The Netanyahu I met is not wrong about everything

Telegraph

5 hours ago

He would speak softly, never interrupting or hectoring, and sometimes I would strain to hear him in the cavernous expanse of the Foreign Secretary's office. Yet I never saw a leader with a more sure-footed ability to control a meeting than Benjamin Netanyahu.
He would let his interlocutor do most of the talking while skilfully guiding the conversation, shutting down unwelcome subjects with an archly raised (dyed) eyebrow or sardonic aside, before returning to his abiding theme that the nuclear-tipped ambitions of Iran's messianic rulers posed the greatest threat to peace.
In nearly eight years at the Foreign Office and Downing Street, I witnessed plenty of encounters with Israel's supremely assured prime minister. Now Mr Netanyahu's struggle against Iran is reaching its climax as he strives to reshape the Middle East by wielding more power more effectively than any other leader in the region. However this crisis ends, it will change the world.
So how should our representatives react to Mr Netanyahu? The easy option would be to recoil with fastidious disdain and mouth the empty platitudes that David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary, has made his own ('we are urging restraint and de-escalation').
Or they could do something difficult and counter-cultural. They could try to understand how Mr Netanyahu thinks and what he wants. They might even be humble enough to admit that they have something to learn.
When I watched Mr Netanyahu in action, what I found most striking was that, for better or worse, he has a coherent and comprehensive analysis of the geopolitics of the Middle East and the wider world.
As the longest-serving prime minister in his country's history – and now the most historically consequential – he is completely different from leaders and foreign ministers who rely on their briefings and say whatever they have been programmed to say without any great thought or conviction.
Over the years, I would listen to him describe how the rise of Iran as a nuclear threshold state and its sponsorship of terrorist movements across the Middle East – from Lebanon to Gaza and Yemen – was transforming the strategic balance of the region. He would emphasise how this threatened the Sunni monarchies of the Gulf at least as much as Israel.
As long ago as 2017, I remember him describing how Arab leaders increasingly saw Israel as a vital counterweight to their real enemy, Iran's revolutionary Shia leaders. At the time, I suspected this was fanciful. After all, that venerable American diplomat, John Kerry, had roundly dismissed the notion that any more Arab states would make peace with Israel without settling the Palestinian conflict first. As US secretary of state in 2016, Mr Kerry declared: 'There will be no separate peace between Israel and the Arab world,' adding: 'Everybody needs to understand that.'
So what happened? In 2020 four Arab countries made a separate peace with Israel, including the Gulf monarchies of Bahrain and the UAE, vindicating Mr Netanyahu and proving Mr Kerry hopelessly wrong.
As I look back, I can remember other examples of Mr Netanyahu's prescience. In 2018 we asked him about Bashar al-Assad at a time when conventional wisdom held that Syria's blood-soaked dictator was secure in power, having effectively won the civil war. Mr Netanyahu begged to differ. He pointed out that Assad was utterly dependent on Russia and Iran. If they ever withdrew their support, the tyrant would inevitably fall. Sure enough, five years later they abandoned Assad to a life of obscure exile in Moscow.
That sequence of events was triggered by Mr Netanyahu himself when he eviscerated Hezbollah, whose fighters had been instrumental in propping up Assad, during Israel's offensive in Lebanon last year. The Syrian despot, shorn of any independent power, had been living on borrowed time – and power is all that matters.
Running through everything that Mr Netanyahu would say was his visceral belief that power is the currency of international relations and all else is wishful thinking and delusion. International rules and institutions count for nothing unless they are backed with power and, in the last resort, a willingness to use force.
Today British diplomats and politicians are re-learning these eternal lessons thanks to Vladimir Putin. But they are learning the hard way having spent the past three decades pretending that diplomacy and hard power can be separated, and spending ever greater sums on international development can somehow compensate for dismantling the Armed Forces.
We are now having to correct these errors at greater cost and risk than would otherwise have been necessary. If we had paid more attention to the view of the world expounded by Mr Netanyahu, these mistakes would never have been made.
And of course, the more I listened the more I saw the gaping holes in his analysis. I was astonished by how his strategic clarity on Iran was matched by near total blindness on the Palestinians.
Mr Netanyahu has no discernible plan for resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict. He is against the two-state solution and against the one-state solution. He is against any solution, except perhaps walling up the Palestinians in various overcrowded enclaves, where they would have municipal powers over street-cleaning and rubbish disposal and not much else. On this vital subject he is just as vacuous in private as he is in public.
Mr Netanyahu was also wrong to oppose the Iran nuclear agreement of 2015, which limited the Islamic Republic to 5,000 enriching centrifuges, all of them obsolete, and just 300kg of uranium, all of it a long way from weapons grade.
By wrecking that agreement, Donald Trump and Mr Netanyahu broke the constraints on Iran's nuclear programme and today their enemy has around 20,000 centrifuges and more than eight tons of enriched uranium, much of it a hair's breadth from weapons grade.
Nor can anything any longer justify Mr Netanyahu's Carthaginian campaign in Gaza, where he seems determined to create a wasteland and call it peace, even after being indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court.
But listing where he is wrong is easy. In one crucial respect, he is right. He instinctively understands the cold reality that hard power is the basis of diplomacy and a willingness to use force is the only way for any country to deter its adversaries. Our diplomats and politicians should admit that we would be in a far stronger position if we had never lost sight of these verities. Mr Netanyahu, for all his faults, never did and never would.