Exclusive: As Israel Votes, Senior Adviser to Netanyahu Makes Case ‘To Finish the Job in Iran’

Israelis voters will decide Tuesday an election that Prime Minister Netanyahu’s camp is framing around a central question — Who should bring the war with Iran to an endgame?A senior foreign policy adviser to the prime minister, and a research fellow at the International Counterterrorism Institute, Ophir Falk, emailed The New York Sun that “Netanyahu is the right man to finish the job in Iran.” Regime change has for decades been a priority for the premier, and earlier this year America joined Israel in an attack on Tehran. Recent reports suggest that the prime minister is eager to return to a kinetic stage of the conflict.Mr. Falk reckons that Mr. Netanyahu “has emerged over the past three-year war on seven fronts as Israel’s greatest wartime prime minister. He is asking people to let him finish the job against Iran.” Mr. Netanyahu’s final campaign advertisements painted the conflict between the Jewish state and the Islamic Republic in apocalyptic terms. President Trump is also reportedly considering new strikes.Mr. Netanyahu has dominated Israeli politics for decades, and his challengers, among them the former prime minister, Naftali Bennett, and former military chief Gadi Eisenkot, argue that his time is up. Mr. Eisenkot, who lost his son and two nephews in the wars set off by Hamas’s attacks on October 7, 2023, is the incumbent’s most formidable challenger. Voter turnout is surging to a level not seen since the 1970s.Mr. Falk asserts that “Israel is a vibrant democracy, and the people vote for him, time and again. Mr. Netanyahu has lost before, in 1999 and 2021, but I would never bet against him. In a democracy, it’s the voters who decide when a leader’s time is up, not his critics.”Mr. Falk declined to address Mr. Netanyahu’s electoral challengers by name. He steered instead toward Washington. He tells the Sun that the “most crucial question, by far, is who will be Israel’s prime minister during President Trump’s last two years in office? Who will best cooperate and coordinate with the president to finish the job in Iran and expand peace in the region?”The relationship Mr. Netanyahu has cultivated with Mr. Trump, Mr. Falk contends, is the campaign’s strongest card. “This has been the greatest relationship ever between an American president and an Israeli prime minister,” Mr. Falk said. “The American-Israeli alliance has never been stronger. Our armed forces have gone to war together” — in February’s “Operation Epic Fury.”Asked about the deterioration in Israel’s standing abroad under Mr. Netanyahu, a charge that critics have leveled against the prime minister, Mr. Falk asserts that “Israel’s economy is booming and we have great relations with most of South America, with India, a country of 1.4 billion people, with Japan, the moderate Gulf states, and many others.” In the days before the election, Mr. Netanyahu appeared to suggest that Israel could explore cryptocurrency as a way to bypass the global effort to sanction the country.The Bank of Israel strongly rejected that suggestion, declaring in a statement that the “right thing for Israel’s economy is preserving the economic relationships with our principal trade partners and focusing on preventing sanctions and their negative influence on the economy.” Mr. Eisenkot quipped on X that the “BibiCoin vision is a threat to national security.” Mr. Falk predicts that Israel’s isolation is fading rather than growing. He vows that “once the war ends, I expect relations to flourish with many additional countries that currently have discreet relations with us. Israel is not isolated. Far from it.”Mr. Falk defends not only Mr. Netanyahu but also his coalition, which includes the two main Haredi parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism, as well as Israel’s far-right minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir. Mr. Falk explains that “this coalition worked well together during the seven-front war and has had many achievements. It faced extraordinary security challenges and, despite internal differences, remained united.”When the Sun pressed Mr. Falk for his prediction on the outcome of the vote, he ventured only that “Israeli voters and the results of the election will determine the future coalition. That’s democracy.”

Exclusive: As Israel Votes, Senior Adviser to Netanyahu Makes Case ‘To Finish the Job in Iran’

Exclusive: As Israel Votes, Senior Adviser to Netanyahu Makes Case ‘To Finish the Job in Iran’

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