Benjamin Netanyahu is the problem. That is what every Left, progressive, or even centrist newspaper, magazine, or media outlet wants Americans, and every Jew in the world, to believe.
According to them, Netanyahu is the architect of every current issue, crisis, or war in the Middle East. He is lurking behind every problem in the world. He got the United States into the disaster of the war with Iran. He bamboozled US President Donald Trump, the most clever scoundrel of them all, according to them, into attacking Iran for the benefit of Israel.
He is Russian President Vladimir Putin’s friend. He is a criminal, both domestic and international. He is no democrat. He is an authoritarian. The list goes on, and includes every epithet the mass media has over the last decades coined to describe someone who it passionately hates, but is unable to effectively confront or remove.
With the elections in Israel fast approaching, the message is clear: the future of Israel and the Jewish people depends on Bibi losing. One may choose one’s favorite conspiratorial reason. The press provides every possible choice. He divided the country to enable the Hamas-led massacres in Israel on October 7. He hid the early warnings coming from Hamas itself.
He failed to react quickly to the outbreak of hostilities. He reacted too harshly. He went too far. He did not do enough. The reader must choose, but the options are so plentiful that no one should leave empty-handed.
A man takes a selfie with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during Likud party primary elections ahead of Israel’s general election in October, in Jerusalem, Monday, August. 17, 2026. (credit: Ohad Zwigenberg/Pool via REUTERS)Bringing down Israel’s leader
But why is Netanyahu, the leader of one of the tiniest countries, the focus of such generous attention? We know zero to nothing about almost any European leader. Even Putin does not get so much attention. The reason is simple: if one wants to destroy a country, one must go after the country’s most capable leader.
For the Netanyahu accusers, the massacres by Hamas on October 7 were not a shock. The events were the logical culmination of many decades of painstaking work. They might not have imagined them the way the events unfolded, but those were minor details.
What was shocking was Israel’s response. They did not expect Israel to respond in the way it did. They expected Israel to collapse. What they got was an overwhelming Israeli victory against odds that no country has ever faced.
October 7 was the culmination of four decades of the rocking-to-sleep campaign that started with the Oslo Accords. After the end of the Cold War, the Arab-Israeli conflict appeared to be the last obstacle on the road to world peace.
Israel, by then, became too strong to be forcefully subdued into a compromise it found unacceptable. Yet the prevailing opinion in the corridors of power of the Western countries was that the creation of Israel was a historical mistake. Almost nobody would admit that in public, but that was, and still is, a prevailing understanding among the elites.
The only possible solution to end the conflict was a slow, gradual disassembly of Israel as a Jewish state. The main goal was to eliminate Israel’s will to fight, to convince the Jews, using many reasons and pretexts, that the fight is futile, pointless, and is not worth it; that there was a benefit to giving up.
In return, the world community would guarantee peace and prosperity. It was a simple proposal, as most “genius” ideas happen to be, that Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, and all subsequent Israeli leaders, some more and some less, including Netanyahu, bought into.
The idea was hopeful and optimistic, so much so that everyone believed in it for their own reasons. Israel’s leaders said the end of the conflict was peace. The rest, or at least most of them, wanted the conflict to end by any means possible. Both views were not in conflict with each other until the very culmination of the process.
The main pillar of that derangement was not the land-for-peace concept that many tend to blame as the culprit. It was the idea that territory no longer mattered. Giving up land, the argument went, would give Israel peace.
But what if peace would not follow? Well, in that case, Israel would still come out on top, because it would show the entire world it is willing to pay the price, and in this modern world of ours, when rockets and missiles fly so fast, a few miles here or there does not really matter.
And so for the past four decades, Israel was contracting, with hostile armies entrenching closer and closer to its hinterland. The irony, of course, is that in a world where every second matters to intercept missiles, territory matters even more than during the days of mass tank maneuvers.
Israel found itself in a situation where it could be attacked on multiple fronts at any time. However, unlike the 1967 Six Day War, it could not deliver a devastating first strike, because the enemy had embedded itself in the civilian population.
The latter was also the reason why nobody expected Israel to effectively respond to an attack. Being sensitive to public opinion is a known Jewish weak spot. The prevailing assumption was that Israel would rather collapse than be damned by the public opinion of the world.
Netanyahu turned out to be that very person nobody expected Israel to produce at its time of peril. Against the advice of almost everyone around him – the military, with its preconceived “concepts”; the foreign ministry; the media; president Joe Biden; and almost all European leaders – Netanyahu willed the country to crush the enemy.
The victory would not deliver “forever peace,” but it would enable the country to survive. Without the victory, there would be a slightly less antisemitic opinion prevailing in the world, but there would be no Israel.
That is why so much dark money and propaganda pages are spent to make sure Netanyahu is not coming back as Israel’s prime minister.
One may not agree with Netanyahu’s decisions or character. One may think he has spent too much on politics already. One does not have to vote for Likud. But one must understand why the world hates Bibi.
Our enemy’s strategy is: One Jew at a time. They are not going to stop after he is gone.
The author lives and works in Silicon Valley, California. He is a founding member of the San Francisco Voice for Israel.