Netanyahu's race against the clock to go ‘full Hezbollah' on Iran

Telegraph

10 hours ago

'I must govern the clock, not be governed by it.' So said Golda Meir, one of Israel's founders and its first and only female prime minister.
Now, some 50 years later, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) may have realised her insight. Indeed, they have taken the clock and blown it to smithereens, neutralising its power to contain them once and for all.
For the mullahs of Iran, this could spell curtains, or at least a long and painful 'Hezbollah-isation' stretching over weeks and months.
The clock has always been central to Israeli military planning, with its strategists at the Kirya in central Tel Aviv long regarding it as important as guns and manpower.
There are two big drivers. First, the IDF is reliant on reservists, so once a war starts there is an immediate social and economic imperative to move quickly.
But much more influential – since the Yom Kippur war of 1973 and the global oil crisis it sparked – has been the 'diplomatic clock' and Israel's reliance on the US and its allies for military and diplomatic support.
Once any new conflict started, the clock of international opinion would start ticking, with the US generally moving to bring things to a close as soon as possible.
The prospect of the Middle East going up in flames and oil prices spiking ruinously has always trumped Israel's longer term security interests.
Even after the Oct 7 massacre, Israel's military establishment feared it had only a limited window to deal with Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in the north.
Manuel Trajtenberg, then executive director of the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) in Tel Aviv, told The Telegraph 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 Oct 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 1,200 people, the wounding of thousands of others and the vicious kidnapping and humiliation of 240 Israelis and foreigners'.
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.
'Our goal in these operations is to remove an existential threat; to remove a ticking time bomb.'