Israeli Naftali Bennett needs to topple two regimes

The last time I’d met with Naftali Bennett was at his home north of Tel Aviv not long after the attacks of Oct. 7 and just before Israel’s army went into the Gaza Strip. The former Israeli prime minister was worried about a blood bath. He also had a plan to avoid it.

Bennett, whose short-lived term of office from 2021-22 was notable for the ideological breadth of his government, sketched a four-part concept: Seize Gaza’s peripheries without trying to occupy its cities. Provide Palestinians with food, water, medicine and safe havens but not the fuel that Hamas needs to operate its tunnels. Use an “ongoing and persistent series of targeted ground raids” to gradually degrade and destroy Hamas’ military over months or years. Offer safe passage out of Gaza for Hamas fighters willing to surrender, probably in exchange for the release of Israel’s hostages.

Benjamin Netanyahu ignored the advice. After 10 months of grinding war, Israel has achieved none of its major objectives. Hamas is not defeated. Its leader, Yahya Sinwar, is still at large and making demands. Scores of hostages remain in captivity. Tens of thousands of Israelis cannot return to their homes. The country is as divided as before and more isolated than ever. And Israelis are girding for a major, multifront war against Iran and its proxies.

So what would Bennett have Israel do now? With polls showing him drawing even with or beating Netanyahu as the person Israelis want as their prime minister, his views matter.

Gaza strategy

“I see words that send one message and actions that are the contrary,” Bennett told me last week when I saw him in New York. He was referring to Netanyahu’s conduct of the war in Gaza. But Bennett was also thinking about Israel’s approach to Iran, which is now closer than ever to a nuclear breakout, despite years of Netanyahu’s public vows that he would never allow the Islamic republic to get this close to a bomb.

Regarding Gaza, Bennett saw two defensible courses of action. The first — his clear preference — is a short, sharp, decisive surge of forces that can knock out Hamas: “If you’re in a boxing ring and you just hit your opponent and he’s just wobbling, you zero in and give him another punch,” Bennett said. The second option is to cut a hostage deal, declare a cease-fire and “fight another day.” That’s the Biden administration’s clear preference; for Israel, it hinges on questions of its ordnance stockpiles and how long it can sustain a high-intensity war.

What Netanyahu is doing is something else. He is talking out of both sides of his mouth — alternating between promises of “total victory” and an immediate deal to bring Israel’s hostages home. At the same time, he is waging a low-intensity war of attrition, reminiscent of William Westmoreland’s Vietnam strategy against an enemy that continually replenished itself, with no end in sight.

“I know there is a body count of Hamas combatants,” Bennett said. “When you count bodies, you are assuming a finite number of combatants. But you have a population of 1 million to draw on,” he added, referring to Hamas. “They could have recruited another 10,000 in the meantime. That’s not how you win a war.”

Iran the octopus

Then there is Netanyahu’s other dismal failure: Iran. For years, Bennett has warned of Tehran’s “octopus strategy,” in which the regime “builds proxies and tentacles across the Middle East and the world, for that matter, and funds, arms and directs them, yet hardly pays a price.” For more than 20 years, the arms of the octopus — in Lebanon, Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Iraq and Yemen — have grown strong while Netanyahu insisted that the focus had to be on Iran’s nuclear programs.

“What we got was both,” Bennett lamented. Tehran built “an empire of rockets and terror” ringing Israel. But Netanyahu also whiffed on the decision to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities when there was still a realistic chance of destroying them in their relative infancy. Now Iran has become a de facto nuclear-threshold state, able to “quickly produce weapons-grade uranium, at multiple facilities, if it chooses to do so,” as an unclassified U.S. intelligence document recently noted.

If Iran were able to deploy nuclear warheads on ballistic missiles — or share them with a proxy like Hezbollah — the Jewish state would be on a road to extinction. The only policy that can reverse it, Bennett warned, is “to topple the Iranian regime before it fully acquires a nuclear weapon.”

He isn’t imagining Iraq-style regime change, with foreign divisions marching toward the capital. Israel can’t do it, and Americans won’t.

What he has in mind, instead, is what happened to the Soviet Union in the 1980s. That, too, was an old regime, “rigid and disconnected,” he said, “profoundly corrupt and incompetent and despised by its own people.” In part, the Soviet Union fell of its own weight. But it was also kicked in its heels — by collapsing oil revenues, a slow bleed in Afghanistan, covert Western support for dissident movements like Solidarity and a clarity of vision that the goal of Western policy was the collapse of the communist empire, not the management of a delicate status quo.