March 2019 will mark a decade since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s return to power, and a decade of him pushing his agenda of placing the Iranian nuclear program at the top of security threats to the State of Israel. Even if Netanyahu is not prime minister in March 2019, it’s already clear that he has succeeded in determining the Iranian nuclear program as the critical item in Israel’s diplomatic-security policy. This was a long process that saw peaks and valleys. It started with preparations for an Israeli strike on Iran in 2009-2012, which later expired with the signing of the 2015 nuclear deal under the Obama administration. In many respects, the nuclear deal was considered a failure for Netanyahu, as his political rivals contended that the terrible deal (from Netanyahu’s point of view) was the result of his shaky relationship with then US President Barack Obama.

On May 8, US President Donald Trump delivered an incredible turnaround to the Iran-Netanyahu saga, with his dramatic withdrawal from the deal and the renewal of the sanctions regime. Netanyahu could not have hoped for a better scenario. He marked himself as the victor, only a week after his political rivals, led by Yesh Atid Chairman Yair Lapid, accused him of gravely damaging the work of the Mossad by presenting on April 30 the Iranian documents Mossad captured from Iran.

It would not be an overstatement to define the last decade of Israel’s foreign and security policy as the Iranian decade and to say that Netanyahu’s Iran doctrine now rules the day. What’s fascinating in this process is not only Netanyahu’s achievement in swaying Trump to fully adopt his Iran doctrine, but also how the entire Israeli political establishment, including Netanyahu’s rivals, was drawn in to an agenda that sees Iran as the supreme threat.

Without discounting the achievement of the United States pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal, the State of Israel in its 70th year is a military power that can withstand even an Iranian nuclear threat. At the same time, it’s also a nation that disturbingly represses any deliberation on the conflict with the Palestinians; the Gaza Strip, for instance, is a barrel of gunpowder that could blow up at any moment. Even more disturbing is that the leaders of the center left allow Netanyahu, for their own electoral reasons, to singlehandedly set the tone of internal discourse in Israel. True, it’s hard to steal the limelight from a prime minister who holds in his hands all the means to set policy, certainly when it comes to a personality like Netanyahu. Despite that, it could be expected that those who see themselves as successors to Netanyahu and declare that they intend to set a different policy, act differently. But in most cases, they actually fall in line with him.