The Israel of October 6 Is Never Coming Back

By Yair Rosenberg

Monday, March 02, 2026

 

Just about the only thing that the administrations of Barack Obama and Donald Trump have agreed on is that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was too timid to pull the trigger. “The thing about Bibi is, he’s a chickenshit,” a senior Obama official told The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg in 2014, explaining that the Israeli leader was “scared to launch wars.” Nine years later, Trump would tell attendees at a campaign rally that Netanyahu had initially committed to join America’s 2020 strike on Qassem Soleimani, the notorious head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, but backed out at the last minute. “I’ll never forget that Bibi Netanyahu let us down,” Trump told his supporters at the gathering, just days after the Hamas massacre in 2023.

 

That was then. Such assessments of Netanyahu sound absurd today, as Israel wages war on Iran for the second time, having dismantled the regime’s proxy armies—Hamas and Hezbollah—and assassinated its supreme leader. But in fact, Netanyahu’s American critics accurately characterized his conduct until October 7, 2023. For years, the Israeli leader spoke loudly and carried a small stick. Despite delivering numerous warnings about Iran’s nuclear ambitions—in Israel, the U.S. Congress, and the United Nations—Netanyahu never backed up his bellicose rhetoric with on-the-ground action.

 

That is, until 2024. The Netanyahu who is currently commanding a high-risk assault on Tehran is not the same Netanyahu who governed Israel for nearly two decades prior. And the country he leads is not the same, either.

 

Before this seismic shift, Netanyahu’s longevity as prime minister was built on a foundation of conflict avoidance. That posture appealed to a risk-averse electorate. Under his premiership, Israeli voters who were comfortable with the status quo could rest easy knowing that their leader would be unlikely to upset it.

 

“Despite his image, Netanyahu is not a warmonger,” Anshel Pfeffer, one of the prime minister’s left-wing critics and his biographer, wrote in 2018. “He is the most risk-averse of Israeli leaders, averse to making war or peace.” At the time, Pfeffer correctly predicted that Israel would not go to war with Iran, despite having a sympathetic Trump administration by its side.

 

Netanyahu was cautious by temperament and also by experience. His older brother, Yoni, was killed in a hostage-rescue raid in 1976. As the leader of the parliamentary opposition, Netanyahu saw a ruinous war in Lebanon destroy the standing of Ehud Olmert, his center-left predecessor as prime minister. A smooth-talking master of image management, Netanyahu understood that wars are hard to predict and impossible to script. Rather than tackle Tehran head-on, he moved the fight into the shadows, championing global sanctions in public while quietly unleashing a covert campaign to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program from within.

 

This preference for containment over open conflict was applied not just to Iran but also to another territory next door. For years, Netanyahu resisted agitation within his own right-wing government to invade Gaza and topple its terrorist rulers. In his 2022 memoir, Netanyahu wrote proudly about rejecting these calls to arms. “Ending these kinds of operations is much harder than starting them,” he noted. “The public invariably expects the government to continue the battle and ‘flatten Gaza,’ believing that with enough punishment the Hamas regime would collapse. Yet that would only happen if we sent in the army. The casualties would mount: many hundreds on the Israeli side and many thousands on the Palestinian side. Did I really want to tie down the IDF in Gaza for years when we had to deal with Iran and a possible Syrian front? The answer was categorically no.” Instead, Netanyahu opted to degrade Hamas with limited air campaigns and then attempted to buy quiet by funneling the group millions of dollars from Qatar.

 

The Hamas massacre of October 7—whose atrocities were broadcast online by its perpetrators and seared into the Israeli consciousness—upended and discredited this approach. With Israel’s borderlands in ruins and hundreds of its citizens taken hostage, the country’s voters could no longer countenance their leader’s quietism, which now looked like a historic blunder. An Israeli public that had elected Netanyahu to steward its security now felt profoundly insecure and demanded dramatic action. To respond to the attack was not enough; the government needed to ensure that others like it would never happen, by confronting threats at their source.

 

Netanyahu had not sent Israeli ground troops into Gaza since 2014. After October 7, that hesitation was no longer viable. He initiated the very campaign in Gaza that he had warned against. The cataclysmic and often chaotic conflict cost more Israeli and Palestinian lives than any war in their history, destroyed wide swaths of the enclave, empowered Israel’s extremists who sought to settle the territory, and sharply eroded Israel’s international standing.

 

Still, Netanyahu at first instinctively resisted the pull toward wider hostilities. When his defense minister and other security officials pushed right after October 7 for Israel to strike not just Hamas but also Hezbollah, Netanyahu demurred. The Lebanese militia was firing rockets into Israel at the time in solidarity with Hamas, but it was arguably the most fearsome nonstate army in the entire world, and a shaken Netanyahu was not eager to take it on.

 

But as in Gaza, the Iranian proxy eventually forced Netanyahu’s hand. Hezbollah continued shelling Israel’s north for more than 11 months, destroying towns and forcing the evacuation of nearly 70,000 Israelis. The devastation and displacement placed tremendous strain on Israel’s internal cohesion—and applied more and more pressure to its leader. Finally, in September 2024, after months of tit-for-tat attacks, Netanyahu launched a full-fledged campaign against Hezbollah, complete with exploding beepers and bunker-busting bombs. And then, something unexpected happened: Everything went according to plan.

 

Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, was assassinated, along with nearly his entire chain of command. Hezbollah was decimated and soon compelled to sign a cease-fire agreement on Israel’s terms. Stripped of his enforcers, Syria’s pro-Iran dictator, Bashar al-Assad, soon fell as well. Total war turned into nearly total victory. And at the same time, another parallel engagement further emboldened Netanyahu. In response to Israel’s bombing of a consular annex in Syria and the subsequent killing of Nasrallah, Iran launched waves of missiles and drones at Israel by the hundreds, the largest such assaults in history. But Israel not only readily repelled nearly all of the projectiles—it also responded by easily penetrating and disabling some of Iran’s most sensitive air defenses.

 

With each successful escalation, Netanyahu’s willingness to use force to settle Israel’s scores increased. This growing confidence culminated in the 12-day war last June, in which Israel achieved air dominance over Iran, bombed its nuclear sites, and took out much of the country’s military and intelligence leadership, all without losing a single soldier. At the outset, Israel’s military planners had projected more than 400 casualties on the home front from Iranian ballistic and drone attacks; in the end, there were only 28.

 

Critics of Israel often rightly point out that Palestinian radicalization is less the result of inveterate ideology than of continuous Israeli occupation, violence, and dispossession. But this logic runs both ways. Netanyahu and the Israeli people would never have countenanced such extreme military actions if they had not experienced the unspeakable horrors of October 7, and the repeated, unrelenting assaults of Hezbollah’s rockets and Iran’s missiles.

 

This cycle has reached its zenith in Netanyahu’s latest and greatest gamble. Casting off his cautiousness, he has bet his political future—and his country’s—on Israel’s ability to confront not only the Iranian regime but also its Hezbollah and Houthi allies, all while managing a mercurial Trump who remains liable to declare a premature victory and exit the stage at any moment. Whether this gambit will succeed is unclear, and one should distrust anyone who suggests otherwise. But what is clear is that the Israel and Netanyahu of October 6, 2023, are never coming back.