MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he waited for this moment for a long time.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: (Non-English language spoken).
KELLY: In a video, he said the joint U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, quote, "allows us to do what I have been hoping to do for 40 years." NPR's Daniel Estrin in Tel Aviv traces some of the pivotal events that led to this moment.
DANIEL ESTRIN, BYLINE: Netanyahu for years called a nuclear Iran the biggest existential threat to Israel. But launching all-out war and killing Iran's supreme leader?
SIMA SHINE: No (laughter). Dealing with Iran, I didn't think we'll reach that moment.
ESTRIN: Sima Shine is an Iran specialist who used to work for the Mossad spy agency. She says Israel never sought to actually abolish the Iranian nuclear program.
SHINE: For years, Israel and the Mossad have been working very hard, one, to know, and two, to delay.
ESTRIN: One example of that delaying tactic? Stuxnet, the U.S.-Israeli cyberattack that damaged an Iranian nuclear facility in 2010. Five years later, President Obama signed a deal with Iran that limited its nuclear program. But Netanyahu said the deal didn't go far enough, and President Trump withdrew from it, prompting Iran to move closer to having weapons-grade levels of uranium. Then one major domino fell in 2023.
SHINE: One day, when the historians will look back, nothing would have happened this way unless the 7th of October would happen.
ESTRIN: Israel retaliated not just against Hamas and Gaza but throughout the region, targeting Iran's proxy militias and its consulate in Syria. Iran attacked Israel in 2024. Israeli fighter jets seized the opportunity to knock out Iranian air defense systems.
SHINE: Which is the first and foremost important element you have to neutralize if you want to go to a strike.
ESTRIN: It paved the way for Israel's 12-day war against Iran in June last year. President Trump joined at the end, ordering U.S. strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities. Since then, Iran rebuilt some of its capabilities, according to Israel, and now the U.S. and Israel are fighting Iran together. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told NPR he imagines Netanyahu brought Trump on board by appealing to his role in American history.
EHUD OLMERT: But I think that Netanyahu told him something that Trump wanted to hear. Perhaps he may have said to him, look, if you will attack, you will be the only president that kept his word. That all of these other guys promised that they will do and they will do, and they will prevent Iran. They will not allow Iran to have atomic capacity. But they did nothing. And you are the only ones because you are such a great leader and because what you can do, no one else can do and so on and so for us. And Trump jump into this opportunity with great enthusiasm.
ESTRIN: Olmert says if he had been Israel's prime minister today, he would've acted differently. He would've encouraged Trump to keep trying to seek a nuclear deal with Iran. Olmert praises the degrading of Iranian military facilities in this war. But Iran's nuclear capabilities remain. And he says war without a negotiated agreement will be futile.
OLMERT: OK, another two weeks, we will destroy more military camps and so on and so forth. And then what? And then there will be a ceasefire and Iran will rebuild everything else. And it will take another two years. And we will face the same issue that we face now. So maybe we can reach out some agreement.
ESTRIN: At the moment, there is no talk of negotiations toward a ceasefire agreement. But Netanyahu, the son of a historian, is tweaking his narrative of the war, introducing the possibility that the Iranian regime may not collapse when the war ends.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
NETANYAHU: (Non-English language spoken).
ESTRIN: "We are undermining this regime in the hope of giving the Iranian people an opportunity to remove it," Netanyahu said in a video Tuesday. "It will not happen all at once and it will not happen easily. But if we persist, we will give them the chance to take their destiny into their own hands." He said Israel was almost a global power fighting alongside the world's superpower, the U.S. This, he said, is already a massive achievement.
Daniel Estrin, NPR News, Tel Aviv. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
