The decisions and political future of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the country’s longest-serving leader, are discussed in an article by the New York Times, speaking of a deeply polarized and divided country that was attacked by Iran on Sunday.

For Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s supporters, Israel’s display of defense technology against an Iranian attack that included hundreds of drones and missiles proves that Netanyahu has long been right to warn about the threat posed by Iran.

On the contrary, his critics give credit to the air force, refusing to positively charge the Israeli prime minister with the management of the crisis.

“Like everything in Israel in recent years, the story is divided into two narratives,” said Mazal Mualem, an Israeli political commentator for Al-Monitor, a Middle East news watchdog, and author of a recent biography of the Israeli leader.

“The division and polarization in Israeli society prevents people from seeing the full picture,” added Ms. Moualem.

Iran’s barrage on Sunday, launched in response to an Israeli attack on an Iranian embassy building this month in Damascus that killed several high-ranking commanders in Iran’s armed forces, came at a perilous time for Netanyahu.

Domestically, he is an unpopular leader who many hold responsible for his government’s policies, blaming him for the intelligence failure that led to the deadly attack under the leadership of Hamas in southern Israel on October 7 Mrand then to the war in Gaza. Abroad, it is at the center of international criticism over civilian casualties in Gaza.

How he ultimately emerges from this crisis with Iran may depend on what happens next, the New York Times continues in their article.

Netanyahu is now faced with two choices: Will Iran respond with a forceful counterattack and potentially embroil Israel and other countries in a wider war? Or will he absorb the attack, which seriously injured a 7-year-old girl but otherwise caused limited damage, following calls for restraint from allies who helped repel the attack in the interest of regional stability?

“The question is whether Israel is going to retaliate immediately or surprise the Iranians one way or anothersaid Ephraim Halevi, who served as director of Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, during the latter part of Mr. Netanyahu’s first term. decade of the 1990s.

No Israeli leader has warned against Iran as consistently as Netanyahu, whose threat is a solid argument for his long stay. Netanyahu, who is Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, has been in power for about 17 years in total.

From his first year in office in 1996, Netanyahu warned that a nuclear Iran would be catastrophic and that time was running out. For almost three decades since then, it has been sounding the same alarm bell.

Iran maintains a network of proxy militias throughout the region, including Gaza, which the government funds and supplies with weapons. Some of these militias in Yemen, Syria and Lebanon have fought with Israel, creating distractions for the Israeli government and military amid the war with Hamas.

But perhaps more worrying, experts say, is that Iran is closer than ever to obtaining a nuclear weapon. Netanyahu’s supporters still credit him with putting Iran’s nuclear program on the world agenda then and praise him now for investing in the powerful, multi-layered air defense system that has allowed Israel and its allies, including the United States, to deter massive wave of Iranian drones and missiles this weekend before they hit Israel.

Sometimes resorting to gimmicks to draw attention to Iran’s nuclear progress, the New York Times reports, Netanyahu has in the past made confrontation with Iran a key part of his global diplomacy. Once, in the United Nations General Assembly, held up a cartoon drawing of a bomb with red lines depicting enrichment levels. Another time, at the Munich Security Conference, he displayed debris from what he said was an Iranian drone sent from Syria that was shot down by Israel.

“Everywhere he went, he brought up the issue of Iran,” recalled Jeremy Issacharoff, Israel’s former ambassador to Germany and for years the State Department coordinator of diplomatic efforts on regional security and the Iranian threat.

At times, Netanyahu’s campaign against Iran has severely strained Israel’s relations with American presidents, although bipartisan US support for Israel has long been seen as a strategic asset.

Around 2012, Netanyahu angered Obama administration by pushing hard to set clear ‘red lines’ to Iran’s nuclear progress, which would even include a military strike by the United States. Before that, the Israeli prime minister made plans for a unilateral Israeli attack in the face of fierce opposition from Washington and public criticism from a number of former Israeli security chiefs. It was never clear whether Netanyahu was bluffing, and the prospect of an imminent strike receded.

He further challenged Obama in 2015 with an impassioned speech to a joint session of Congress, denouncing what he called a “bad deal” negotiated by the United States and other world powers with Iran to curb its nuclear program.

When President Donald Trump came to powerNetanyahu encouraged him to withdraw from the deal — a move that many Israeli experts called a terrible mistake and failure of Netanyahu’s Iran policy.

“Since then, there have been no restrictions on the program,” Isakharov said, adding that Iran “has never been more advanced.”

At the same time, under Netanyahu, Israel forged diplomatic relations with more Arab states that are considered part of the moderateanti-Iranian axis, including the United Arab Emirates.

Regardless of what comes next, Netanyahu’s biographer said, “Bibi is still in the game,” referring to him by his nickname. “He is a central player and he is not finished, diplomatically or politically. And he plays a big game.”