How Trump brought Netanyahu’s longtime dream of Iran’s destruction within reach

Twelve days into its war on Iran, the Israeli military released an audio recording of a conversation between two fighter pilots mid-sortie: “It is a great honour for us to fight with you,” said the Israeli pilot. “Likewise, gentlemen,” said the American pilot. “Strike hard. See ya.”

At the speartips of two of the world’s most formidable air forces, they were on a mission that Israel’s prime minister had aspired to for years and had been planning for months. Last November, Benjamin Netanyahu convened a small circle of top officials to set out a new goal in Iran. He wanted to assassinate Iran’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Israeli military leaders had begun preparing for the next war with Iran almost as soon as the previous round of fighting ended last June. Donald Trump had cut that short with a post on Truth Social commanding Israeli warplanes to turn back while “doing a friendly ‘plane wave’ to Iran”.

But Netanyahu had unfinished business with the Islamic Republic.

Israeli officials kept the evolving plans to kill Khamenei secret from Washington, according to Israel’s defence minister, Israel Katz. “The assumption [was] that we might have to carry it out on our own,” he said during a round of interviews with Hebrew-language media outlets this month in which he revealed the meeting in November. A target date of mid-2026 – possibly in June – was set.

The plans were scrambled by shopkeepers in the electronics market in Tehran. In December, they went on strike in protest at the collapse of the Iranian currency, drawing hundreds of thousands into the streets.

It was then that Trump and Netanyahu began talking about “creating conditions” for Iranians to overthrow the regime, Katz said. “We began advancing those objectives.”

For at least three decades, Netanyahu had spoiled for a fight with the theocratic regime committed to Israel’s annihilation. Successive US administrations and his own security establishment had frustrated him, deeming it too risky to take on a country with a population more than nine times larger than Israel’s. Now, with Trump back in office, Netanyahu’s dream was within reach. Styling himself as Israel’s Winston Churchill, he enlisted the world's biggest military to make it come true.

The opportunity might never have come if Hamas had not burst out of the Gaza Strip on 7 October 2023, slaughtering about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking at least 250 hostage. Two days after the attacks, Netanyahu received the mayors of communities near Gaza, but the prime minister’s sights were set in the distance. “I ask that you stand steadfast, because we are going to change the Middle East,” he told them.

From now on, Israel would strike enemy capabilities wherever they emerged. The strategy of “mowing the lawn” – curbing threats through periodic, repeated operations – had failed. “If you think about the impact that 9/11 had on the American psyche – and that ultimately led to the war on Iraq – it’s a similar trajectory here,” said a western diplomat.

Gaza was Israel’s Ground Zero. While laying waste to the coastal enclave – battering Hamas and killing more than 75,000 Palestinians – Israel moved to dismantle the rest of the “axis of resistance” that Iran had built across Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iraq.

And then, last June, Israel went for Iran. The US joined in with strikes on its nuclear facilities before Trump imposed a ceasefire. Operation Rising Lion had degraded Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities and sent its nuclear programme “down the drain”, Netanyahu said. It also convinced Israeli leaders that conflict with the Islamic Republic was manageable.

After the war, Trump was “very optimistic about the prospects of convincing Iran to get back to negotiations and agree to zero enrichment”, said Tzachi Hanegbi, who was head of Israel’s national security council at the time and accompanied Netanyahu when he visited the Trump White House in July for a third time, notching up more visits than any other foreign leader. “We were sceptical.”

As protests roiled Iran earlier this year, Trump promised: “Help is on its way.” By then, Iran’s security forces were crushing the demonstrations, but the US president had resolved to take action. American fighter jets were ready to go on 14 January, when Netanyahu called. Israel was not ready for the inevitable backlash from Iran, he said: could Trump hold off?

Over the following weeks, the US moved missile defences and warships to the region while two American property developers wrangled with Iranian negotiators over the most complex of diplomatic portfolios. In a TV appearance on Friday 27 February, Oman’s foreign minister, Badr Albusaidi, said a nuclear deal was “within reach”, but US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner had told Trump a different story.

Hours later, Israel dropped dozens of bombs on three sites, including Khamenei’s compound in Tehran. Sirens sounded across Israel. The war had begun. In a photograph released by the Israeli prime minister’s office, Netanyahu wearing a black padded jacket sat with a pen in his hand on the phone with Trump. Spread out on the desk in front of him was a map of Iran and a book: Tim Bouverie’s Allies at War, which recounts how Churchill did everything he could to bring the United States into the conflict after France fell to Nazi Germany.

How exactly Trump, who pledged to extricate the US from overseas conflicts and put “America first”, came to be mired in another Middle East war remains unclear.

“The only explanation – or the best explanation – is being persuaded by Netanyahu,” said Eran Etzion, a former deputy head of Israel’s national security council. “Whether it was the manipulation of Israeli intelligence that was presented to him in a certain way… Who knows?”

The notion that Netanyahu dragged Trump into the war “stinks of antisemitism”, said an Israeli government official. “You can’t make Trump do anything that he doesn’t want to do.” Trump himself has pushed back on the idea he was manipulated. “If anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand,” he said.

In the prime minister’s office, the mood was buoyant. “We think it’s going remarkably well,” said the Israeli government official, explicitly comparing Netanyahu to Churchill. A change of regime in Iran would be Netanyahu’s “crowning glory”, unlocking greater integration between the Gulf states and Israel, he said. Netanyahu was doing the world a favour by getting rid of the regime.

He and Trump talk nearly every day.

“Thank you God & Donald Trump!” read digital billboards around Tel Aviv sponsored by the Friends of Zion Museum, founded by the American Christian evangelist Mike Evans. Photographs of six US soldiers killed in an Iranian strike on their base in Kuwait have been added to the hundreds of images of slain Israeli soldiers and hostages heaped around a fountain in Dizengoff Square.

“I don’t give a shit if Trump and Bibi’s [Netanyahu’s nickname] incentives aren’t clean,” said a young Israeli, drinking iced coffee in the sunshine with two friends during a break from work. “Without Iran, there is no Hezbollah, no Hamas, no Houthis – amazing!”

A friend was less enthusiastic. “It feels like the eighth season of a TV show that should already have ended,” she said. “Yes, I want the Iranian people to be free. [But] I don’t trust anyone to tell the truth: it might be a rightful war, but it might not be.”

One thing they could all agree on: it would be great to visit Tehran.

Two weeks into the war, the regime shows no sign of collapsing. Khamenei has been replaced by his hardline son Mojtaba. Iran is choking the strait of Hormuz, which has led to the world facing the worst oil crisis in history, according to the International Energy Agency. Meanwhile, concerns are growing about 440kg (970lb) of enriched uranium in Iran.

Trump has veered between demanding the Islamic Republic’s unconditional surrender and proposing the Venezuela option.

It is up to the Iranian people themselves to decide who should lead the country, said the Israeli government official, though Israel has threatened to kill any candidate it does not approve of. “Anyone with Ayatollah at the start of their name is not an option,” the official said.

If Trump’s objectives – like his motives – appear vague, Netanyahu’s are clear, said Alan Eyre, a former Iran policymaker and Persian-language spokesperson at the US state department: “The Israeli goal is destruction of the Iranian state,” he wrote, dismissing Netanyahu’s calls for the Iranian people to rise up as “rhetorical obfuscation”

A week into the war, Netanyahu recalled the promise he made two days after 7 October. “We are changing the face of the Middle East,” he said. “But… first and foremost, we changed ourselves. With elections due this year, Israeli opposition leaders are all acting like wartime prime ministers, vying for the vote of an increasingly hawkish public. Polls show overwhelming support for the war with Iran among the Israeli public. A recent survey conducted by the Migdam research institute for Israel’s N12 news site found that 75% of first-time voters identify as right wing.

As the war with Iran raged, former prime minister Naftali Bennett, a leading contender to succeed Netanyahu, pointed to another emerging threat: a radical Sunni alliance between Ankara, Damascus, Doha and the remnants of Hamas. “If they try to surround us with terror, we will not sit idle,” he said.

Israel is emerging from the war with Iran as a superpower Netanyahu said in his latest speech

Etzion said: “We are becoming Sparta and this was absolutely not the intention of the Zionist movement. Of course, we always knew we have to defend ourselves. We created the IDF [Israel Defense Forces]. We’re proud of it. We serve in it. But it was always our goal to integrate in the region peacefully and to find a way to end the conflict rather than perpetuate it.”

The war on Iran has upended a delicate ceasefire in Lebanon with Hezbollah, which attacked Israel in response to the killing of Khamenei. In the occupied West Bank, Israeli settlers have killed six Palestinians since 28 February as the world looks away. The Gaza peace plan is on hold.

Etzion returned to Israel from the US last week concerned about the mood in Washington. Even before the war with Iran, the relentless carnage October in Gaza post-7 October had shifted American sentiment in favour of the Palestinians.

If the Republicans lose the midterms in November, they are likely to blame the war with Iran. And, whatever the reality, the perception is that Netanyahu dragged Trump into it.

Photograph by Jack GUEZ / AFP via Getty Images