By Bret Stephens
The last time I’d met with Naftali Bennett was at his home north of Tel Aviv not long after the attacks of Oct. 7 and just before Israel’s army went into the Gaza Strip. The former Israeli prime minister was worried about a blood bath. He also had a plan to avoid it.
Bennett, whose short-lived term of office from 2021 to 2022 was notable for the ideological breadth of his government, sketched a four-part concept: Seize Gaza’s peripheries without trying to occupy its cities. Provide Palestinians with food, water, medicine and safe havens but not the fuel that Hamas needs to operate its tunnels. Use an “ongoing and persistent series of targeted ground raids” to gradually degrade and destroy Hamas’ military over months or years. Offer safe passage out of Gaza for Hamas fighters willing to surrender, probably in exchange for the release of Israel’s hostages.
Benjamin Netanyahu ignored the advice. After 10 months of grinding war, Israel has achieved none of its major objectives. Hamas is not defeated. Its leader, Yahya Sinwar, is still at large and making demands. Scores of hostages remain in captivity. Tens of thousands of Israelis cannot return to their homes. The country is as divided as before and more isolated than ever. And Israelis are girding for a major, multifront war against Iran and its proxies.
So what would Bennett have Israel do now? With polls showing him drawing even with or beating Netanyahu as the person Israelis want as their prime minister, his views matter.
“I see words that send one message and actions that are the contrary,” Bennett told me last week when I saw him in New York. He was referring to Netanyahu’s conduct of the war in Gaza. But Bennett was also thinking about Israel’s approach to Iran, which is now closer than ever to a nuclear breakout, despite years of Netanyahu’s public vows that he would never allow the Islamic republic to get this close to a bomb.
Regarding Gaza, Bennett saw two defensible courses of action. The first — his clear preference — is a short, sharp, decisive surge of forces that can knock out Hamas: “If you’re in a boxing ring and you just hit your opponent and he’s just wobbling, you zero in and give him another punch,” Bennett said. The second option is to cut a hostage deal, declare a cease-fire and “fight another day.” That’s the Biden administration’s clear preference; for Israel, it hinges on questions of its ordnance stockpiles and how long it can sustain a high-intensity war.
What Netanyahu is doing is something else. He is talking out of both sides of his mouth — alternating between promises of “total victory” and an immediate deal to bring Israel’s hostages home. At the same time, he is waging a low-intensity war of attrition, reminiscent of William Westmoreland’s Vietnam strategy against an enemy that continually replenished itself, with no end in sight.
“I know there is a body count of Hamas combatants,” Bennett said. “When you count bodies, you are assuming a finite number of combatants. But you have a population of 1 million to draw on,” he added, referring to Hamas. “They could have recruited another 10,000 in the meantime. That’s not how you win a war.”
Then there is Netanyahu’s other dismal failure: Iran. For years, Bennett has warned of Tehran’s “octopus strategy,” in which the regime “builds proxies and tentacles across the Middle East and the world, for that matter, and funds, arms and directs them, yet hardly pays a price.” For more than 20 years, the arms of the octopus — in Lebanon, Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Iraq and Yemen — have grown strong while Netanyahu insisted that the focus had to be on Iran’s nuclear programs.
“What we got was both,” Bennett lamented. Tehran built “an empire of rockets and terror” ringing Israel. But Netanyahu also whiffed on the decision to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities when there was still a realistic chance of destroying them in their relative infancy. Now Iran has become a de facto nuclear-threshold state, able to “quickly produce weapons-grade uranium, at multiple facilities, if it chooses to do so,” as an unclassified U.S. intelligence document recently noted.
If Iran were able to deploy nuclear warheads on ballistic missiles — or share them with a proxy like Hezbollah — the Jewish state would be on a road to extinction. The only policy that can reverse it, Bennett warned, is “to topple the Iranian regime before it fully acquires a nuclear weapon.”
He isn’t imagining Iraq-style regime change, with foreign divisions marching toward the capital. Israel can’t do it, and Americans won’t.
What he has in mind, instead, is what happened to the Soviet Union in the 1980s. That, too, was an old regime, “rigid and disconnected,” he said, “profoundly corrupt and incompetent and despised by its own people.” In part, the Soviet Union fell of its own weight. But it was also kicked in its heels — by collapsing oil revenues, a slow bleed in Afghanistan, covert Western support for dissident movements like Solidarity and a clarity of vision that the goal of Western policy was the collapse of the communist empire, not the management of a delicate status quo.
The opportunity with Iran, as Bennett sees it, is that “the head of the octopus is much weaker, much more vulnerable and feeble, than its arms. So how foolish are we to engage in war with the arms when we could engage with the head?” That would mean a resumption of serious economic sanctions — thanks to administration waivers, Iran today exports nearly four times as much oil as it did four years ago — and empowering Iran’s powerful opposition movement, particularly with communications gear.
That’s an effort only an American president can lead. What about the immediate crisis with Iran?
I asked Bennett about the timing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh’s assassination in Tehran. After a long pause, he replied, “It’s very hard to cherry-pick particular actions if there’s no broad strategy.” But he also warned Iran that it had “huge vulnerabilities, especially in its energy sector, which is highly concentrated in a few bottlenecks that can be dealt with. They should be afraid right now and not the 10 million Israelis. This whole passive method in which our enemies take the lead is not the Israeli way.”
Bennett left the prime minister’s office vowing to stay away from politics for at least a decade. He left me with little doubt that he’s on the verge of getting back in, with the aim of toppling the ruling coalition through parliamentary maneuvers this year and going for elections. He pledged a thorough housecleaning that could help unite Israelis once again.
“All the senior leadership of Israel, political and military, needs to be replaced,” he said. To defeat one regime, another one must first be beaten.
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