemy hard.
That strategy is overly simplistic. It blurs the depth of the failures and the question of responsibility for them, and it ignores the need to carry out a genuine investigation of what happened, in an attempt to reduce the risk that it will happen again.