How Israel’s brutal war strategy has remade the Middle East

As the dust still hovers from the Israeli airstrikes that killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in his underground lair, and while bombs explode over the heads of Israeli targets from Beirut in Lebanon, to Damascus in Syria, to Rafah in Gaza, to Hudaydah in Yemen, we can see, emerging from the haze, the outlines of a new Middle East.

Israel’s initial intent in launching devastating attacks in Gaza, Lebanon, and beyond has been to cut off both the head and the hands of its enemies. The overriding strategic motivation, however, is far greater than that. 

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is harking back to a day, decades ago, when Israel’s military superiority was so overwhelming that no other power in the region could dare seriously challenge it. What both the year-long Gaza campaign and the ongoing attacks of the past two weeks are primarily about is to reestablish what, in the aftermath of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel, had arguably been lost: deterrence. This is all about deterrence, demonstrated through overwhelming, asymmetric reaction to any military provocation.

Israel’s post-October 7 mission

The only potential brake on a Gaza response that has been plausibly described by many as genocide has been the potential threat of international condemnation in the form of sanctions and formal war-criminal status for Israeli leaders, as well as the loss of US military and political support. It is now clear that Israeli officials who might have feared those consequences needn’t have, and won’t need to fear them for the foreseeable future.

In the context of Hezbollah and Iran, the two key members of the so-called “axis of resistance,” some observers, including me, had thought that Israeli deterrence had been permanently lost after October 7, replaced instead by a mutual “balance of terror” such that neither they nor Israel would willingly resort to all-out war. The Israelis have exploded that illusion, quite literally. 

Over the past two weeks, employing everything from rigged pagers to multi-thousand-pound bunker-busters, Israel has called the Hezbollah bluff. What we have learned is that Hezbollah’s long-range missile capabilities have been seriously overhyped, countered by Israel’s effective “Iron Dome” antimissile system. As Israel continues to pound leadership bunkers and weapons caches at will from uncontested airspace — at the cost of hundreds of civilian lives in Lebanon — the Lebanese Shiite militia has been revealed as a paper tiger. 

On Monday, Israel again launched a “limited” ground invasion to destroy Hezbollah infrastructure, but it is unlikely to push far, nor to repeat its mistakes from past invasions of attempting to hold ground. However the endgame plays out, Hezbollah will soon have to accept what has now been amply demonstrated, just as it was during the month-long disaster of the Israeli invasion of 2006:  It is completely overmatched and will be forced, once again, to retrench and rearm.

For Iran, the lesson of its two largely impotent missile assaults this year on Israel’s Iron Dome, compared against the success of Israel’s ongoing attacks on its ally in Lebanon, has surely hit home. Tehran may have felt obliged on Tuesday to respond in some way to repeated Israeli humiliations, delivered in Lebanon, Syria, and the heart of Tehran itself, but make no mistake: The clerics who control Iran are anything but suicidal. We cannot know precisely how Israel will respond to the latest assault, but Iran will find a way to climb down before the exchange gets entirely out of hand.

What this means is that we can stop fearing a wider regional war because it is already being fought, and Israel has largely won it. And with it, the relative deterrence Israel sought has been restored.

The costs of a remade Middle East

This doesn’t mean that the emerging regional balance, even if favorable to Israel at the moment, is stable. Even after its leadership decapitation, Hezbollah is still a formidable institution; the militant group, not the Lebanese government, remains the preeminent power in the country. The next round of confrontation, when it comes, will likely find the reconstituted Hezbollah stronger than before. 

On the far side of the Persian Gulf, Iran’s newly inaugurated President Masoud Pezeshkian will likely be forced by domestic political considerations, if not international diplomatic inertia, to put aside any notion of resurrecting the 2015 nuclear deal. He will focus instead on achieving the genuine deterrence that only nuclear arms can provide.

Hezbollah still insists that it will continue its strikes on Israel until the war in Gaza ends, but nearly a year after October 7, that war has all but ended. Israel has achieved nearly all it can militarily there, at horrific cost to the Palestinian people in Gaza. Even after the guns have mostly fallen silent, Israel may see the odd missile salvo from Lebanon or the occasional terrorist attack. But the fact that Israel’s enemies will need to resort to terrorism will be a sign of their weakness, not their strength.

As for Palestine, its future is a question no more. Diplomats from the US, Europe, and the Arab world can save themselves the effort: There will be no negotiations worthy of the name and no solutions in Gaza or the West Bank, other than those unilaterally imposed by Israel and tacitly permitted by the US.

Netanyahu, whose political rehabilitation is well underway, and others on what used to be referred to as Israel’s extreme right, are hardly losing sleep over good governance in Gaza. The “solution” in the territory has already been arrived at. 

Israel will retain physical control of the Philadelphi Corridor on the border with Egypt and the east-west strip bisecting what remains of the enclave, largely preventing reconstruction of the tunnels through which Hamas might otherwise rearm and the free movement of armed fighters within Gaza. With little effort, Israel can continue to control the flow of international aid to Gaza’s destitute population and use disproportionate and overwhelming force against any nascent glimmer of resistance. Should Gaza devolve into chaotic clan warfare, that will hardly arouse concern in Jerusalem, which will care only that the effective threat of militancy is permanently removed.

We have seen a similar policy of asymmetric military response to armed Palestinian restiveness playing out to telling effect in the West Bank towns of Jenin and Tulkarm in recent weeks. Israel has responded with a combination of heavy air- and drone attacks, ground incursions, and the willful destruction of businesses and civilian infrastructure. These actions, stepped up but hardly new, are meant to quash popular resistance to a pervasive post-October 7 wave of Israeli settler-led violence against Palestinians, aided and abetted as a matter of government policy by the Israeli Defense Forces. 

All of this overlays a foundational policy of enforced impoverishment, as Palestinians are barred from jobs they previously held in Israeli-controlled areas and as Israel routinely withholds tax revenues gathered on behalf of a Palestinian Authority it is systematically undermining. The message to Palestinians from Israel is clear: Resistance is futile.

Israel’s 40-year program of inexorable dispossession of Palestinians through land seizures and settlement, a process long slow and implicit, has become increasingly rapid and explicit since October 7. Even if occupied Palestinian lands aren’t formally annexed, a unitary Israeli state from the river to the sea is all but inevitable. 

What will be left is managing the optics of what is clearly apartheid. Though neighboring Jordan is unlikely to facilitate Palestinian expulsion, the desire of individual Palestinians to flee endemic poverty and hopelessness to neighboring countries may become difficult to stop. Nominally voluntary exile, arguably, is the policy of the Israeli far right. And while it won’t be easy, time is on their side.

A campaign of state terror

What we are witnessing is state terror, committed on all sides throughout the Levant, limited only by the combatants’ greatly differing capacities. To terrorize, one must necessarily practice wanton disregard for civilian casualties. For Israel, such willful indifference to suffering carries the risk of joining its adversaries as an international pariah. But Israelis are discovering that its pariah status, unlike for its enemies, carries few practical consequences when balanced, as it is, with unblinking American support.

The American reaction to Israel’s stunning but bloody military success is utterly predictable. Exultant Republicans are claiming vindication for their unembarrassed support of Israel’s merciless military strategy. As for the fate of Palestinians, former President Donald Trump has already articulated what we can anticipate to be his baseline policy, albeit one tinged with an amoral regard for PR optics: Do whatever you feel you must, “but get it over with fast.”

Democrats, despite their discomfort with the civilian casualties on the ground, will nonetheless uphold their traditional policy of steadfast political and military support of Israel. They may feel differently, and they are acutely aware of the significant generational drift in American attitudes toward Israel and Zionism, particularly on the left. For now, political realities remain unchanged: Israel can still command more support in Congress than any American president of either party could ever hope to. 

Vice President Kamala Harris, however she may betray humanitarian sentiment, would follow the example of President Barack Obama before her: She will not sacrifice precious political capital and her entire legislative agenda on the altar of a two-state policy gambit that has zero prospect of success. The toll of Palestinian casualties brought out mass protests in the US and may continue to do so, but they have yet to meaningfully change US policy.

The Sunni Arab states, led by Saudi Arabia, have paused the diplomatic efforts that might otherwise by now have resulted in a historic rapprochement with Israel, but this should be seen as little more than a hiatus in deference to domestic political optics. 

Human emotions aside, the geopolitical interests driving a de facto Saudi alliance with Israel remain in play. Generational change in Gulf country leadership has brought with it relative indifference to the Palestinian cause. Memories of crushed children and wailing mothers will soon fade when the media turns away. Compelling national interests in confronting the shared enemy, Iran, and promoting high-tech Israeli investment will prevail. 

Even as we look ahead to a time when Israel’s Shiite antagonists are again ready to engage, there may be little left to fight over. Nothing is so persuasive, or so deflating, as immutable facts on the ground. For those in the “axis of resistance,” the deepening hatred of Israel generated by the events of the last year will seethe for at least another generation. Even if the threat they pose to Israel is never existential, it ensures that Israelis will not be able to rest easy. And for Israel, as the reality of apartheid over the Palestinians becomes undeniable, it will gnaw at the national soul. For now, however much we may like to think otherwise, in our time as much as at any time in human history, might — for those ruthless enough to exercise it — still wins in the end.