How the clocks stopped for Netanyahu, allowing him to go ‘full Hezbollah' on Iran
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Manuel Trajtenberg, then executive director of the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) in Tel Aviv, said at the time that the IDF was racing against 'several different clocks, all of them ticking down'.
'There's the military clock itself in terms of manpower and capacity but also the hostages, international pressure and even economic pressures,' he said.
Looking back now, it's hard to determine what the worry was.
While the 1967 Arab-Israeli War was famously wrapped up in six days, the latest conflict has been raging for nearly two years.
Hamas has all but been blasted to extinction, ditto Hezbollah in Lebanon. The IDF is acting at will against anything it judges a threat in Syria and moves with impunity over Yemen.
Now Iran – 'the head of the octopus' – is firmly in its sights.
Part of what's changed things is the psychological shock of October 7 and the sense of existential crisis in Israel it has created.
'The diplomatic clock is a fraud, and Israel's leaders must see through it', urged Nave Dromi, director of the Israel Victory Project in the wake of the massacre.
'There can be no specific time limitations on responding to the murder, rape and butchery of 1200 people, the wounding of thousands of others and the vicious kidnapping and humiliation of 240 Israelis and foreigners'.
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But as important in the destruction of the clock is Benjamin Netanyahu and his willingness to take on US presidents – a theme since he confronted Barack Obama over his 2015 nuclear deal with Iran from the floor of the US Congress.
The Israeli prime minister then tied Joe Biden in knots over Gaza, and then Lebanon, for the final 15 months of his term. And he has now almost certainly cocked a snook at Donald Trump, who, by most accounts, wanted more time to renegotiate a nuclear deal with Tehran.
'Trump had sought additional time from Netanyahu for nuclear talks, and Netanyahu did not give it to him,' said Daniel Shapiro who served as US ambassador to Israel from 2011 to 2017, in an interview with Foreign Affairs magazine on Friday.
For Iran, Netanyahu's great foe of more than 30 years, this could be very bad news indeed, with nothing obvious to stop Israel's bombing campaign against it grinding on for weeks and months.
Sima Shine, a senior researcher at INSS, said there was 'no significant international pressure' to wrap things up – quite a thing for a former Mossad official and Iran specialist who spent decades battling the clock.
'There is little sympathy for the Iranian regime', she said. 'Everyone recognises its negative role in the war in Ukraine, its involvement in the Middle East conflicts, its brutal suppression of protesters – especially women – and the fact that no one wants to see it possess nuclear weapons.'
At a briefing for journalists on Saturday, a senior IDF official turned things around 180 degrees, conjuring up a very different figurative clock.
'We are prepared for more … an aerial road to Tehran has effectively been opened', he said.
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