Netanyahu accused of pushing toward Iran war as his grip on power slips
Analysts and opposition figures say Israel's caretaker prime minister may see a renewed conflict with Tehran as a route out of political defeat, even as military leaders warn of a wider war.
By Luana Sato ·
Israel's caretaker prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has ordered the military to prepare for war ahead of a potential attack on Iran, according to reports, defying opposition calls for restraint as his right-wing coalition steadily loses its grip on power.
The reports follow revelations that Netanyahu has been phoning United States President Donald Trump almost daily to press for renewed strikes on Iran. Israeli media have also reported repeated confrontations between Netanyahu and military chief Eyal Zamir, who has resisted proposals for military action against Tehran, warning that they could trigger a wider conflict.
The political backdrop is fraught. Opposition leader Gadi Eisenkot has been tasked with forming a viable government after the coalition that led Israel through the war in Gaza and a series of regional campaigns began to falter, but his success is far from guaranteed. Netanyahu has been pushing for a national unity government that would include himself and his Likud party, or, according to critics, waiting for Eisenkot to fail, which would force yet another election.
"Netanyahu is desperate," Ahron Bregman, an Israeli political analyst at King's College London, said, arguing that the caretaker leader's behaviour shows he knows he is likely politically finished and that only a national unity government could save him. "A little war could compel Eisenkot & Co to form such a government in a time of crisis," he said.
Many in the opposition, including Eisenkot himself, have accused Netanyahu of trying to drag the country into a potentially devastating war for his own political survival, or of deliberately stalling the coalition-building process in the hope of running down the clock.
Yet analysts suggest that even Netanyahu's fiercest opponents could rally behind him if he launches an attack. "It's paradoxical," said Haggai Ram, a professor at Ben-Gurion University and author of the book Iranophobia, which examines Israel's longstanding hostility toward Tehran. "Everyone knows it would be contrived, but the hysteria over Iran cuts through everything." If war began, he added, the public would expect the opposition to fall in line: "They'd recognise the cynicism for what it was, but this is Iran. This is the great enemy."
Ram noted that for the former military figures in the opposition, confronting Iran was what they spent their entire lives training for, while years of warnings have led many in the public to see such a war as inevitable. Israel's decades-long cold war with Iran has spanned much of the population's lifetime, marked by threats from Tehran's regional allies, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, whose rhetoric threatening Israel's destruction has been widely reported in Israeli media. Israeli leaders have warned since at least the 1990s that Tehran was on the brink of acquiring a nuclear weapon and would likely use it against Israel.
Tensions escalated sharply after the Hamas-led attack on October 7, 2023, as Israel launched multiple wars across the region. A 12-day exchange of strikes with Iran in June 2025 was followed by a joint attack with the United States launched in February, which disrupted some of the world's critical waterways, threw financial markets into turmoil and affected household expenditure across much of the world.
Daniel Bar-Tal, a political psychologist at Tel Aviv University, said Netanyahu is "fighting for his life", facing a public that largely opposes him and his coalition along with multiple active criminal cases against him. Bar-Tal doubted that Trump, Israel's principal ally and military backer, would allow Netanyahu to derail US negotiations with Iran, but said Israelis would still likely "support such a war", calling it a good card for the embattled leader to play.
For now, Ram said, Israel exists in what feels like a state of permanent expectation. "People know that any case for war would be manufactured," he said. "They're not stupid and they see it for what it is." Still, he added, many regard the war as inevitable: "They're just waiting, and if and when it happens, despite everything they know, they will still report for duty and do what they're ordered."
