Israel has secured three strategic victories over the past 15 months.
Firstly, it has managed to downgrade the military and logistical capabilities of its most ardent enemies, Hamas and Hizbullah. It has done this in a relatively short period of time, while effectively operating on multiple fronts, and it has restored the confidence and sense of being able to achieve major objectives of the Israeli military and security establishment.
Secondly, it has decimated Iran’s strategic position in the eastern Mediterranean. This is Israel’s primary long-term victory over the past three decades, because the strategic presence that Iran had built in the eastern Mediterranean, mainly in Lebanon and Syria, transcended its military and logistical capabilities.
Iran is the only major Middle Eastern country that has a strategic doctrine that is blatantly hostile to Israel. Despite that, it managed over the past two decades to surround Israel with allies that, according to several calculations, were able to bring about a balance of deterrence with Israel. This allowed Iran to project its power right up to Israel’s borders, which gave it bargaining chips in the negotiations with the Western powers, especially the US, concerning other dossiers of importance to it.
The fact that it managed to build this presence in the eastern Mediterranean and to create this form of deterrence with Israel was considered in many regional and Western capitals to be a strategic success for Iran. Strategic successes bestow advantages. As a result, Israel’s decimation of the Iranian presence and power in the eastern Mediterranean marks a major shift to Israel’s advantage in the power dynamic with its primary opponent in the region.
Thirdly, Israel now senses that it can go further. Whereas its military confrontations over the last two decades, primarily with Hizbullah in 2006, left Israel planning for a rematch and unable to pursue further objectives, the confrontations of the past 15 months have left it contemplating a bigger prize. This is to force the Islamic Republic to accept highly restrictive measures on its programme to develop serious nuclear capabilities, failing which Israel would subject Iran to further military strikes, such as the one it dealt in October 2024.
The objective here is not merely to further weaken Iran and expose the weakness of its regime to its population, but also to lay the groundwork for potentially attempting to topple the Iranian regime.
However, successes give rise to challenges, and Israel’s strategic successes in the past 15 months have entailed three major challenges to the region and to Israel.
The first is that serious conceptions of peace between the Israelis and Palestinians have been missing for at least a decade. But the scale of the deaths and destruction that have taken place in Gaza over the past 15 months has engendered amongst large sections of the Palestinians not only a desire for revenge, but also an obvious conviction that struggle and not negotiations will shape the future.
This coincides with feelings amongst large segments of Israelis, particularly after the attacks of 7 October 2023, that waging war is the best route to security in their neighbourhood. That fact that such feelings are festering at a time when the Israeli far-right is at its strongest since the founding of Israel in 1948 has shrouded the region, and especially Israel, in a mindset of war. This creates a cycle in which fear and ferocity feed on each other.
The second challenge is that Israel has been undergoing a slow transformation for at least a quarter of a century. Israeli society has moved from reflecting the secular, socialist experiment that was attempted in the country between the 1950s and the 1980s. Demographic and sociopolitical trends that have been emerging in Israel over the past three decades have exacerbated divisions, not only about values and cultural frames of reference, ways of life, and the role of religion in society, but also, and more importantly, about the essence of the Israeli project within the state and in the wider Middle East.
This last point, about Israel’s place in the Middle East, has arguably been at the core of the clashes between the most important views within Israel about its future. Irrespective of talk about geo-economic integration and co-investments with the largest financial resources in the Middle East, if fear and ferocity take hold of the collective psyche in Israel, war, not peace and integration, will follow.
The third challenge, as I argued in the US magazine Foreign Affairs in June 2020, is that Israel might attempt to change the strategic landscape in its neighbourhood. However, any such attempt, successful as it has been so far, will not end the strategic projects of other key powers in the region, whether Arab or non-Arab. This means that as long as Israel keeps pushing for a vision of the Middle East that clashes with those of others, it will need to continue to impose its views and interests on other actors.
This will necessitate a perpetual power-advantage relative to other such actors. The support that the US gives to Israel goes a long way in securing this necessity. But imposing one’s will and interests on others in a highly confrontational war and amidst inflamed feelings also necessitates a continuous level of internal mobilisation, let alone major resources of capital, human manpower, and attention and concentration. In essence, this condemns Israel to living with a war mindset for the foreseeable future.
The last three articles in this series looked at the Turkish, Iranian, and Israeli positioning in the tumultuous Middle Eastern strategic landscape. The next set will look at the Arab world, especially at the question that the first article in this series presented: whether the projects of the key Arab countries are aligned, or at least not opposed?
Is the Arab world drifting towards a constellation of smaller worlds connected by economic links and of course cultural bonds, but unable to forge a cohesive strategic project in the foreseeable future?
* The writer is the author of Islamism: A History of Political Islam (2017) and Egypt on the Brink (2010).
* A version of this article appears in print in the 13 February, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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