In the days after the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, evaded any public admission of responsibility for the colossal security failure. He mostly avoided attending memorial services for the dead. He rarely met with the families of Israeli hostages languishing in the tunnels of Gaza.

Under previous Israeli Prime Ministers, flagrant lapses of intelligence and military strategy were followed fairly quickly by hearings and dramatic results. In October, 1973, Egyptian and Syrian forces took Israel by surprise in the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights, and, for a few days, put the state in profound peril. Within weeks of the conclusion of the assault, which became known as the Yom Kippur War, a state commission of inquiry, led by the then chief justice of Israel’s Supreme Court, Shimon Agranat, questioned witnesses about the miscalculations and oversights that led to the crisis. Its findings helped lead to the eventual resignations of Prime Minister Golda Meir and Defense Minister Moshe Dayan.

In contrast, even though leading members of Netanyahu’s military and defense establishment have resigned or apologized for their roles in the tragedy of October 7th, he has so far dodged any real accounting, rebuffed any inquiry. As a result, for the first year after the attacks, his poll numbers were dreadful. Political observers in Israel across the ideological spectrum talked about when, not if, Netanyahu would finally fall from power and be replaced by, among others, General Benny Gantz, the former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, or the ex-finance minister Avigdor Lieberman. And yet, as Nahum Barnea, a veteran political columnist, told me in Israel at the time, “I go to funerals of politicians to make sure they are buried. But comebacks are possible.”

And now, on the day after Donald Trump joined Israel in bombing the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear installations, Netanyahu and his circle are counting on his political resurrection. Never mind the catastrophe of Gaza, with tens of thousands dead and worldwide condemnation. Never mind Netanyahu’s political assaults on democratic norms and institutions. Never mind his legal travails.

Amit Segal, a journalist for Channel 12, is deeply sourced in the Prime Minister’s office and considered by some a kind of messenger for his thinking. I called Segal on Sunday, less than a day after American B-2 bombers dropped their payloads on nuclear sites at Fordow, Isfahan, and Natanz in what has been dubbed Operation Midnight Hammer.

“In the first twelve months after October 7th, it looked like this was Netanyahu’s Gallipoli, a catastrophe which almost destroyed Churchill’s career,” Segal said. In 1916, as First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, led the Entente powers of the First World War in a crushing defeat on Turkey’s Gallipoli Peninsula at the hands of the Ottoman Empire.

“This was the single most horrific moment in the history of Israel, and it was under the administration of ‘Mr. Security,’ ” Segal went on. “It wasn’t just another scandal. It was his raison d’être. Today, following the fall of Hezbollah, in Lebanon, and the fall of Assad in Syria, and the fate of Hamas, and now the attack on the nuclear program in Iran, October 7th looks more like Pearl Harbor—a devastating failure that ends some time later with total victory. History, in fifty years, I believe, will see October 7th in the context of the Israel-Iran war. But the question is, more immediately, will the Israeli public see it that way? I am not sure. But it is significant. It has re-created him as Mr. Security. But it is not over. Nonetheless, people here see the Israeli attack and getting the green light from the U.S. and Trump as the most dramatic diplomatic achievement for Israel since the United Nations voted on its existence in 1947.”

Segal’s spin has the ring of authenticity only insofar as it seems to accurately echo the obsessions, the vanities, the thinking, and even the inner life of Netanyahu. In his memoir, Netanyahu makes constant references to Churchill. When I interviewed him during his first term, Netanyahu smoked enormous cigars and kept a portrait of Churchill in his office. When it comes to Tehran, Netanyahu has been talking about gathering storms for many years. In 2006, he said, “It is 1938 and Iran is Germany.” In 2011, he told the British interviewer Piers Morgan, “I admire Winston Churchill because I think he saw the danger to western civilization and acted in time to staunch the hemorrhage.”

Segal told me that, in planning the military assault on Iran, the security establishment estimated that retaliatory strikes would cause somewhere between eight hundred and four thousand deaths in Israel. So far, the reality has been much lower than those expectations. Some of Iran’s ballistic missiles have slipped through Israel’s air defenses and, according to the Times, at least twenty-nine people have been killed and nine hundred injured. Segal also allowed that, when Netanyahu justified the strikes to the public by talking about the imminence of Iran’s nuclear-weapons program, it was, “to be honest, more of a literary description than a mathematical one”—meaning that, though Israeli intelligence, according to Segal, had evidence that Iran had enriched uranium to percentages only appropriate for a weapon, the actual weaponization process was hidden from view. The conclusion, Segal said, wasn’t that “they could do it tomorrow.” The crucial factor was that Iran was in a weakened state, with much of its air defenses eliminated. As a result, Segal said, “They took what they knew and portrayed it as more dramatic than it was. But Netanyahu was right on intentions.”

When I relayed Segal’s remarks about Churchill to Amos Harel, a defense analyst for Haaretz, Harel chuckled. “Well, this is the Bibi narrative. As the son of a historian”—the father, Benzion Netanyahu, was a right-wing historian of the Spanish Inquisition—“he thinks this way. What he is trying to do right now, without admitting the blame for October 7th and having gotten rid of everyone else who was involved, he is retelling the story as if it was all planned. He is now saying that, on October 9th, he already knew it would be a turning point in the history of the Middle East.”

Israel analysts told me it is not yet clear how or when Netanyahu might try to capitalize on the Iran issue for political gain. Some say he will eventually call for new elections and might even find a way to jettison the most reactionary members of his current coalition, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. Netanyahu could reach out to his critics for the sake of national unity, or he might use his seeming success against Iran to fuel his way on the road to greater autocracy. Others even speculate that, having attacked Iran and cajoled the United States to join the war, he will, after being the longest-serving Prime Minister in Israeli history, call it quits. One of his biographers and a writer for The Economist, Anshel Pfeffer, however, doubts that scenario, saying, “Netanyahu has no life at all without that office.”