Israel’s Last Lion

Three weeks into the war with Iran, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held his first English-language press conference. It was worth waiting for.

While the Trump administration has cycled through contradictory statements (the war is “very complete,” “just beginning,” won, won but not enough, postponed), Netanyahu spoke with rare clarity that is almost shocking.

Three goals, stated plainly: eliminate the nuclear threat, eliminate the ballistic missile threat, and create the conditions for the Iranian people to reclaim their freedom. No ambiguity. No spin. Not 100 posts from the same government offering competing assessments within the same afternoon.

“The function of leaders,” Netanyahu said, “is to stand and tell people the truth. Even when things are uncomfortable.”

When was the last time you heard a Western leader say that, and mean it, and live it?

And we’re hearing it from the man the world loves to hate.

The podcasters blame him. The protesters in London chant against him. Graphic artists disfigure and literally demonize him. European diplomats in their subtle rhetoric create the same portrayal. Even voices within the Make America Great Again movement, are matching the narrative that Netanyahu is the problem, that the Jewish nation dragged America into this conflict, that “the Jews” are pulling the strings on the most powerful nation on Earth.

Netanyahu addressed that charge head-on, challenging anyone who thinks that he, or anyone, can tell President Donald Trump what to do and not to do. As he pointed out, Donald Trump was warning that Iran was a serious danger 47 years ago, as many were hailing the Islamic Revolution—then the Islamists took more than 60 Americans hostage at the United States Embassy.

Trump campaigned against Barack Hussein Obama’s Iran nuclear deal in 2016 and withdrew the U.S. from the deal during his first term. In the 2024 campaign, when Netanyahu visited Mar-a-Lago, the first thing President Trump told him, unprompted, was, “Bibi, we’ve got to make sure Iran doesn’t have nuclear weapons.”

The narrative that Israel dragged America into war against a nation that’s been chanting and causing “death to America” for almost five decades is not only inaccurate and deceitful, it is also serving a very old spirit.

Herbert W. Armstrong warned about it decades ago on his radio program, The World Tomorrow. “If you do not have love in your heart for the Jewish people,” he said, “if you have hatred in your heart for the Jewish people today, you’re not a Christian.” He called conspiracies about Jewish power “poppycock.” In his autobiography, he warned about people who are hooked on what he called “the insidious, poisonous drug of anti-Semitism.”

A lot of people are hooked on it today—a lot of people, on the left and on the right, with huge audiences. Regardless of what Netanyahu and the Israel Defense Forces say or do, the anti-Semites claim that the problem is the Jews.

This is the environment in which Netanyahu operates. And still he stands.

The Philadelphia Trumpet focused on Netanyahu in the August 2025 issue in “Netanyahu: Israel’s Rising Lion.” It drew a comparison that at first might seem extravagant, but it holds up under scrutiny. My father, Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry, wrote that God used the courage of Winston Churchill to save Western civilization from Nazi tyranny, and that He is now using the fighting spirit of Netanyahu to hold off the atomic forces of evil. “Netanyahu embodies this fighting spirit,” he wrote. “He has warned for decades that Iran is close to having a bomb.”

Churchill did more than warn about Nazi Germany. He stirred up the fighting spirit the men of Britain desperately lacked to confront it.

He stood before Parliament in May 1940—when Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Norway, the Netherlands, Poland and France were falling or had fallen; when public opinion was weak, when appeasers dominated the government; when the easy path was to negotiate—and said:

You ask, What is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war—by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us.

Clarity. Leadership. Manhood. Strength. Churchill gave British men something to rally around. He all but grabbed them by the arm and made them rally around it!

Even his enemies knew exactly where he stood.

Netanyahu has been doing the same thing for 30 years—and he is paying a steep price for it.

He has faced criminal indictments, coalition collapses, street protests demanding his resignation, and withering attacks from within Israel and abroad. He has been called a provocateur, a liability, a warmonger, a terrorist, a Nazi. Even his own allies in the Trump administration have often distanced themselves from him. And yet the warnings he has been sounding since the 1990s about Iran and its nuclear ambitions have proved correct.

Some say that taking action against Iran is dangerous, that it inflames the region, that it alienates allies, that it drives up oil prices, which causes destructive economic shock waves around the world.

“There’s always a danger in acting,” Netanyahu said in response to such points during a recent press conference, “but in conditions of existential threats, there’s a much greater danger in not acting. And if you think that the oil markets are in trouble today, think of Iran with nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them. Then think of the blackmail that you would endure.”

That is like hearing Churchill warn about Adolf Hitler—to people who still don’t see it coming.

Yet as with Churchill, this is not a new argument. Netanyahu has been making it for decades. And for decades, American presidents, with one partial exception, kicked the can down the road.

Obama did worse than that. Sanctions were squeezing the Iranian regime, which was weaker than it is now, and he intervened to save the regime. He negotiated a deal no one in America was asking for that kept Iran’s regime in power, eased sanctions, and gave it a pathway to a nuclear weapons program. It was implemented on Jan. 16, 2016, and the next day he sent pallets of cash to Iran—literally. He flew $400 million in foreign currency on an Iran Air Boeing 737 to the mullahs, then sent another $1.3 billion in the weeks thereafter. Under Obama, it was U.S. policy to weaken Israel, change the balance of power in the Middle East, and intentionally strengthen Iran.

Netanyahu was there. He stood against it. He went to Congress to argue against the deal. He was pilloried for it, and the deal went through anyway.

President Trump’s first and second terms have revived the U.S.-Israel alliance, but only partially. Yet Netanyahu has navigated this high-stakes relationship carefully and honestly—and humbly. He told reporters something that was remarkable and reveals a quality so rare in a politician.

“He’s the leader,” he said. “I’m his ally.” He described Israel as the “model ally,” noted that President Trump makes his own decisions, and said plainly: “Do I respect them? Yes, I do.” When asked about an Israeli strike on an Iranian gas compound that Trump sharply criticized, Netanyahu was direct. Israel acted alone, he said, and now, at Trump’s request, it would hold off from further similar strikes.

He publicly said that he and Israel were playing second fiddle, voluntarily, without complaint.

You don’t often see that. Especially not from a man who has every reason to believe his strategic instincts are correct. He wanted to finish the job last summer, but Trump called it off. Now the U.S. and Israel are back, three weeks into a new and much more extensive campaign, yet with many of the same objectives unresolved. Netanyahu has shown no resentment, no public score-settling, no leaked complaints. He takes the long view. He keeps his eye on what matters. And he knows that the stakes could not be higher for the Jewish nation.

“It’s not enough to be moral,” he said, with characteristic forthrightness. “It’s not enough to be just. It’s not enough to be right. We have to be strong. We have to be armed. We have to be more powerful than the barbarians, or they will not merely be at the gate: They’ll crash our gates and destroy our societies.”

That is a statement of reality. It is the kind of thing Churchill said. It is the kind of thing that, in our current climate, gets you labeled a fascist and a warmonger and removed from power.

But it is true.

One reason Netanyahu resembles Churchill is because he thinks about Churchill. He has a portrait and a sculpture of the greatest Briton in his office. He knows he is playing a similar role today to Churchill in the 1930s. He has cited him repeatedly. He recently told reporters:

Churchill said that democracies suffer from the slumber of democracy. Disease, as he called it. And they only wake up, he said, they may wake up only when they hear the gong; the ‘jarring gong of danger’ is the way he put it. Well, you’re hearing the jarring gong of danger.

More than anyone else, Netanyahu has been sounding the alarm on Iran’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, which would bring not just a danger but an apocalypse.

Some would rather sleep through the alarm. Some want to politically kill the person ringing it.

There are very few leaders left who see what is actually happening, call it what it is, and refuse to back down under pressure. Benjamin Netanyahu is one of them. He may be the last one standing with that quality in Israel. He is swimming against a tide of global appeasement, anti-Semitic conspiracy, revisionist history and political cowardice—and he has been doing it, largely alone, for his entire career.

The Bible speaks of the tribe of Judah as having a lionlike quality (Genesis 49:9). That spirit is real, and it is rare. And in the life of Benjamin Netanyahu, you can see what it costs a man to live by it.

In “Netanyahu: Israel’s Rising Lion,” my father wrote that Ezekiel 33:1-6 is a prophecy about both Winston Churchill and Benjamin Netanyahu, courageous watchmen who give lionlike roars to rouse their people to fight against evil. Yet a significant change takes place in verse 7. As the threats facing our world escalate to the point where no political leader can solve them, God chooses a new watchman to warn the people (someone who was not elected like Churchill and Netanyahu). “The success that Israel has had with Operation Rising Lion is going to give way to the end of the watchman work of a man chosen by the people,” my father wrote. “Then there will be only one watchman message left—that of God’s watchman, before the worst suffering ever on Earth!”

Winston Churchill was Britain’s last lion. Benjamin Netanyahu is the last lion in any nation of Israel. (Like Israel, the United States, Britain and related nations also descended from the ancient Israelites.) Netanyahu is holding off the atomic forces of evil, but the clock is ticking. This is why you need to heed the warning message coming from God’s watchman, a man who will warn you—literally like the prophets of the Bible—not only of national security catastrophes but of the sins that cause it.

Request your free copy of Winston S. Churchill: The Watchman.