In the days after the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, Israel’s Prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu evaded any public admission of responsibility for the colossal security failure. He mostly avoided attending memorial services for the dead. He rarely met with the families of Israeli hostages languishing in the tunnels of Gaza.

Under previous Israeli Prime Ministers, flagrant lapses of intelligence and military strategy were followed fairly quickly by hearings and dramatic results. In October, 1973, Egyptian and Syrian forces took Israel by surprise in the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights, and, for a few days, put the state in profound peril. Within weeks of the conclusion of the assault, which became known as the Yom Kippur War, a state commission of inquiry, led by the then chief justice of Israel’s Supreme Court, Shimon Agranat, questioned witnesses about the miscalculations and oversights that led to the crisis. Its findings helped lead to the eventual resignations of Prime Minister Golda Meir and Defense Minister Moshe Dayan.

In contrast, even though leading members of Netanyahu’s military and defense establishment have resigned or apologized for their roles in the tragedy of october 7th, he has so far dodged any real accounting, rebuffed any inquiry. As an inevitable result, for the first year after the attacks, his poll numbers were dreadful.Political observers in Israel across the ideological spectrum talked about when,not if,Netanyahu would finally fall from power and be replaced by,among others,General benny Gantz,the former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett,or the ex-finance minister Avigdor Lieberman. And yet,as Nahum Barnea,a veteran political columnist,told me in Israel at the time,”I go to funerals of politicians to make sure they are buried. But comebacks are possible.”

And now, on the day after donald Trump joined Israel in bombing the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear installations Netanyahu and his circle are counting on his political resurrection. Never mind the catastrophe of Gaza with tens of thousands dead and worldwide condemnation. Never mind Netanyahu’s political assaults on democratic norms and institutions. Never mind his legal travails.

Amit Segal, a journalist for Channel 12, is deeply sourced in the Prime Minister’s office and considered by some a kind of messenger for his thinking. I called Segal on Sunday, less than a day after american B-2 bombers dropped their payloads on nuclear sites at Fordow, Isfahan, and Natanz in what has been dubbed Operation Midnight Hammer.

“In the first twelve months after October 7th, it looked like this was Netanyahu’s Gallipoli, a catastrophe which almost destroyed Churchill’s career,” Segal said. In 1916, as First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill led the Entente powers of the First World War in a crushing defeat on Turkey’s Gallipoli Peninsula at the hands of the Ottoman Empire.

“This was the single most horrific moment in the history of Israel, and it was under the administration of ‘Mr. Security,’ ” Segal went on. “It wasn’t just another scandal. It was his raison d’être. Today, following the fall of Hezbollah, in Lebanon, and the fall of Assad in Syria, and the fate of Hamas, and now the attack on the nuclear programme in Iran, October 7th looks more like Pearl Harbor-a devastating failure that ends some time later with total victory. History, in fifty years, I believe, will see October 7th in the context of the Israel-Iran war. But the question is, more immediately, will the Israeli public see it that way? I am not sure. But it is significant.It has re-created him as Mr. Security. But it is indeed not over. Nonetheless, people here see the Israeli attack and getting the green light from the U.S. and Trump as the most dramatic diplomatic achievement for Israel as the United Nations voted on its existence in 1947.”

Segal’s spin has the ring of authenticity only insofar as it seems to accurately echo the obsessions, the vanities, the thinking, and even the inner life of Netanyahu. In his memoir,Netanyahu makes constant references to Churchill. When I interviewed him during his first term, Netanyahu smoked enormous cigars and kept a portrait of Churchill in his office. When it comes to Tehran, Netanyahu has been talking about gathering storms for many years. In 2006, he said, “It is indeed 1938 and Iran is germany.” In 2011, he told the British interviewer Piers Morgan, “I admire Winston churchill because I think he saw the danger to western civilization and acted in time to staunch the hemorrhage.”

segal told me that, in planning the military assault on Iran, the security establishment estimated that retaliatory strikes would cause somewhere between eight hundred and four thousand deaths in Israel.So far, the reality has been much lower than those expectations.