Netanyahu’s Losing Battle

The Pakistan-brokered talks between the US and Iran may have ended without any deal, but this does not bring any good news for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The two-week pause in the war has caused more political damage to Netanyahu than the destruction he has inflicted on Lebanon.

Netanyahu failed to topple the Iranian government despite convincing the world’s number one superpower to join his war on Iran. He also failed to defeat Hezbollah, as both the armed group and Iran proved to be stronger than Israel had deemed them to be. A columnist in the left-leaning Haaretz wrote that the Israeli prime minister vowed to destroy Iran, but in the end, Iran could destroy him. This fitting analogy is evident from recent opinion polls carried by Israeli newspapers.

Three opinion polls conducted in Tel Aviv on Friday showed that an overwhelming majority of Israelis view the war against Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah as a failure for US President Donald Trump and Netanyahu, while still supporting a resumption of the fighting to achieve the objectives announced at the outset. Most respondents gave low ratings to the political leadership, in contrast to their assessment of the military leadership. On potential Knesset election results, the polls suggested the war would not save Netanyahu from losing power. The surveys were published by Israel’s public broadcaster Kan 11 and Channel 12, while the third was jointly conducted by Maariv and the Walla news website.

Among those intending to vote for the governing coalition, 57 per cent opposed the ceasefire and 25 per cent supported it. Among opposition voters, 62 per cent opposed it and 26 per cent supported it.

It is notable that Netanyahu did not gain support in opinion polls conducted during the war, as had been expected by some.

Israeli journalist Sam Sokol wrote in The Times of Israel that the Iran war has ended not with clarity, but with “questionable success”—and a growing political problem for Netanyahu.

The political backlash has been swift and severe in Israel. Opposition leaders have branded the outcome a strategic and diplomatic failure. Yair Lapid, head of the centrist Yesh Atid party, accused Netanyahu of using Israelis as “cannon fodder” and misleading Washington. “There has never been such a diplomatic disaster in all our history,” he wrote, lamenting that Israel was excluded from decisions at the very core of its national security.

Lapid argued that while the military executed its mission and the public demonstrated resilience, Netanyahu “failed diplomatically, failed strategically and did not meet any of the goals he himself set,” adding that it would take years to repair the damage caused by “arrogance, negligence and a lack of strategic planning.”

Others were even more scathing. Yair Golan, head of the opposition’s left-wing The Democrats party, called Netanyahu “dangerous for Israel,” arguing that he has failed to achieve even “a single one” of Israel’s strategic goals and that the Iranian regime “is coming out of the war stronger strategically than it entered it, with the upper hand.” Former prime minister Naftali Bennett cautioned that Israel now faces a “vengeful Iran,” more determined than ever to pursue nuclear capability. “The leadership sold us illusions,” he said. “All their empty promises have exploded in our faces.”

Far from transforming Israel’s security landscape, the war has left underlying realities largely unchanged. For analysts like Amos Harel of Haaretz, failure was embedded in the strategy from the outset. The campaign exposed familiar weaknesses: wishful thinking, shallow planning, disregard for expert advice, and political pressure overriding professional judgment.

For Netanyahu, the implications are stark. Having long defined his leadership around confronting Iran as an existential threat, he has now secured the confrontation he sought—only to see it end without decisive results and without Israeli control over the diplomatic endgame.

As Harel observed, this is not an isolated pattern but a recurring one: repeated promises of total victory—in Gaza, Lebanon, and now Iran—followed by outcomes that fall short of those ambitions.

The most striking feature to emerge from the opinion polls is that more than 75 per cent of respondents favoured war against Iran but feel that the victory was not complete. This opens the way for Netanyahu to resume fighting, with or without US support. However, this option is fraught with risk. If he resumes fighting and still does not win decisively, it could backfire badly.

At this juncture, Netanyahu stands at a political crossroads where escalation may deepen the crisis, and restraint may expose strategic limits. Either path carries consequences that could redefine not only his leadership but also Israel’s long-term security calculus.

Views expressed are personal. The writer has worked in senior editorial positions for many renowned international publications