Benjamin Netanyahu: The Inside Story of Israel’s Victory

Hello?” Benjamin Netanyahu begins over the phone. “I’m going to give you a précis of everything that happened because we stand now at a crossroads of history. The campaign that we carried out changed the Middle East.”

I’m fine, thank you, but Israel’s prime minister has no time for pleasantries. He has to testify six hours a day, three days a week, at his trial. Prosecutors allege he was bribed with positive news coverage, a novel theory, and employ the kind of vague breach-of-trust and fraud statutes that U.S. federal courts no longer allow.

Mr. Netanyahu maintains his innocence. Most of all, he maintains that he has a war to run—and that Israel is winning big. He poses the question: “How did it happen?” From the darkness of Oct. 7, 2023, Israel has roared back to crush Hamas and defang Hezbollah, leaving the Assad regime in Syria to crumble and all their masters in Iran to fret, without air defenses, over Mr. Netanyahu’s next move. How did it happen?

Benjamin Netanyahu.

“On Oct. 7, they woke me up at 6:29 in the morning,” Mr. Netanyahu says. That’s hours after senior security officials knew something was awry, but there’s no getting around the failure. Hamas death squads slaughtered nearly 1,200 Israelis. By this time, “there was a full-scale attack from Gaza,” he says. “It was clearly not just another round. I went to the Kirya, our military headquarters, called the cabinet and declared war,” Mr. Netanyahu says. “And I said it’s going to be a long war.”

“On Oct. 8, Hezbollah came into the fighting. Now we had potentially two fronts,” he says. “On Oct. 9, I told the heads of the communities next to Gaza, ‘I ask that you stand steadfast, because we are going to change the Middle East.’ ” The word then from Mr. Netanyahu’s office was that although this war had started worse than the Yom Kippur War in 1973, and with zero early warning, it could end better than even the Six-Day War in 1967, and with a greater chance for peace.

On Oct. 11, “the defense minister and the military chiefs suggested we go after Lebanon. That is, shift the whole war north, against Hezbollah, and leave Hamas intact in the south,” Mr. Netanyahu says. “I said, ‘we can’t do that.’ ” The perpetrators of the Oct. 7 massacre couldn’t be left to stew, and “we shouldn’t conduct a two-front war. One massive front at a time.”

But the fog of war is real. “Suddenly, we were receiving intel that there were Hezbollah paragliders already going into the Galilee, into Tiberius,” Mr. Netanyahu says. The U.S. had urged him not to invade Lebanon. “But if we’re going to be attacked and invaded, what choice do we have?” he says. “I actually let the planes take off to have a full-scale attack on Hezbollah,” early in the war. “And you know why it stopped?” he asks. “It turns out the gliders were geese. I called back the planes.”

Mr. Netanyahu praises President Biden for visiting in solidarity on Oct. 18, 2023. “It’s the first time a U.S. president came to Israel at a time of war,” Mr. Netanyahu says, “and he sent two carrier battle groups, which was important to stabilize the northern front.”

Disagreement emerged over how to fight Hamas. “Nobody had ever fought with such intense tunnel warfare in such a dense urban area,” Mr. Netanyahu says. The Americans advised against a ground invasion of Gaza. U.S. military experts said to fight from the air instead.

Mr. Netanyahu knew from experience that wouldn’t work. “From the air, you can mow the lawn. You can’t pull out the weeds,” he says. “We’re here to uproot Hamas—not to deliver deterrent blows, but to destroy it.”

As Israel advanced on the ground, “Hamas saw us moving, moving, moving with American support,” he says. “There was not yet the buildup of public pressure against us.” That, Mr. Netanyahu says, scared Hamas into the first hostage deal, in late November 2023, and assured him that he could briefly stop the fighting. Hamas’s leader, Yahya Sinwar, “thought it was bravado on my part—that once I paused the war, I wouldn’t be able to resume it.”

Mr. Netanyahu wasn’t bluffing, but as the war restarted, “they began to turn on us in the media and in the West.” The more Americans, international bodies and liberal Israelis pressed Mr. Netanyahu to fold, the less inclined Hamas became to cut a second hostage deal—“and Hamas said so openly.”

Meanwhile, Israeli troops “parked” as the invasion of Rafah, on Gaza’s border with Egypt, was debated. “It’s not enough to destroy Hamas if you don’t control the southern closure,” Mr. Netanyahu says. That means the Philadelphi corridor, along the Egyptian border—or, he allows, some line above it. Otherwise, Hamas would rearm.

The U.S. predicted as many as 20,000 new casualties if Israel invaded Rafah. Vice President Kamala Harris said it would be impossible to evacuate civilians: “I have studied the maps. There’s nowhere for those folks to go.” When Israel finally advanced in May, casualties were notably low as civilians quickly went to the safe zone by the beach.

“The Americans said to me, ‘If you go into Rafah, you’re on your own, and we’re not going to send you the critical arms,’ which is tough to hear,” Mr. Netanyahu says. Internally, others argued that Israel was too reliant on U.S. munitions to risk fighting on. “That’s a legitimate case,” Mr. Netanyahu says. “But if we don’t go into Rafah, we can’t exist as a sovereign state. We’d become a vassal state and we won’t survive. The question of arms will fix itself, but the question of our independence will not. That’s the end of Israel.”

In Rafah, Israel cut off Hamas’s supply route and later killed Sinwar, its chief. The Biden administration imposed a de facto arms embargo on Israel, delaying weapons shipments.

“The U.S. withheld critical weapons,” Mr. Netanyahu admits, but he appreciates the pressure Mr. Biden was under. “It’s not easy to be president, let’s face it, with these very radical fringes in his party. It wasn’t easy to do what Mr. Biden did,” including helping Israel in its defense against Iranian missile attacks, he says.

Many senior Israeli officials argued that Israel should make concessions to Hamas to quiet Hezbollah and avoid escalation in Lebanon. Mr. Netanyahu summarizes their position: “ ‘We’re going to get a cease-fire anyway in the north—either we can get it after the fighting or before the fighting, and it’s going to be the same deal. So, why not skip the fighting?’ ”

He rejected the premise: “It makes a hell of a difference whether we make the cease-fire after we cut Hezbollah down to size or after we leave it intact.” Hezbollah couldn’t be left holding a sword of Damocles above Israel’s head.

Even after 11 months of Hezbollah rocket fire, depopulating Israel’s north, the U.S. opposed any move to take the fight to Hezbollah. “I said we should do it in October,” Mr. Netanyahu recounts. “One of the reasons was that October is one month before November.” Who knew what would happen after the U.S. election? But during the campaign, the chances of securing U.S. support would be greater.

“We prepared for Hezbollah a massive surprise,” Mr. Netanyahu says, and I presume he means the exploding pagers on Sept. 17. When attacking Hezbollah was first contemplated, nearly a year earlier, this surprise “was barely considered, if at all, because at that time those capabilities had not yet been amassed. Their lethality was but a fraction of their full force a year later,” he says.

This time, “there were those who had misgivings about using it at all. But since it was time-sensitive, I pushed it through.” The result was “a shock and awe of historic proportions” and “the greatest surgical targeting in history.”

The expectation, in Israel and America, was that Hezbollah’s response would be like nothing Israel had seen before, toppling towers in Tel Aviv. But the terrorists had been stunned, and because of what Israel did next, they were unable to retaliate effectively.

To follow the surprise attack, Mr. Netanyahu pushed a plan to destroy Hezbollah’s missiles, including those the group considered invulnerable. Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s longtime leader, “was relying on the missiles and rockets that he put in private homes” and trusting Israel not to target them, he says. Mr. Netanyahu credits his army with “an improved plan, which was actually brilliant, because among other things they took over Lebanese television” to warn civilians to evacuate their homes. Then, Israel struck. “In six hours, we wiped out most of the ballistic-missile stockpiles Hezbollah had amassed.”

Raw intelligence convinced Mr. Netanyahu to kill Nasrallah. “He was literally taking over the command of the military actions. But the thing that startled me was that I realized he was the axis of the axis,” Mr. Netanyahu says. “He had replaced [Qassem] Soleimani,” the Iranian general who was killed in a January 2020 U.S. strike. “It’s not only that Iran was using him. He was using Iran.”

Israeli troops entered Lebanon to destroy Hezbollah’s underground infrastructure by the border. “This was going to be Hezbollah’s main thrust for an invasion of the Galilee. They could reach Haifa, easily, and beyond,” Mr. Netanyahu says. “The subterranean network turned out to be enormous—much bigger than we thought.”

When Hezbollah sued for a cease-fire, leaving Hamas to twist in the wind, Mr. Netanyahu saw a chance to refresh Israeli forces. U.S. arms shipments are expected to speed up—“reinforcements are on the way,” as incoming Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R., S.D.) put it—and Israel can prepare a “full-scale offensive” if Hezbollah tempts it. But “Hezbollah doesn’t want to continue the fight right now,” Mr. Netanyahu says.

Neither do the Iranians. “They were dumbfounded when we took out their critical air defenses” after their second missile attack on Israel, he says. Israel also damaged Iran’s ballistic-missile production, “which means they now have to calculate how much ammo they have, because it’ll take them several years to resuscitate it—assuming we don’t hit it again.”

Each attack had a multiplier effect. “We knocked down Hezbollah, which was supposed to protect Iran. And Iran didn’t protect Hezbollah either. And neither of them protected [Syria’s Bashar al] Assad. So, we just split that whole axis right down the middle.”

Mr. Netanyahu says Iran “spent probably $30 billion in Syria, another $20 billion in Lebanon, God knows how much on Hamas. And it’s all gone down the tubes,” he says. “They have no supply line.” Mr. Netanyahu intends to keep it that way. “We warned Assad not to let Iran supply Hezbollah with weapons through Syria. He played dumb.”

As Hezbollah licked its wounds, Syrian rebels felled the Assad regime on their own. Immediately, Israel bombed Syria’s chemical-weapons facilities and other military assets. “I don’t know if we killed anyone, but we certainly smashed the weaponry of the Syrian army,” Mr. Netanyahu says. “We don’t want all the stuff the Syrians amassed falling into the hands of the jihadists.”

For Israel, it’s a return to form. “Power isn’t merely guns, missiles, tanks and aircraft,” Mr. Netanyahu says. “It’s the will to fight and seize the initiative.”

Iran’s nuclear program now looks vulnerable. “I’m not going to talk about that,” Mr. Netanyahu says. When I say I’ve never heard him so reticent on his favorite subject, he responds cryptically: “I’ve always said the jury’s out, still out on all of us, and I don’t exclude myself.” It is perhaps on this that he expects to be judged.

Iran will enter 2025 with an ailing 85-year-old leader, staring down the barrel of another Trump administration. I’d imagine the president-elect hasn’t taken kindly to Iran’s attempts to kill him and his former officials since his first term in office.

“President Trump has supported Israel throughout this war,” Mr. Netanyahu says. There’s new optimism for a hostage deal after Mr. Trump’s threats to Hamas, and maybe even for diplomatic normalization with Saudi Arabia to follow. “It would be the natural expansion of the Abraham Accords that we forged under President Trump’s leadership,” Mr. Netanyahu says. “The threat to Hamas can only help. He places the onus squarely on Hamas and tells them there will be consequences.”

The hostage deal Mr. Netanyahu envisions is a partial one in exchange for a pause in the fighting. “I’m not going to agree to end the war before we remove Hamas,” he says. “We’re not going to leave them in power in Gaza, 30 miles from Tel Aviv. It’s not going to happen.”

There was a time when people didn’t believe him. “I was arguing for ‘total victory,’ ” he says, “and they said there’s no such thing as victory.” You don’t hear that so much anymore, now that Israel and its leader seem to have emerged on top.

Mr. Kaufman is a Journal editorial writer and the letters editor.