In Israel, where everyone has had to become an Iran expert, a video clip has been making the rounds. It’s from a 2021 speech by Gholam Ali Rashid, commander of Iran’s joint military headquarters, whom Israel killed in early strikes on June 13.
Three months before the 2020 U.S. killing of Qassem Soleimani, Rashid recounts, the legendary Quds Force commander laid out his life’s work. “I have assembled for you six armies outside Iran and I have created a corridor 1,500 kilometers long and 1,000 kilometers wide, all the way to the shores of the Mediterranean,” Soleimani told Iran’s army chiefs. “Any enemy that decides to fight against the Islamic Revolution, and against the sacred regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran, will have to go through these six armies. It won’t be able to do so.”
Yet Israel did. Rather than circumvent Soleimani’s strategy, Jerusalem has fought Tehran on its own terms. Of Soleimani’s six armies, only the Houthis and Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Units have escaped. After the Oct. 7 massacre, Israel fought through Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah, wiping out their leadership and slicing up their missile arsenals, leaving the Assad regime in Syria to crumble without support.
Suddenly, Iran didn’t look so menacing. Israel could focus on the state and nuclear program seeking its destruction without worrying about thousands of rockets a day from Iran’s proxies. Then President Trump could enter to remove all doubt.
Since the Iranian regime found itself alone under Israeli assault, it has been in shock and denial, says Sharona Mazalian Levi, a researcher at Tel Aviv University’s Alliance Center for Iranian Studies. “The regime got so used to lying to the people, it came to believe its own propaganda,” she says. Israel was on the road to collapse. Iran could never be seriously challenged. Right up until the U.S. strikes, Iran claimed to be running up the score.
In reality, Israel, the size of New Jersey, was devastating Iran’s nuclear program, ballistic-missile program and military chain of command. Tehran’s civilians follow Israeli evacuation orders. Iran, twice the size of Texas with nine times Israel’s population, doesn’t even try to take on the Israel Defense Forces. Its dwindling salvos target civilians. The June 15 strike on the Weizmann Institute’s cancer-research facility is the world’s loss, but how does it bring Iran any closer to victory?
“The missile math now is very much in Israel’s favor,” says Gen. David Petraeus, the former U.S. Centcom commander, in a Wednesday interview. Unlike Russia or Ukraine, the Israelis also have air supremacy. “They can do anything they want, just about.”
That means Israel can also destroy any future Iranian start toward resuming nuclear enrichment. “This whole idea that this just sets ’em back a couple of years—I think that’s nonsensical,” Mr. Petraeus says. The nuclear program “will not only be destroyed now, and all of it, but Israel won’t allow it to happen again.” This puts the U.S. “in an enormous position of leverage.”
Blind to the moment’s significance, former President Bill Clinton argued on Tuesday that “Mr. Netanyahu has long wanted to fight Iran because that way he can stay in office forever.” The truth may be closer to the opposite: Benjamin Netanyahu has been driven to gain and keep power to stave off Iran’s nuclear ambitions. When I interviewed him for these pages in December, he was convinced that history would judge him on this question above all.
Mr. Netanyahu was among the earliest to identify the threat of a nuclear Iran and proliferation to its terror network. But after first becoming prime minister in 1996, he said in December, “the establishment fought me all the way” on Iran. The left viewed it as a deflection from a two-state solution, and “the military fought me the most.”
In time, as Iran’s nuclear program and forever war on Israel advanced, Mr. Netanyahu won the domestic Israeli argument—so much so that the opposition came to criticize him as not hawkish enough. By various means of sabotage, Israel was able to delay Iran’s nuclear program by a decade, but Iran soldiered on. Many thought it was too late to stop Iran.
But the Oct. 7 attack, and Hezbollah’s decision to join on Oct. 8, put Soleimani’s layers of defense at risk. They also weakened the resistance among Israel’s military and intelligence establishment to striking the nuclear program, especially after Iran entered the fight directly.
The timeline of Israel’s planning, much of which hasn’t been reported previously, is instructive. On June 4, 2024, following Iran’s April ballistic-missile attack on Israel, Mr. Netanyahu told his ministers it was their government’s responsibility to prevent a nuclear Iran. “The threat needs to be removed on this watch,” he said, according to a senior official in the room. The wars against proxies had other aims, but Mr. Netanyahu deemed this one overriding.
“We can’t leave it for the next generation,” he said in another closed meeting, “because there may not be a next generation.” On Nov. 18, a month after Iran’s second ballistic-missile strike on Israel, Mr. Netanyahu issued a directive to the IDF and Mossad to prepare to remove the Iranian nuclear threat by April 2025. But when the time came, Mr. Trump demurred, wanting talks.
As they dragged on in May, a former senior Israeli official who worked with Mr. Netanyahu for years told me something was off with the prime minister. “He seems to have convinced himself that everything will come together perfectly”—that Hezbollah’s defeat and Mr. Trump’s election would lead to an attack on Iran’s nuclear program, which would then clear the way for a Saudi peace deal. “The Bibi I knew was always the most skeptical in the room,” the former official said.
But the talks set Mr. Trump’s 60-day deadline, which everyone was prepared to forget until Mr. Netanyahu decided to enforce it. A senior Israeli official says the IDF and Mossad had thought June or October would be ideal timing for a strike.
On June 13, Mr. Netanyahu took his attack plan to the cabinet, which for once made his life easy and approved it unanimously. Mr. Trump, unlike his predecessors, didn’t give Israel a red light. He followed up this Saturday night, in prime time.
Soleimani was mostly right in his vision. But he couldn’t imagine that Israel would fight through Iran’s proxies and withstand slaughter, extortion, tunnels, rockets and internal displacements, along with pressures and calumnies international and domestic, and emerge with enough in the tank, U.S. backing intact, and Mr. Netanyahu still in the driver’s seat. Now, Israel’s prime minister can realize a vision of his own—and fulfil his historical responsibility.
