I seriously doubt that when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu woke up on October 7, 2023, to the news of the worst catastrophe in Jewish history since the Holocaust, he imagined that a year later he would be staring at the tweet below, courtesy of Syrian rebels who labored to express in broken Hebrew their deep gratitude for killing Hezbollah mass-murderer Hassan Nasrallah.
Syrian rebels are thanking Bibi in Hebrew for taking out Nasrallah and say this will pave the road to peace. There are more mistakes than words in this sign but it’s the intention that counts. pic.twitter.com/ORxtANLl1M
— Uri Kurlianchik (@VerminusM) September 29, 2024
Arab children in Syria were dispensing Baklawas, the apparently traditional food to consume when your enemy is gunned down, holding up signs that said, “Thank you, Netanyahu, now get the head of the criminal Assad,” and “Thank you, Netanyahu, you have warmed the hearts of the children of Syria.”
The Syrians in Idlib are not stopping their celebrations for a second, the signs say:
“Thank you Netanyahu, now the head of the criminal Assad.”
“Thank you Netanyahu, you have warmed the hearts of the children of Syria”.I never saw so many Arabs celebrate Jewish achievements. pic.twitter.com/oTVmarwvqf
— Dani Blekman (@Dani_Blek) September 28, 2024
They’ve been calling him “Abu Yair,” the father of Yair, disregarding the low popularity of the Netanyahu boychik in his homeland. They’ve crowned him King of the Middle East. And last week, in a related incident, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud (MBS) told The Atlantic, “Do I care personally about the Palestinian issue? I don’t” (Turns Out the Saudi Crown Prince Couldn’t Care Less about the ‘Palestinians’).
Somehow, the Hamas atrocities have upended Netanyahu’s and most Israelis’ perceptions about the Jewish State’s abilities and its role in the roughest neighborhood on the planet. It took weeks of preparations for a ground war, while the Air Force was taking down practically everything that was standing in the Gaza Strip. It took a great deal of patience, while more than 60 thousand residents had to be evacuated from the north under Hezbollah’s rocket barrages. It took Churchillian stubbornness and persistence mixed with restraint on Netanyahu’s part. But it must be said, Benjamin Netanyahu is the closest thing Israel has today to David Ben Gurion.
In May 1948, against the panicked warnings of the majority of the Zionist leadership, against the advice of the United States, and knowing full well that Arab armies would invade his fledgling state as soon as he declared independence, even as Arab irregulars were already doing battle with scantily-armed Jewish forces on the highways and in the towns – David ben Gurion understood he had a narrow window of opportunity to change the reality of the region forever. And he pressed on.
Sometime in October 2023, Netanyahu must have gazed into the same window of opportunity, and since then, he has become a rock against the US and the Europeans, against a nasty opposition, against his own defense minister, and against the security establishment whose criminal errors had caused the war.
He has been at it for one week short of a year, using every trick in his book, overruling his defense minister and the IDF brass, pounding the table more than once, screaming at the top of his lungs in closed cabinet meetings. And now, when two weeks of astonishing victories over Israel’s most frightening foe have succeeded and the foe turned out to be mostly cobwebs (Yes, thank you, Secretary Nasrallah, for the idiom), this 2024 Ben Gurion is not resting on his laurels. He’s pushing forward, and I won’t be surprised if, sooner or later, he won’t put the world’s ultimate enemy, Iran, in its place.
In Dahiya, Beirut, on Sunday afternoon, the body of Hassan Nasrallah was recovered from the ruins of his headquarters that the Air Force bombed last Friday. A short time later, Hezbollah confirmed that Ali Karaki, Commander of Hezbollah’s southern front, the man behind the attack on innocent Israeli civilians in Upper Galilea, was also killed in the attack. In another attack, on Saturday, Nabil Qaouk, a member of the Hezbollah leadership ranks for decades, who was thought by some to be Nasrallah’s heir apparent, was also terminated. On Sunday, after the bombing of Dahiya resumed, some of the last survivors of Hezbollah’s historic leadership were eliminated.
On the Yemenite front, before the Air Force paid a return visit to bomb the Hodeida port, as well as a power station and oil refinery, the senior Houthi coordinator in Yemen was killed in a helicopter crash in Iran.
What happens next?
The IDF may or may not invade south Lebanon to eliminate the Hezbollah survivors there, collect their weapons stashes, and blow up their tunnels, to later physically bar any Hezbollah terrorist from entering south of the Litani River. But the IDF can take its time. The evacuees are patient, they now once again trust that the people’s army is in good hands and isn’t afraid of confrontation.
But the window of opportunity does not overlook south Lebanon. It is trained squarely on Tehran. The 1,200-kilometer flight to Yemen involved dozens of warplanes and logistical planes. One couldn’t help thinking that this was a dress rehearsal for a much more meaningful attack.
The fact is that Iran is basically helpless before a modern aircraft attack. The bulk of its weapons are rockets that can be taken down and outmaneuvered. Their air force is aging, with aircraft that are more than 40 years old. If you worry about safety, don’t fly IRIAF. On December 25, 2019, a MiG-29 crashed in the Sabalan mountains. On August 26, 2018, an F-5F crash-landed near Dezful, killing the pilot and injuring the co-pilot. On June 1, 2021, another F-5F crashed near Dezful, killing both crew members. An F-5F crashed into a school in Tabriz on February 21, 2022, killing both crew and a person on the ground. On May 24, 2022, two Chinese-built Chengdu J-7 crashed east of Isfahan killing the pilots. And those are the crashes we know about.
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Iran has been supplying Russia with loitering munitions such as the HESA Shahed 136. While those are effective against unsuspecting civilian populations, they are no match for a wing of F-35 stealth fighters firing from behind the horizon.
Bronwen Maddox, Director and Chief Executive of Chatham House, wrote last week that Israel may be moving directly against Iran, the leader of the so-called “Axis of Resistance.” She warned that “by expanding the conflict it will have no way to access the diplomatic prize that still dangles in front of it: normalized relations with Saudi Arabia, and through that, help from its neighbors in containing the threat from Iran.”
But as things stand now, we may someday see MBS himself holding up a sign in broken Hebrew, thanking Abu Yair for ridding him of his hated neighbor to the north.
