In the virtual reality world inhabited by Defense Minister Israel Katz, mighty Israel, endlessly blowing things up in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran, has reduced its enemies to quivering, gibbering wrecks.
In three self-aggrandizing AI-boosted videos Katz has issued in the past 10 days, bombs fall relentlessly on enemy targets to a stirring soundtrack extolling his uniquely aggressive stewardship — “finally, finally, a right-wing defense minister” — as he strides manfully near IDF helicopters, tells the IDF chief of staff what to do, talks while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu listens, and appears to press a big red button. In one of the clips, issued on August 3, Iran’s leaders are reduced to pleading for divine protection from his unstoppable assault; in another, released on Monday, Mojtaba Khamenei and Hezbollah chief Naem Qassam are depicted, goggle-eyed in panic, cowering in a bunker.
The third video, which borrows the soundtrack of the first — Katz was in a hurry, anxious to assert his mighty credentials ahead of next week’s Likud primary — focuses on the West Bank. Katz declares that he has fostered a “revolution” in Judea and Samaria, and brags that 40,000 residents of West Bank refugee camps have been forcibly evacuated and that he has canceled the use of administrative detention against Jewish terror suspects. Plainly, Katz deduced that the more hawkish he looks and sounds, the more likely he is to fare well in the primary, bolstering his dream of one day succeeding Netanyahu.
The clips, especially the first two, are so ridiculously bombastic that they might be considered amusing were Israel’s genuine security reality less threatening and complex.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz released a campaign video for the Likud primaries, telling voters to pick him for spot 121 and repeating the phrase “boom boom boom” to push his hardline security image.
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The clip mixes footage of Katz with IDF officers, explosions and… pic.twitter.com/4amMZonIRU
— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) August 10, 2026
In the real world, Hamas has 20,000 armed fighters, and has been assiduously training them, while the Netanyahu government has been newly compelled by the Trump administration to stop targeting the terror group, and is currently no longer even going after October 7, 2023, participants.
Hezbollah is still killing Israeli soldiers in south Lebanon and remains capable of firing dozens of rockets a day at Israel.
מהפכת ההתיישבות שלנו ביהודה ושומרון:
✅ הקמת 104 יישובים חדשים.
✅ הכרה ב-160 חוות חקלאיות.
✅ ביטול צווי המעצר המנהליים נגד מתיישבים.
✅ עיבוי ההתיישבות בבקעת הירדן.
✅ פינוי כ-40 אלף תושבי מחנות הטרור בג’נין, טולכרם ונור א-שאמס והשארת צה”ל במחנות.
✅ פעילות התקפית שהביאה… pic.twitter.com/e8fvjXXz2n
— ישראל כ”ץ Israel Katz (@Israel_katz) August 10, 2026
And Iran, far from crying out for divine salvation, has US President Donald Trump, who is meant to be the most powerful man on the planet, abandoning his own plane via catering truck for fear of assassination and ready to sacrifice all of February 2026’s stated war goals if Tehran would only consent to let ships traverse the Strait of Hormuz — a hitherto non-sovereign waterway crucial to global energy supplies that the Islamic Republic is insisting it will henceforth control.
A giant poster displays Trump family coffins in Iran’s Palestine Square, July 17, 2026. (Crux Youtube screenshot)
In Trump’s own recent virtual take on reality, Iran’s monstrous regime had been ousted, replaced by leaders who are “not radicalized,” “very rational” and “nice.” In the inconveniently real world, Trump’s security handlers have every reason to fear plots against his life: The regime has repeatedly threatened to kill him, and put up huge posters in Tehran of him and his family in coffins to underline the point.
It also this week appointed the ex-Revolutionary Guards chief Mohsen Rezaei as head of its Supreme National Security Council; Rezaei is wanted by Argentina, with an Interpol Red Notice, as one of the architects of the 1994 AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires that destroyed the Jewish community’s multistory main offices, killing 85 people. A very rational and nice man is Rezaei, and not radicalized at all.
Mohsen Rezaei, former commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, who was named on August 9, 2026, as the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, attends a ceremony at Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s shrine in southern Tehran, on June 4, 2026. (Photo by Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto)
But back to Katz.
Far from the self-branded totah (“beast”) portrayed in his AI videos, the defense minister is a weakling; the nation watched two weeks ago as he capitulated to pressure from a panelist on the far-right Channel 14, supported by a baying studio audience, and announced, literally seconds after backing the IDF’s top West Bank officer Avi Bluth, that he would in fact be booting the general.
Belying his video fakery, Katz is also a cypher, an empty vessel carefully selected by Netanyahu — after the prime minister in November 2024 fired Yoav Gallant, a defense minister with some backbone — precisely because he would reliably do whatever he was told to do. Where Gallant issued public warnings ahead of October 7, 2023, demanded a state commission of inquiry after that unprecedented catastrophe, and sought to conscript young ultra-Orthodox males to an IDF desperate for manpower, Katz firmly backs Netanyahu’s pointless government- appointed and -mandated probe of the failures surrounding the Hamas invasion, and has dutifully voted for all legislation designed to maintain the Haredi exemption from military service, even as the IDF chief of staff has warned of the calamitous consequences.
Sometimes, his kowtowing goes too far even for Netanyahu. The prime minister was, reportedly at least, furious with Katz for seeking to fire Gen. Bluth, and the hapless defense minister was forced to backtrack, issuing a statement singing Bluth’s praises and claiming that there were no disagreements between them.
Defense Minister Israel Katz, as seen in an AI-generated video he issued on August 3, 2026. (X screenshot)
And it could be that his delusional video clips were also considered over the top by the prime minister. In any case, Katz, it turns out, will not have to endure the challenge of competing in the Likud primaries, after all. Netanyahu, presumably fearing that his unloved vassal might fare particularly badly — Katz came in a lowly 12th in the 2022 primary, and polling suggests he might have done worse this time — announced two days ago that Katz will be guaranteed a slot high up Likud’s Knesset slate, the better to continue to heed his master’s voice if Netanyahu can retain power in October’s elections.
A prime minister in denial
The root of the threat posed by Defense Minister Israel Katz, self-styled peerless vanquisher of Israel’s enemies, is not only that he believes his own AI narrative, but that the prime minister who appointed and retains him has been inhabiting a virtual reality since long before October 7, 2023, and has refused to emerge into the real world even in its aftermath.
In Netanyahu’s prewar virtual reality, Hamas was deterred, sated by the vast sums of money he had encouraged Qatar to send into Gaza. The conclusive evidence that Hamas was preparing to invade was false. The high-tech border fence was, in any case, a potent barrier to any invading forces, and one that required few actual troops to defend it — rather than a flimsy construction whose only value was in detecting an approaching threat so that troops could be braced to repel it.
In Netanyahu’s postwar virtual reality, absolute victory over Hamas, Hezbollah and all of Israel’s enemies is eternally close at hand. As recently as June, with Iran retaining its stockpile of 60%-enriched uranium, its quickest path to the bomb, and Trump endlessly self-contradictory about extracting it, the prime minister claimed that the Iranian threat has been “removed for years to come” and Israel “saved from annihilation.”
In Netanyahu’s abiding virtual reality, important new regional nations are about to normalize ties with Israel, even as reports abound that two of those nations are conspiring to lull Israel into an October 7-style false sense of security, the better to destroy it, and as Netanyahu, Katz and the IDF’s refusal to effectively tackle soaring deadly settler violence is alienating many of Israel’s few remaining international allies.
In Netanyahu’s virtual reality, Israel’s relations with its one key ally, the United States, are robust and stable, even as Trump’s vice president and potential successor JD Vance is warning us that “you can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have,” and reminding us that Trump “is the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this moment in time.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (right) travels to Rafah, on the Gaza-Egypt border, to visit IDF troops, July 18, 2024. (Avi Ohayon/GPO)
Katz’s risible AI-generated world is emblematic of Netanyahu’s refusal to face reality — a refusal to internalize that October 7 happened on his watch, to have the failures properly investigated and thus to maximize the likelihood that nothing like it can ever happen again.
In the real world, Israel’s enemies are not cowering. They are reviving. And the defense minister who won’t see that, and the prime minister who employs him and cannot allow himself to recognize his own failures, far from protecting Israel, are endangering it.
The ultimate consequent danger of Israel’s leaders preferring a virtual reality to the actual one is that we will all be left, in this utterly ruthless region, with a virtual Israel rather than an actual one. Our most important election ever is two and a half months away. Speed the day.
This Editor’s Note was sent out earlier Wednesday in ToI’s weekly update email to members of the Times of Israel Community. To receive these Editor’s Notes as they’re released, join the ToI Community here.