On Saturday night, Netanyahu urged Iranians to “unshackle themselves from tyranny,” seizing a “once in a generation chance” to overthrow the dictatorship. “Take to the streets en masse” and “get the job done,” he added. Cleaving to the same strategy, U.S. President Donald Trump is insisting the Iranians have their “single greatest chance” to “take back” their country.
Netanyahu thinks he comes out on top, even if the popular uprising he is calling for plunges the nation into violent disorder. In an ideal world, a friendly regime appears in Tehran. But Israel often makes the Realpolitik judgment that turmoil can bolster its interests too.
That has been obvious in Lebanon and in Syria. Netanyahu has not assisted the Lebanese authorities in their efforts to discipline Hezbollah’s Shiite militia, or to get them to disarm. He has done quite the reverse, continuing air raids and drone strikes. Similarly, he’s stirred up trouble for the new leadership in Damascus by backing the Druze minority. In the Palestinian territories, Netanyahu is often accused of exploiting the divisions between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.
The logic is clear. If countries are consumed by internal political strife — even civil war — they can’t get their acts together and turn on Israel. So it would be a mistake to think that Netanyahu’s only desirable endgame is stability in Tehran. Instability could work too. If Iran is too weak to run uranium enrichment centrifuges, and to support Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen, that is also a victory.
The goal of the Iran war, according to Netanyahu’s foreign policy adviser Ophir Falk, is simple: “To win.” And in a text exchange with POLITICO he added that winning would be when “the threat posed by the Ayatollah regime and its proxies is removed.”
When asked what the Israeli government thinks is happening inside the embattled regime, Falk replied, almost nonchalantly: “We’ll see what happens.’