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On Some Things Netanyahu Is Right

(New York Times) David Brooks - Those of us in the Bibi critics' club have to confront an uncomfortable fact: Especially over the past 10 months, Netanyahu has impressively remade the face of the Middle East. He's degraded Hamas and Hizbullah, two of the vilest terror regimes on the planet. He has made the Iranian theocracy look pathetic and decrepit. Israel has demonstrated its vast military and intelligence supremacy over its enemies, establishing total freedom of the skies over much of Iran. It has shown that its agents can penetrate enemy organizations and find and kill their militant leaders. Netanyahu's actions have contributed to the toppling of the Assad regime in Syria and have helped the legitimate Lebanese government regain control of its own territory. The Axis of Terror is in shambles. We know that Israel and the U.S. have the will and capacity to attack Iran anytime and anyplace. We know that if Iran reconstitutes its nuclear program, Israel and America have the capacity to deliver a much more devastating blow. I think Netanyahu was right to be obsessed with Iran over the past several decades. Iran has been the central source of instability in the Middle East ever since the 1979 Iranian revolution. Other issues in that region are secondary. I also think Netanyahu was right to go on offense and take a maximalist response to the events of Oct. 7. Over the past few decades, Iran has methodically built a noose around Israel with terror armies and advanced weaponry. For decades, both Israel and the U.S. were willing to tolerate the noose. Dismantling it seemed too hard and risky. That changed on Oct. 7. Suddenly the looming noose began to appear intolerable. Netanyahu, and the Israeli public generally, decided to respond to Oct. 7 not with the limited retribution campaign that many of us outside observers were supporting, but by attempting to dismantle the whole noose, including Hizbullah and Iranian nukes, and that now looks like the right call. Occasionally I see lawn signs asserting that "war is not the answer," but here was a circumstance in which war was the answer. Many of Israel's enemies in the Middle East actually believed the narrative floated among overheated activists on Ivy League campuses that Israel was more of a colonial outpost than a real country and that the Jews could be pushed out of Israel the way the Belgians were kicked out of their colonies in Africa. They paid for their belief in that myth by suffering devastating defeats. If the Middle East is ever going to be a more peaceful place, it will be because everybody finally acknowledges, even at Columbia, that Israel is not going to be exterminated from the river to the sea.
2025-06-29 00:00:00
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