Netanyahu’s Tenacity

Benjamin Netanyahu gets a lot of flack these days, from all sides. Hostage families — not all, but enough of them — demonstrate against him every evening, demanding that he stop the war in Gaza RIGHT NOW so that all the hostages, living and dead, can be released. His every move is attributed by his political enemies, such as the far-left peaceniks who read Haaretz — to his supposed desire to delay his “corruption trial” on charges of having accepted cognac and cigars from an admirer. He is still being berated by members of the Biden administration who felt he ignored their advice and conducted the war in Gaza as he, and the IDF generals wanted, not how Biden and Blinken insisted it be fought. The strategist Edward Luttwak thinks we ought to applaud Netanyahu for his Churchillian-like tenacity over the last 18 months of war in Gaza. More of Luttwak’s view can be found here: “How Bibi Buggered On to Victory,” by Edward N. Luttwak, Tablet, April 15, 2025:

When you’ve worked long enough in the field of strategy, you eventually come to the depressing realization that victory in any major war is not won by some brilliant strategy, feats of generalship, or even superior technology. Rather, it’s won by sheer tenacity.

Tenacity is the most important virtue of national leaders at war, which allows them to press on with no assurance of victory, fending off tremendous political pressures to fold. Winston Churchill displayed this quality in 1940. In June of that year, Germany appeared unstoppable. Paris and the entirety of Western Europe had fallen. The Luftwaffe was grinding down the grossly outnumbered British pilots, and German invasion barges were being assembled in Belgian ports. Even then, with Britain desperate for U.S. support, the American national debate on interventionism, prompted by the outbreak of war in September 1939, continued to break decisively in favor of the isolationists.

Exploring an accommodation with Germany appeared as the eminently reasonable and prudent course of action because of Herr Hitler’s generous offer to leave Britain and its vast empire intact. When British parliamentarians pressed Churchill to explain his plan, he confessed to his intimates that he had no plan at all. He was determined to just keep buggering on.

Then the situation became bleaker still for the British and for Churchill personally. In June 1941, the German army smashed its way into Russia, advancing rapidly toward what looked like an imminent victory. Although the Wehrmacht’s swift conquests promised to wholly remedy Germany’s only weakness—its lack of petroleum—the isolationists in the U.S. Congress remained dominant. Meanwhile, at home, London was abuzz with talk of Churchill’s heavy drinking, his personal dependence on gifts from his Jewish friends to pay for his extravagant tastes and, above all, his utter lack of strategy—he had failed to offer any path at all that could conceivably lead to victory.

Things looked grim all around. In North Africa, the brilliant German tactician Erwin Rommel was outmaneuvering British forces with ease. Much worse were the first reports of Germany’s astonishing technological progress: the world’s first jet fighter that could easily outfly every single British and American fighter; the world’s first air-to-surface missile (Fritz X) that, in September 1943, would sink the Italian battleship Roma (to prevent it from surrendering to the Allies); and the Tiger tank that could crush British armor.

Nevertheless, the isolationists in Congress refused to fund even a prosaic piston-engine fighter project—the P-51 Mustang, the war’s best Allied fighter—which was developed with fast-dwindling British funds.

Churchill’s answer? Just keep buggering on.

In Lebanon, Hezbollah has endured the following: its entire command structure has been devastated, beginning with the direct hit on the building under which where the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, had been hiding, as well as the IDF’s killing of his successor, and that successor’s successor; the IDF has killed both the commander and the deputy commander of the elite unit known as the Radwan Force; 3,800 Hezbollah operatives were wounded with the “exploding pagers,” most so severely that they are now permanently hors de combat; 10 of 12 members of the group’s Jihad Council have been killed, and more than 80% of Hezbollah’s ’ once-huge arsenal of rockets and missiles have been destroyed. In Syria, Iran’s ally became its enemy overnight, when Bashar Assad fled Syria for Russia, and the country was taken over by Sunni jihadists who rightly see Shi’a Iran as an enemy. Meanwhile, ever since Assad fled, the IDF has been destroying every sort of weapon in the Syrian army’s arsenal, from jet fighters blown up on the tarmac of military airbases, to rockets, tanks, artillery — all sorts and conditions of weapons that, the IDF believes, constituted between 80% and 90% of the Syrian army’s weapons. All of Syria’s military airbases have been hit, and several of them have been put out of commission. Now the jihadists in Syria are helpless in the face of Israel’s overwhelming military success in destroying so many weapons and damaging so many airbases.

In Yemen, the Israelis have conducted strikes on the Houthis’ base in the capital, San’a, and damaged the port at Hodeidah, through which, in the past, the Houthis took delivery of weapons shipments from Iran — but not any longer. Now it is the Americans who have taken over from Israel the task of dealing with the qat-chewing, allahu-akbaring, rifle-toting fanatics, striking day after day until that time when the Houthis cry uncle and cease to launch missiles at ships in the Red Sea. After an Israeli attack on Iran on October 26, all of Iran’s air defenses, including its Russian S-300 batteries, were destroyed. As a consequence, Iran has been rendered defenseless against raids from the air by Israeli fighter jets. or from missiles, rockets, and drones.

And all of these successes, Edward Luttwak wants to remind us, have been achieved under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, whose Churchillian tenacity in wartime deserves the free world’s gratitude.