[News] Don’t blame it on Netanyahu, Israelis across the political spectrum support the illegal attack on Iran

[Anti-Imperialist News]

mondoweiss.net
<https://mondoweiss.net/2025/06/dont-blame-it-on-netanyahu-israelis-across-the-political-spectrum-support-the-illegal-attack-on-iran/>
Don’t blame it on Netanyahu, Israelis across the political spectrum support
the illegal attack on Iran
Adam Horowitz
June 19, 2025
------------------------------

Liberals in the West who want to criticize Israel will often point to Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the source of the country’s issues. They
will emphasize his corruption, his attempts to avoid prison, or his need to
court those further to the right to explain away everything from expanding
settlements in the West Bank to carrying our a genocide in Gaza.

They are now framing Israel’s aggression in Iran in the same way as
Netanyahu’s war <https://x.com/BernieSanders/status/1934659864610918435>,
but opinions within Israel, including those from ‘liberal Israelis’ suggest
otherwise. In fact, war with Iran has historically, as well as currently,
been pushed and supported by the entire Zionist political spectrum, from
left to right.

It is important to understand this, in order to understand just how
overwhelming the Israeli support for Israel’s illegal attack is.

The polling shows this to be the case.

A recent poll
<https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2025/06/16/israelis-rally-around-iran-strikes-according-to-new-poll/>
conducted by The Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Agam Labs shows Israelis
overwhelmingly support the aggression against Iran, with only 16% opposing
it. The 16% is heavily weighed by the 68% of Palestinians who oppose it
(20% unsure, 12% support). Among Jewish Israelis, less than 5% oppose it.

This has long been reflected among Israel’s political leaders, including
the so-called opposition.

Less than a week before the attack, Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid
chided Netanyahu for not having attacked Iran earlier. In an Haaretz podcast
<https://x.com/DropSiteNews/status/1932045765368480154> he said:

“It would have been possible to handle it in a way, that you inflict a
severe blow on Iran, a blow that would have the potential to topple the
Iranian regime, because it collapses the economy, which was in trouble
anyway… it was simply a much better opportunity, one of a great many
opportunities which haven’t been taken advantage of.”

It is not uncommon that a figure associated with the Israeli liberal class
would be more hawkish on Iran than Netanyahu himself.

In his memoirs, former Labor leader and Prime Minister Ehud Barak boasts of
being more hawkish than Netanyahu on the issue of attacking Iran when Barak
was Defense Minister under Netanyahu from 2009 to 2013. Barak, who is often
nicknamed “Mr. Security” in Israel, didn’t believe
<https://www.972mag.com/attack-iran-wasnt-ehud-baraks-autobiography/> Iran
posed an “existential threat” – in his eyes, the issue was a change in
regional balance of power, and the loss of Israel’s regional nuclear
monopoly. Barak wanted to preempt Iran’s “zone of immunity” – where it was
no longer possible to significantly damage the Iranian nuclear program. His
idea was to message to the Iranians that “we could always attack again” and
that it would not be worth rebuilding their nuclear facilities.

So Iran has always been a political question that Barak and many others
have suggested should be handled with aggression and belligerence. And most
of the Israelis are behind it. What is the objective now, more precisely?

According to the Israeli head of the National Security Council Tzachi
Hanegbi (Likud), Israel does not even hope to destroy the Iranian nuclear
project entirely, because this is deemed impossible. In an interview
<https://e.walla.co.il/item/3757585> on Saturday with the Kan public
broadcaster, he said that the goal was to force the Iranians into a new
nuclear deal with the United States. Channel 12 news then reported
<https://www.mako.co.il/news-military/Israel_iran_war/Article-81c849a6d0b6791027.htm>
that the government’s calculation before its attack on Iran was that it
would cost between 800 and 4,000 Israeli lives. A price evidently worth
paying to retain military superiority in the region.

Ehud Barak confirmed Hanegbi’s assessment of possible military achievement.
Saturday, he told
<https://edition.cnn.com/2025/06/13/world/video/israel-ehud-barak-iran-amanpour-digvid>
Christiane Amanpour on CNN:

“In my judgement, it’s not a secret that Israel alone cannot delay the
nuclear program of Iran by a significant time period, probably several
weeks, possibly a month—but even the US cannot delay them by more than a
few months.”

Amanpour wonders: “What is the point then?”

Barak begins to mumble:

“It’s uh, it’s problematic, it still has a justification from the point of
view of Israel. Uh, eh, instead of sitting idle, our government feels that
they have to do something… probably together with the Americans we can do
more.”

Barak repeats the “immunity zone” and the “threshold” idea that he has
forever been pushing:

“My judgment is, that because Iran is already what is called a ‘threshold
nuclear power’, then the only way to block it is either to impose upon it a
convincing new agreement, or alternatively open upon it a full-scale war to
topple down the regime. That’s something that together with the US we can
do, but having said that, I don’t believe that any American President –
neither Trump nor any one of his predecessors would have decided.”

Well, that sounds amazingly coherent. They are just going for destruction,
and let’s see what comes out of it. That’s Barak from the “left” of Israeli
politics. He’s actually supporting Netanyahu, no doubt because he has long
been a proponent of this madness and overhauled him on the right.
*‘The pilots of Kaplan’*

Saturday night, an Iranian missile hit
<https://edition.cnn.com/2025/06/14/world/video/missile-strike-kirya-israel-military-digvid>
Tel Aviv in close proximity to Israel’s main military headquarters on
Kaplan Street. This military headquarters, known as HaKirya, is situated in
one of the most bustling civilian areas in the country. It is adjacent to
the Sarona shopping mall, next to the Tel Aviv Museum, and close to many
apartment residences. To be sure, if Hamas had such headquarters in such an
area, it would be yet another pretext for Israel for its eternal propaganda
claim that “Hamas uses civilians as human shields”.

Kaplan Street is also known in Israel for something completely different
than the military headquarters – the wide street has been the stage for the
massive demonstrations (before October 7, 2023) against the government’s
judicial reform. These protests were often called the “Kaplan
demonstrations”. Thus, it also holds an iconic place in Israeli liberal
thinking as a signifier for “democracy.” On Friday, Orna Berry, who is a
science entrepreneur and former chief scientist for the Israeli
government, tweeted
the meme <https://x.com/OrnaBerry/status/1933557116196819201/photo/1>: “At
this time, all of Kaplan is above Tehran. Return in peace.” By this she was
offering her support to the pilots who have also been prominent in the
protest movement for Israeli “democracy” and are now the ones attacking
Iran. Indeed, many of the same pilots
<https://mondoweiss.net/2023/09/an-israeli-pilot-refusenik-reflects-on-the-state-of-israeli-fascism-and-apartheid/>
who bomb children across Palestine also consider themselves liberals, and
the Israeli public generally calls them “the best.”

This is how the Israeli public sees the aggression on Iran. Although they
don’t exactly see how they will get out of this war and what they will get
out of it, they have been told for ages, and by many, that attacking Iran
is a good idea.

Netanyahu surely understands that this issue is one that can really unite
the nation – and that’s something that he loves and needs, especially for
himself right now. It also adds a smokescreen in relation to the Gaza
genocide and the accelerated ethnic cleansing of the West Bank.
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