Not long after the start of the fifth Israeli-Palestinian War on 7 October 2023 – leading to Israel’s clashes with the Axis of Resistance fronts in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iraq – Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials began to crow about crushing victories on seven fronts and leading the campaign to reshape the Middle East. Such claims are meant to justify Israel’s political, military and strategic role in installing the new order in Syria and curtailing the role of Hizbullah in Lebanese politics, compelling it to withdraw north of the Litani River. They are also meant to justify Israel’s unprovoked attack against Iran to destroy its nuclear facilities and to change the regime that has been in power in Tehran since 1979.
In the early hours of 13 June, Israel launched a large-scale attack against Iran, using some 200 aircraft to strike nuclear sites, assassinate Iranian political and military leaders, and damage infrastructure. It also killed over 70 civilians in that one morning. The first wave of strikes exposed Iran’s strategic vulnerability, which had already become apparent from previous Israeli assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, as well as repeated breaches of Iranian nuclear facilities. Israel also managed to draw the armed forces of its greatest ally – the US now led by President Donald Trump – into the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, while US military intelligence has been serving Israel on all fronts.
“Everything about the June 13 attacks speaks to the Iranian regime’s incompetence,” writes Arash Azizi under the headline, “Iran’s Stunning Incompetence,” in The Atlantic on 13 June. “Israel was able to hit major nuclear and military sites all over the country in the space of a day. It has taken out dozens of high-ranking military and nuclear officials. The list includes Ali Shamkhani, one of the most powerful men in Iran’s military, political, and economic firmaments. Among other portfolios, he was in charge of Iran’s nuclear talks. Shamkhani was also a longtime commander in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the militia that undergirds the power of the Iranian regime. The IRGC lost its chief and several of its top commanders in the Israeli assault. Consider this: The Islamic Republic wasn’t even able to protect its own brass, let alone the people of Iran, to whom it has long shown nothing but contempt.”
This scene reinforces so many others in which Israel militarily prevailed over Arab states and militias, leading Israeli leaders to envision themselves as the master architects of a new Middle East tailored to Israeli whims. However, as the political scientist Stepen Walt points out in an article appearing in Foreign Policy on the same day as the article above, “Israel Can’t Be a Hegemon.” Walt adds, “the Israeli government is making a bid for regional dominance that’s unlikely to succeed.” Walt, who has been dubbed the dean of American realists, observes that Israeli dominance rests on several pillars, most notably qualitative military superiority, a cohesive internal front, and a close relationship with the US and other Western powers.
Yet, despite such advantages, Israel has failed to eliminate non-state actors like Hamas, the Houthis, and Hizbullah, who continue to fight Israel and inflict losses on both lives and resources. No less important is the demographic factor: 10 million Israelis (only 75 per cent of whom are Jewish) cannot easily sustain a perpetual confrontation against hundreds of millions of Arab Muslims – not to mention millions more in Iran and Turkey, both of which have substantial militaries capable of inflicting significant damage on Israel.
Walt writes that, following in the footsteps of other “would-be regional hegemons like Napoleonic France, Nazi Germany, or Imperial Japan,” Israel might be able to achieve a dominant position temporarily, but like them, it will be unable to consolidate its initial gains. Eventually, concrete geopolitical and geoeconomic realities will reassert themselves.
As Walt points out, more successful hegemonic states did not rely solely on military power and alliances. They also had a regional, or even global, project for sustaining their hegemony in a more durable and less belligerent manner. However, this flies against the reality of the Israeli settler-colonial ideology and project whose campaigns of mass killings, ethnic cleansing, and other atrocities have all the traits of the genocide that led Jews to vow “Never again!” Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims who are experiencing the horrors Israel is unleashing against them today will ensure that Israeli hegemony remains in constant and painful jeopardy for generations to come.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 26 June, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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