Against the world, the wartime prime minister is the loneliest leader

Photos: Flash 90, AP images

A year after presiding over the biggest Jewish disaster since the Holocaust, war has transformed Binaymin Netanyahu into a far more decisive — and lonely — leader than ever before. An exclusive conversation with the wartime prime minister

It’s known as “the aquarium” because of its glass walls, but the prime minister’s office is hopelessly mislabeled, because it’s anything but transparent. In this suite of rooms, part of a drab and dated office complex near the Knesset, generations of Israeli leaders have strategized, schemed, and deployed smoke and mirrors.

Such has always been the nature of this place, but over the last 12 months, as he’s prosecuted the most savage conflict in Israel’s history, Bibi Netanyahu has taken that opacity to new levels.

Completing a process that began over the last few years, there’s an invisible wall between the prime minister and much of his team. Netanyahu is known as someone who prefers to keep his emotional distance, his aides more service providers than friends and colleagues. And although he has a loyal foreign minister, it’s Bibi alone who has over the last year been the face of a nation’s policies, defying in his international media appearances the accusations of the world against his country’s war of survival.

One year into the Israel-Iran clash, Hamas is decimated, Hezbollah reeling, and Iran running scared. At our interview — which took place before Bibi ordered the detonation of Hezbollah’s beepers — Netanyahu came across as a lonely figure. As we discussed the horrific moral conundrum of security versus hostages, as well as the immense pressures that have emerged from the White House, the full weight resting on the shoulders of the man in the ergonomic chair was obvious.

In an era in which image is everything — a fact the prime minister is aware of at all times — it’s rare to meet Netanyahu without the public mask. But when that does happen, you meet a very different persona from the one the Israeli public is familiar with. Without his makeup and meticulously coiffed hair, the Netanyahu of late 2024 bears the marks of the difficult year that he and the country have endured.

But along with the loneliness, there’s a sense that Netanyahu at the end of 2024 has been freed by the very isolation in which he operates. Long accused of prevarication and dithering and with his reputation as “Mr. Security” in tatters, the Bibi who now defies foreign leaders seems different — bolder, more decisive, clearly going for the win he’s promised his constituency all along.

The boldness is likely also a product of the interregnum effect created by a lame-duck US president and the election race. With Biden fading — and unlikely to want to punish Israel on the way out of office as Obama did with his hostile UN Resolution 2334 — the outgoing administration is silently acquiescing as Bibi powers ahead. Whatever their positions on Israel’s wars, both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump in campaign mode aren’t in a position to do more than commentate. The result is a unique window to put facts on the ground before the elections — an opening that Netanyahu has seized.

The sharper new Bibi is revealed in deed, and in word, too. When French President Emanuel Macron announced an arms export ban, Israel’s leader responded with an unusually sharp denunciation. Abandoning normal diplomatic restraint, he called the ban a “disgrace.” Israel, he said, would win even without their support, “but their shame will continue long after the war is won.”