Among the many moments described in the Washington Post’s recent article on the Biden administration’s failed efforts to secure a ceasefire in Gaza, one stands out. According to the article, after President Joe Biden warned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu against a major land incursion into Gaza, Netanyahu replied that there was no other choice but to go in because “the people want revenge.” Whatever one thinks of his record of running circles around Biden, Netanyahu’s response provided a candid summary of the worldview that has driven Israel’s use of military force since Hamas crossed the border on October 7, 2023, and murdered more than a thousand Israelis. It would be generous to say that this worldview represents a coherent military strategy. The term “strategy” would imply that Netanyahu’s government has a clear vision of how it will use massive military force to achieve a desired political, diplomatic, and yes, strategic goal. But there is no evidence of such a strategy. If there is a goal, it is to show that Israel has the technological means to impose an extremely high military and human cost on its foes. This is a shock and awe approach in which military force is both a means and an end.
This triumph of tactics over strategy is a disaster for both Israel and its far less powerful rivals. It will not produce the “total victory” in Gaza that Netanyahu has promised, nor secure the return of the 60,000 Israelis who evacuated their homes near the Lebanon border following the launching of Hezbollah rockets on October 8, 2023. Nor will Israel’s July 31 assassination in Tehran of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh compel Iran to pull back from a wider confrontation with Israel. Today, as Netanyahu has himself noted, Israel is fighting a seven-front war. What he did not dare admit is that his government has no obvious vision of how to translate a still elusive victory into tangible diplomatic ends. He may feel that his best option is to avoid articulating such a vision until after the US elections. But no matter who becomes president, the damage to Israel’s long-term security, political, and economic interests will be incalculable and perhaps permanent. Compounded by the mistakes and misjudgments of its enemies, the sad part of this tale is that Israel’s self-defeating war of rage was neither necessary nor inevitable.
Sinwar Misreads Israel and the Axis of Resistance
While we are no closer to an authoritative analysis of what Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar wanted to achieve by orchestrating the October 7 attack, he may have envisioned two closely linked scenarios. The first was that the attack would trigger a massive uprising in Israel and the West Bank that would be accompanied by military assaults on Israel from Hezbollah, Iran, and other regional allies of Tehran. The second was that these assaults would not only drain Israel’s military resources, but more important, would impose human, economic, and psychological costs whose accumulating effects would compel more and more Israelis to leave not merely their homes but their country.
Sinwar’s reported rejection of a Gaza ceasefire deal based on the current terms on offer may represent his version of the triumph of tactics over strategy. Or it may represent a triumph of rage and desperation over the pragmatic logic of a diplomatic compromise (a logic that Netanyahu and his hard-right allies also reject). But even on a tactical level, Sinwar miscalculated in four fundamental ways. First, he failed to grasp that the October 7 attack would magnify the deeply felt perception in Israel that the country was facing an existential threat that merited a ferocious military campaign. Second, he misjudged the capacity of Israel’s leaders to sustain the onslaught even as they skirted defining the political goal of Israel’s war on Gaza. Third, Sinwar misunderstood his enemy. Despite (or because of) his 22 years in Israeli prison, he apparently did not grasp that while an array of centripetal social, religious, and political forces have split its society, the state and country Israel is not going to disappear, melt away, or implode.
Finally, Sinwar did not appreciate how an attack that Israel saw as an existential peril would enhance the clout of Israel’s hard-right leaders Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. Israel is now partially governed by religious extremists who are as determined to crush their enemies in Gaza, Lebanon, and the West Bank as the extremists who control Hamas are determined to fight Israel. But in contrast to Hamas, Israel’s true believers have a powerful military, one that has leveled much of Gaza and killed thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians. While Sinwar might believe that Hamas will win by simply surviving this onslaught, that calculation likely was at least partly premised on his hope that Hezbollah, West Bank Palestinians, the Houthis, and Iran would come to Gaza’s rescue.
For most of the past year, Hezbollah and Iran telegraphed that they did not want to risk a full-scale war with Israel (and the United States) to back Hamas.
Indeed, as strange as it sounds, Sinwar may have shared the view of Israeli leaders that under Iran’s guidance, the Axis of Resistance had honed its conventional and unconventional weapons in ways that pose a dire threat to Israel’s very survival. Yet for most of the past year, Hezbollah and Iran telegraphed that they did not want to risk a full-scale war with Israel (and the United States) to back Hamas. Iran had also signaled that it wanted to contain escalation. Iranian leaders even reiterated this message after launching their unprecedented April 13-14 drone and missile attack on Israel. Their insistence that the assault was meant to conclude that round of conflict must have disappointed Sinwar. What he may not have realized was that Iran’s “no peace, no war” formula was a recipe for Iranian caution rather than unrestrained adventurism.
Israel Misreads the Axis of Resistance
Iran’s “no peace, no war” strategy does not mean that it accepts a regional equation that includes Israel. Iranian leaders believe that amplified by regional economic, demographic, and military pressures, Israel’s internal divisions will eventually dissolve a state that is a foreign-imposed ideological construct. But because this hoped-for withering of the Israeli state may take years—and because any attempt to accelerate this dynamic would drag Iran into a wider war that could threaten the regime—in the wake of the October 7 attack Iran continued to prioritize strengthening the Axis of Resistance over direct confrontation with Israel and the United States.
But rather than recognize the many tensions that have coursed through the spine of the Axis of Resistance, Israel’s leaders seem to have held tight to two assumptions. First, that Iran was behind the October 7 attack, and second, that this attack, as former minister of defense Benny Gantz put in a recent New York Times op-ed, was part of an Iranian strategy not merely to “annihilate Israel,” but also to secure “hegemony” in ways that would endanger the “region’s future.” The evidence for Gantz’s assertions is weak, however. Iran and Hezbollah were not only caught off guard by the October 7 attack, Tehran’s subsequent actions underscored its desire to limit its support for Hezbollah to attacks that would not signal anything close to an annihilationist strategy. Indeed, Tehran—along with many countries including the United States—supported a Gaza ceasefire in the hope that it would bring a permanent end to Israel’s assault on the enclave.
That such an outcome would have represented a win for Hamas is certainly true. But this is very different than implying, as some Israeli leaders have, that Iran’s foreign policy is fueled by a kind of messianic madness. Indeed, Gantz’s assertion that Tehran is driven by a “fundamentalist ideology” that is not “rational” is both unconvincing and dangerous. It is unconvincing because Iran’s policies are the product of a complex juggling act of competing goals. It is dangerous because it belies the very rational calculations that have guided Iran’s actions most of the past year—calculations that Israel itself clearly considered in its efforts to weaken Iran and Hezbollah without getting drawn into the black hole of a full-scale war.
From Contained Escalation to What?
As became evident over the last eight weeks, the fragile logic of contained escalation has given way to the dangers of total military conflict. The driving force behind this change is Israel’s government and in particular Prime Minister Netanyahu. Throughout most of the past year, he focused Israel’s military might on Gaza. But this policy has not only failed to deliver the victory he sought, but it has also left the remaining Israeli hostages abandoned. The death of six hostages in late August infuriated Israelis, galvanizing mass protests in September that underscored the bitter divide between the supporters and opponents of Netanyahu. It is hardly a coincidence that in the wake of these protests—and the tensions they spawned within his government—Netanyahu shifted his focus to Hezbollah and Iran. Some Israeli experts believe that both actors, and especially Iran, pose a clear danger far greater than any peril posed by Hamas.
This sentiment was manifested in widespread anger over the forced evacuation of more than 60,000 Israelis from their homes after October 7. Their plight underscored the frustrating reality that while Hezbollah—with Iran’s prodding—had avoided attacking major population and infrastructure targets, Tehran and its Lebanese ally had used the cover of contained escalation to pose daily threats to the security of the entire north of Israel. At some point, Netanyahu, who at the outset of the Gaza war had rejected calls within his government to launch a major campaign against Hezbollah, apparently decided to push the reset button.
When Israel’s military campaign on Gaza failed to deliver the victory the prime minister sought, Netanyahu shifted his focus to Hezbollah and Iran.
The first signal of a coming change in Israel’s strategy came on July 31 when Israel assassinated Haniyeh in Tehran. Haniyeh’s killing the day after the new Iranian president’s inauguration was surely meant to humiliate Iran’s leaders and even more, to highlight Israel’s deep penetration of the Islamic Republic’s security establishment. In retrospect, it appears that this extraordinary attack unfolded in tandem with Israel’s emerging plans to move against Hezbollah, and by implication, against Iran. Israel’s September 17 and 18 triggering in Lebanon of devices hidden in more than 1,000 pagers and walkie-talkies—most of which exploded in the hands of Hezbollah members but also killed Lebanese civilians including two children and wounded many others—portended as much. But the full scope of Israel’s shift to the Hezbollah/Iran theater became clear with Israel’s September 27 assassination in Beirut of Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah, who died along with Al Quds Force Brigadier General Abbas Nilforoushan, the senior Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps commander for Lebanon and Syrian operations. No strike had ever exacted such a high symbolic political and security cost for Israel’s enemies. In one fell swoop the attack, which also struck three residential apartment buildings, telegraphed the wider aerial and land campaign that Israel would launch in the ensuing two weeks.
While this campaign has destroyed the rules of contained escalation, it is far from clear that Israel’s leaders expected Nasrallah’s killing to provoke a massive Iranian counterattack. In fact, it seems that many security experts thought otherwise. Summarizing their thinking, columnist Marc Schulman wrote on October 5 that he—along with other far more informed experts—had been mistaken in assuming that “attacking Israel in retaliation for the killing of Nasrallah is clearly not in Iran’s best interest,” and that attacking Israel “when Hezbollah (its main deterrent against Israel) has been largely defanged, seems an illogical act.”
Schulman’s wording is telling, as it displays the failure of Israeli leaders to grasp the multiple symbolic, domestic, and strategic calculations that impelled Iran’s leaders to conclude that Israel’s actions posed an existential threat that merited massive retaliation. A step that was reportedly vigorously debated in the ruling establishment, as Iran leaders–including its president—described Iran’s October 1 launching of 180 ballistic missiles at Israel as fully “legal, rational, and legitimate.” This language might suggest that Tehran hopes that its October 1 missile attack will have the same result as Iran’s April 14 missile assault, which was widely seen as giving both Israel and Iran reason to stand back from the abyss. But Iranian leaders may very soon find out that they, like their Israeli counterparts, have misjudged their enemies. If, as Netanyahu has warned, Israel retaliates with a major strike on Iranian oil facilities or major security and missile bases, the two countries may get sucked into a ballistic missile shooting match with incalculable consequences.
Such a war could unfold against the backdrop of an escalating war in Lebanon that despite the growing ferocity of Israel’s military campaign against Hezbollah leaders and military facilities, is as unlikely to secure the victory that Netanyahu has promised with the same assurance that he pledged victory in Gaza. The very idea that Hezbollah has been “defanged” (as Schulman puts it), underscores the risk of taking on a charismatic and still heavily armed movement that despite—or because of—the loss of many of its leaders, retains the means and will to draw Israel into an endless war of attrition. Against the backdrop of the deaths of eight Israeli soldiers in the first days of the ground invasion, some American and Israeli experts are now warning of repeating the mistakes that led Israel into an 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon that ended with Israel’s humiliating withdrawal. Yet prompted by Israeli leaders from the government and the opposition, Israel is now escalating its attacks in both Lebanon and Gaza without any obvious plan to translate its military gains into lasting strategic benefits.
Israel’s Messianic Leaders Want God and Land, Not International Legitimacy
An Israeli plan for lasting strategic benefits would require grappling with the one issue that Netanyahu and his government refuse to engage: the need for a negotiated solution that allows Palestinians and Israelis to move toward mutual recognition and national independence. It is true that over the last decade many obstacles have created huge risks for any Israeli or Palestinian leader who might dare advocate such a vision. But Hamas’s October 7 attack unfolded in part because Israel’s leaders systematically chose to live with the status-quo in Gaza and prioritize annexing the occupied West Bank into Israel. The 16-year long Israeli siege and wars on Gaza before October 7 and decades of occupation and increasing aggression against Palestinians in the West Bank with full impunity for Israel have also contributed to the ensuing developments. Pushed by hard-right nationalists and by Netanyahu, these Israeli policies have set the stage for multiple implosions and explosions that have rocked the region. As much of Gaza has been leveled, they have also instilled among Arabs, especially young people, a shared sense that their existence as human beings counts for little to nothing in the regional and global arenas.
This bitter feeling fuels support for Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran. But it may eventually consume the scaffolding that constitutes the Abraham Accords between Israel and Bahrain, Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates. Indeed, the spreading fires of despair are one reason why Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has reiterated that the kingdom will not normalize relations with Israel absent its commitment to taking steps toward a two-state solution.
Israel’s messianic leaders do not attribute any importance to securing a diplomatic framework that would give Israel the international legitimacy that was once its goal.
Israel’s messianic, hard-right Jewish leaders do not attribute any importance to securing a diplomatic framework that would give Israel the international legitimacy that was once the preeminent goal of successive Israeli governments. Ministers Ben Gvir and Smotrich believe that the only way for Israel to secure redemption is to impose control over what they call “Greater Israel.” While more than half of Jewish Israelis do not back this agenda, one year after the October 7, Israelis are still reliving the massacre through their encounters with family and friends who survived that day, and through a barrage of online videos and television news coverage. Not surprisingly, most Israeli coverage ignores much of the carnage in Gaza and the decades of occupation and violence against Palestinians that preceded it. There are, of course, no safety rooms or shelters for Lebanese or for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, or even for many Palestinians in Israel.
The limited vision in Israeli policies has been enabled by the sophistication of the country’s military. There is an almost inverse relationship between the level of technical and military wizardry that Israel commands and the lack of strategic and diplomatic acumen of its leaders. That this paradox has depended on unconditional US military support is a reminder of the Biden administration’s failure to push Israel’s leaders to stop taking actions that ultimately will undermine Israel’s security and international legitimacy.
Featured image credit: Shutterstock/Rafael Ben-Ari
