Netanyahu, desperate, now tells us we’ll die if we don’t re-elect him

So desperate is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to retain power that on Sunday, two days before we vote, he resorted to warning of a potential “second Holocaust” if he is not re-elected, in a post illustrated with an AI-generated mushroom cloud rising above a nuclear-bombed Tel Aviv. The ostensible logic behind his apocalyptic warning: Only if he is in office will US President Donald Trump ally with Israel to finally bring down the regime in Iran.

But Netanyahu evidently does not believe that even such naked fear-mongering will motivate enough of the Israeli electorate to grant him and his various far-right extremist and non-Zionist ultra-Orthodox allies another term in office.

And therefore, he has reportedly been pushing the Israel Defense Forces to carry out an as-yet unspecified military action “relating to Iran” — right now, on the very eve of the elections — that the military, again reportedly, fears might trigger some kind of “miscalculation.”

News of this unconscionable prime ministerial pressure on his army chief, Eyal Zamir, was reported late into Sunday night’s Channel 12 news broadcast by the outlet’s diplomatic reporter Yaron Avraham, who had evidently just gotten the military censor’s permission to broadcast parts of what he had been told, and who seemed to be paling in horror at the information he was conveying. Zamir, he elaborated, has been resisting carrying out the action as instructed, and has demanded further substantive consultations and signed, legal authorization from Netanyahu.

Netanyahu airily dismissed the report as “nonsense.” His defense minister on Monday morning was more detailed: “I state unequivocally that Israel had no intention of initiating an attack on Iran before the elections in Israel, while we have made clear that if Iran attacks Israel, we will respond with great force,” said Israel Katz.

Which is precisely the point. The denied Channel 12 report did not suggest that Netanyahu was planning to initiate an attack on Iran before the elections, but rather that he wants to carry out an unspecified action that the IDF regards as likely to lead to a miscalculation — in other words, to do something that could prompt an Iranian attack on Israel.

Were that to happen, of course — were Iranian ballistic missiles and drones to again rain down on Israel just before or on election day — the vote would have to be postponed.

If this reported Netanyahu Iran-poking sounds wildly improbable, it is demonstrably not. According to multiple reports from different sources, the Israel Air Force last week sent dozens of fighter jets and refueling aircraft over Syria and Iraq toward the Iranian border, on a flight path resembling an attack on Iran, and they only turned back shortly before reaching Iranian territory. Israel, which reportedly told the Trump Administration what it was doing ahead of time, indicated that this was a show of force designed to deter Iran from a pre-election attack.

Eyal Zamir evidently went along with that military action. But, again reportedly, he deems whatever Netanyahu has or had in mind for this week as being more likely to provoke an Iranian attack than to discourage one.

Sunday night’s Israeli TV report was followed hours later by a thoroughly unsurprising CNN report that Netanyahu has been pushing US President Donald Trump to partner with him in a renewed assault on Iran prior to the Israeli and US (midterm) elections but that Trump, while now twice endorsing Netanyahu’s candidacy, has emphatically not endorsed any such attack at this time.

Trump “did not give a green light,” CNN reported, citing an Israeli security source, in part because Zamir told Dan Caine, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs, that it would lead to the postponement of our elections. “Recent US intelligence assessments indicate that Netanyahu and his allies still lack a clear strategic objective” for another round of conflict, the CNN report also noted.

In a speech he delivered shortly before Sunday night’s devastating Channel 12 revelations, Netanyahu’s main challenger, former IDF chief Gadi Eisenkot, warned somewhat prophetically, “I see the polls, I know the data, and I know Netanyahu. He’ll stop at nothing — no lie, no extreme measure — to stay in power.”

After the report had aired, Eisenkot tweeted, “Netanyahu, I’m watching you,” adding that the prime minister “refuses to understand that Israel’s security isn’t a political bargaining chip, that the lives of Israel’s citizens and IDF soldiers aren’t expendable, and that the State of Israel is not his private property.”

Other opposition leaders were more succinct: “The man has gone off the rails,” said former prime minister Yair Lapid.

Netanyahu cannot abide the possibility that, at 77 years old and after a total of 19 years as prime minister, he might lose power. (The polls aren’t even all that bad; despite his unacknowledged prime culpability for failing to stop Hamas’s invasion and massacre, despite the hell he’s put Israel through these past four years, they show his rivals with no clear route to a Knesset majority.) Addicted to office, he has long since convinced himself that his and Israel’s well-being are one and the same, and that Israel’s actual survival depends on his political survival.

The man who failed to prevent the single worst one-day attack on Jews since the Holocaust, inside the borders of the country it was his prime obligation to protect, is now warning of a second Holocaust, echoing Iran’s destroy-Israel propaganda with AI images of Tel Aviv under nuclear attack. The man who led Israel in this year’s failed joint attempt with the US to bring down the regime, and by his own implicit admission failed to eliminate the existential threat posed by Iran’s nuclear program, is reportedly ready to provoke another war, with no clear strategic objective and no American partner. All to boost his chances of remaining prime minister.