“This has been the best decade in Israel’s annals,” Israel’s interim Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasted Dec. 29 at the final weekly government meeting of the year. “We have become hugely more powerful,” added the man who until recently also served as the country’s defense minister. The indicted Netanyahu, who has turned the Prime Minister’s Office into his personal buffer zone, also informed his assembled ministers and the media that he planned to lead the State of Israel in the coming years, as well, “to new and unprecedented security achievements.”

Indeed, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are rightly considered the strongest army in the Middle East. Israel is also the only state in the region armed with a nuclear bomb (according to foreign reports). Israeli intelligence enjoys a vaunted global reputation, as do the state’s state-of-the-art arms defense industries. So when all is said and done, can the past decade, which ran concurrently with Netanyahu’s term in office, be crowned “the best decade in Israeli annals” in terms of the state’s security?

The person most qualified to answer the question is the IDF’s supreme commander, and this is what IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Aviv Kochavi said about Israel’s security situation at a Dec. 25 conference, just days before Netanyahu drew his rosy picture. “The Quds Force is operating there (in Iraq) on a daily basis … the country itself has turned into an ungoverned area. Advanced weapons are being smuggled by the Quds Force into Iraq on a monthly basis, and we can’t allow that,” Kochavi warned. He also pledged that Israel would not allow Iran to entrench itself in Iraq and along Israel’s northern border.

The Dec. 31 attack on the US Embassy in Baghdad by Iran-backed militias signals a further deterioration in the standing of Israel’s defense ally (the United States) in the Middle East in general and in Iraq in particular. In his speech several days earlier, Kochavi speculated that Israel would have “to deal” on its own with the situation in Iran and with its associates in the neighborhood. Israeli defense officials have already concluded that Netanyahu’s best friend in the White House has lost American deterrence capability vis-a-vis Iran.