After a week of speculation that Benjamin Netanyahu was pushing President Donald Trump to resume offensive operations in Iran, the prime minister has declared that he is not seeking another attack before the Israeli elections that will decide his political, and perhaps his personal, future. Whether or not the pause in the war continues, an open-access article in Middle East Policy contends that Netanyahu’s two-decade inflation of the threat from the Islamic Republic helped create the conditions for the attacks in 2025 and 2026 that have thrown into question American military effectiveness and strategic wisdom.
The new study, “Israel’s Netanyahu Trap” by Bulent Aras, anchors our special issue, October 7 Legacies: Regional War, Global Crisis. The collection features investigations of Israeli politics ahead of the late October elections, the regional and global crises triggered by the Iran War, and the Palestinian struggle for autonomy. Fifteen of the 17 articles are outside our paywall and free to read. Also available is our Fall 2026 double issue, featuring incisive analyses of regional developments, as well as our special issue commemorating a quarter century since the 9/11 attacks. If you find this article useful, please forward it to others you believe will benefit. You can register to receive our weekly updates here. And please follow us on the social media platforms X and LinkedIn.
To understand what Aras terms the Netanyahu Effect, the new Middle East Policy study compares civilian and military discourse across Israeli institutions between 1997 and 2024 and evaluates them against the security environment. Aras’s examination finds that the prime minister has trumpeted the threat from Iran as a diversionary mechanism. “The Netanyahu Effect,” he writes, “is not unusual hawkishness but the centralization and monopolization of threat construction by an executive facing acute domestic vulnerability.”
Two implications from the Netanyahu Effect demonstrate the importance of Aras’s study. The first is the mechanics of the trap. The Israeli leader ramped up his anti-Iran rhetoric during periods of personal political crisis and reduced the space for de-escalation. This alarmism created pressures that eventually influenced the Israeli security establishment. Between 2018 and 2022, Aras writes—when the prime minister
was indicted on charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust—Netanyahu appeared on Israeli television to warn of the Islamic Republic’s nuclear ambitions. “Iran lied, big time,” he told viewers. The prime minister’s use of Holocaust analogies—such as, “The days when the Jewish people remained passive in the face of genocidal enemies, those days are over”—made any diplomatic overtures tantamount to appeasement. Over time, such repeated framing hardens into a narrative baseline that constrains the leader’s own future maneuvering.
This sparked the second and perhaps most important aspect of the Netanyahu Trap: “Sustained rhetorical securitization pressures the armed forces to align with the elected government’s preferences.” Aras identifies a roughly 24-month lag between shifts in the security establishment’s rhetoric and subsequent military escalation. In the most recent period, the author writes, “the peaks of executive hostility occurred during the 2023 judicial overhaul and the post-October 7 coalition crisis of early 2024.” As his evidence reveals, there were deadly consequences: “Roughly two years later, the state was in a multifront war with Iran.”
The October 27 elections in Israel, Netanyahu’s first major contest since the 2023 Hamas massacres, will indicate whether citizens can escape the trap. But Aras underscores that his methodology could be applied to other contexts:
As populist nationalism, partisan polarization, and democratic backsliding reshape political environments globally, vulnerable leaders increasingly rely on the public construction of foreign enemies to maintain domestic cohesion. Where intense threat inflation intersects with the erosion of civil-military oversight, the risk of rhetorical entrapment grows. Diversionary spectacle, in such conditions, may not be a substitute for kinetic conflict but a precondition for it.
October 7 Legacies: Regional War, Global Crisis
A Middle East Policy Special Issue
ISRAELI POLITICS AFTER 10/7
Free to read!
Paradigm Lock-In and Strategic Surprise: Explaining Israel’s October 7 Intelligence Failure
Ruth Hanau Santini | Andrea Novellis
Open access!
Israel’s Netanyahu Trap
Bulent Aras
THE US-IRAN WAR
Open access!
The Stability-Instability Paradox and the Evolving Balance of Terror in the Middle East
Thomas Juneau
Open access!
Signals, Red Lines, and Collision: The Israel-Iran Spiral and US Intervention
Buğra Sari
Crisis in the Strait of Hormuz: What Lies Ahead?
Gawdat Bahgat
Open access!
Visions of Gulf Security in an Era of Uncertainty: Between External Alignment and Regional Autonomy
Rory Miller | Şaban Kardaş
Open access!
Trump’s Transactional Diplomacy: Breakthrough or Breakdown?
Guilain Denoeux | Robert Springborg
CAN THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC SURVIVE?
Open access!
Iran’s Revolutionary Situation and Digital Authoritarianism: 1979 vs. 2026
Mohsen Askari
Open access!
Qatar and Iran: Market Access Under Geopolitical Conflict
Ahmet Hakan Özkan
Open access!
Between Ideology and Strategy: The Iranian Revolution and the Reconfiguration of Middle Eastern Security
Alabbas F. Alsudani
REGIONAL WAR, GLOBAL DISRUPTION
Open access!
Maritime Disruption in Yemen: The Making of a Hybrid Red Sea Order
Federico Donelli
Open access!
Russia’s Strategic Paradox: Short-Term Gains, Long-Term Risks from the Iran War
Namig Abbasov | Emil S. Aslan
Free to read!
Russia and Iran: The Axis of Transactions Unraveled
Federico Manfredi Firmian
PALESTINE AND THE STRUGGLE FOR AUTONOMY
Free to read!
Beyond Symbolism: The Effects of Palestinian State Recognition
Dalal Iriqat
Free to read!
‘I Thought I Would Die’: Testimony from Palestinian Women Jailed by Israel
Oqab Jabali | Saqer Jabali
New Political Actors in Palestine: The Digital Efficacy of Gen Z
Abdalraheem S.H. Shobaki | Mahmoud S.H. Shobaki
Free to read!
The Scholar’s Dilemma: Rational Study of Irrational Wars
Annie Tracy Samuel
BOOK REVIEWS
The Wretched of the Earth: Rashid Khalidi, Omer Bartov, and the Palestinian Tragedy
Review essay by Mohammed Ayoob
Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza; El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
Reviewed by A.R. Joyce
Azizi, The Axis of Resistance
Reviewed by Mahmood Monshipouri
Lynch, America’s Middle East
Reviewed by Yasir Kuoti
Strand, Israel and the Gaza Strip since 1967
Reviewed by Abdulgani Bozkurt
Manfredi Firmian, War in Syria and the Middle East
Reviewed by Bahram P. Kalviri
Donelli, Power Competition in the Red Sea
Reviewed by Riccardo Gasco
Haberman and Swan, Regime Change
Review essay by A.R. Joyce