Bibi takes the reins at zero hour

Photos: Flash90; AP Images

Even as Bibi spent decades warning of the threat from a nuclear Iran, and acting behind the scenes to stave off that danger, he was derided as a coward, too hesitant to act. Last week’s stunning strike represents Netanyahu’s late-career emergence as a decisive war leader, at the head of a country heading into the unknown

IN a long-running campaign of character assassination that Barack Obama’s inner circle waged against Bibi Netanyahu, a 2014 article in the Atlantic was the most vicious.

“Myopic, reactionary, obtuse, blustering, pompous, and Aspergery,” were just some of the contemptuous adjectives that the Obamaites leveled at the Israeli leader according to editor Jeffrey Goldberg.

Unlike Team Obama’s patron saint, the Israeli prime minister was a “no-vision small-timer.” For the cardinal sin of refusing to sacrifice his country to create a Palestinian state he was deemed a “national leader who acts as though he is mayor of Jerusalem.”

Most devastating was the lip-curling judgment of cowardice for Bibi’s failure to attack Iran after all his warnings. Sheltering behind their anonymity, the intrepid Beltway briefers sneered, “He’s not Rabin, not Sharon, not Begin — he’s got no guts.”

That litany of scorn makes essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what has just happened in Iran. Because after a quarter-century in power, and decades spent warning the world of a nuclear-armed Iran during which he absorbed the contempt of politicians who just wanted to bury their head in the sand, Bibi has finally dared.

More than any other Israeli or world figure, the campaign to stop the ayatollahs from going nuclear is identified with Netanyahu. Without his statesmanship and vision, Western action to deter Tehran would have been even weaker than it has been.

What didn’t they say or do to prevent this strike. For the last 15 years, a whispering campaign against Bibi in the foreign press was stoked by Israeli opposition figures. Netanyahu’s own ministers and security chiefs leaked attack plans to the Americans to scuttle imminent strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

And yet through it all, the Israeli leader soldiered on. The shadow war that he waged against the Iranians for the last decade and a half, was paralleled by a diplomatic struggle with American administrations determined to impose a weak deal with Iran on Israel.

That’s why the most audacious opening strike the world has seen since 1967 and the subsequent war, is 100 percent Bibi’s, for good and ill. Written off as a coward and a procrastinator, hesitant to pull the trigger where his predecessors were decisive, the last few days have seen Netanyahu emerge as a war leader bent on taking down the biggest threat in his country’s history.

The secular-raised Netanyahu has never worn the language of outright faith easily. But the note that he inserted in the Kosel’s ancient stones hours before ordering the jets aloft pointed to a dimension of faith present as he embarked on the greatest roll of the military dice since 1967.

“B’siyata d’Shmaya,” it notably began and then simply quoted one of the most stirring pesukim in the Torah.

“Hein am k’lavi yakum — Behold! The people will arise like a lion cub and raise itself like a lion.”

Bibi has dared, and now his legacy — stained by the disaster of October 7 and years of domestic dispute — will ultimately rise and fall on the outcome of this conflict.