As Israel’s brutal war on Gaza continues unabated, its former spy chief Yossi Cohen pointed to a telling indicator of how it could win its never-ending wars with its neighbours.
In his memoir The Sword of Freedom published last month, Cohen, a former Mossad chief, writes that “modern wars no longer end in absolute victory or abject surrender, yet the state of Israel must win any conflict it enters.”
Cohen, who during his tenure at Mossad worked closely with the Israeli army in operations in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and as far away as Iran, is pulling back the curtain on Israel’s old deterrence doctrine and its new approach of leveraging its foes through “offensive defence.”
This is precisely the route that Israel has remained determined to take since it started its genocidal onslaught on Gaza in October 2023 in response to a daring incursion by Hamas into its territory.
Soon Israel had expanded its offensive across Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen and had waged a 12-day wave of airstrikes on Iran targeting its nuclear and military facilities. It even bombed Qatar, a strategic US ally and key mediator with Hamas.
As Israel proceeded with its conquests, it became clear that the war was not in retaliation for the Hamas operation but rather was part of a quest to impose its dominance on the entire Middle East.
Its aggressive and proactive offensive strategy means that Israel can no longer claim it is acting as a result of a siege mentality, and its army can no longer be called the “Israeli Defence Forces” (IDF).
Israel is now a nation on a rampage and one seething with monstrous rage and the desire for vengeance. It is fighting for expansion and dominance and carrying out an agenda of forced displacement and destruction in Palestine and “Eretz Yisrael HaShlema,” or “Greater Israel,” abroad.
To ensure its strategic superiority over its less technologically advanced neighbours, Israel has upgraded its powerful war machinery with robotics, artificial intelligence, and missiles able to intercept in space.
Some of these innovations by Israel’s Aerospace Industries (IAI) were on display at a UVID technology conference in Tel Aviv last month. They are believed to have been used in the 12-day war between Iran and Israel in June, known in Israel as “Operation Rising Lion.”
“This was a digital war, and the combination of UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] with satellites and mission aircraft, alongside the ability to receive coordinates, proved that the war of the future is already here,” boasted Boaz Levy, president of IAI, on the sidelines of the conference.
Israel’s accelerating military buildup and strategic technological advancements would not have been possible without Western support, whether in Gaza, the West Bank, or against Iran.
The weapons in Israel’s existing inventory, including crucial advanced laser-targeting systems which experts say will change the rules of the battlefield, come mainly from the United States.
As a result, Israeli leaders including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu no longer speak of peace and instead repeatedly proclaim an Israeli-dominated Middle East built through a multi-front military strategy.
Yet, that strategy of regional supremacy through a mix of aggressive warfare exploiting the perceived weakness of its neighbours and political and diplomatic manipulation cannot be sustainable, and neither are its goals achievable.
Israel may be militarily superior on a tactical level, but it is strategically vulnerable. This vulnerability does not lie in a traditional balance-of-power perspective but rather from the deep-rooted perception by the Arabs that it is alien to the region.
Backed by the United States and other Western nations, Israeli governments have successfully blackmailed Arab leaders by exploiting their seeming readiness to pursue peace, which for them was a break from winning an unwinnable war.
The war in Gaza, which has ended hopes for a two-state solution with the Palestinians, and Israel’s growing assertiveness to impose its hegemony have fully exposed the phantasy of peace in the region and underlined the impossibility of coexistence with the Jewish state.
A recent survey of Palestinian public opinion conducted by the prestigious Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research showed that some 41 per cent of the Palestinians still consider Hamas most deserving of their leadership.
By bragging about his spying talents and showing the weakness and blindness of the Arab and Iranian leaderships, Cohen, whose memoirs appeared in Hebrew under the sensational title of By Stratagems Shall You Wage Your War, is ignoring basic tenets of strategic thinking, particularly the classic advice by the Chinese strategist Sun Tzo that “the highest form of victory is achieving success without fighting.”
Israel’s worst enemies are not the Arabs, but itself.
Suppose that Israel is the only power to dominate the Middle East. Will the Arabs accept Israel’s leadership, or will they resist like any other people concerned for their dignity and honour who will fight resolutely in defence of their existence when peaceful resolutions fail?
The Israelis would do better to listen to the academic Avi Shlaim, one of their most seasoned historians, who has repeatedly argued that Zionism, Israel’s official ideology, is in the process of destroying itself.
In a recent interview, Shlaim said that “empires become really violent when they are in decline, and I think this is what we’re witnessing now – the last gasp of Israeli violence.”
The arrogance of power is every empire’s Achilles heel, and Israel is not an exception. The lesson that every Israeli should know by now is that their leaders are their worst enemies, not the Arabs.
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