Israel is feeling its oats.
The office of the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, last Tuesday declared that Israel had “placed itself in the first rank of the world’s major powers.” The statement came just after the “12-day war” with Iran, during which the Jewish state demonstrated military superiority over the Islamic Republic, its chief adversary.
Of course, all three belligerents to the conflict—not just Israel, but also the United States and Iran—used lofty language in declaring victory, in part to shore up popular support at home. But the expressed triumphalism among Israeli leadership, at least, seems to have been sincere, despite the damage done to Tel Aviv and other cities by Iran’s missile barrages, and despite the deaths of dozens of Israelis in a war that their government instigated. (Over a thousand Iranians perished, including hundreds of civilians.)
To understand why Netanyahu sees the war as a great victory, you need to understand Netanyahu. The prime minister has long harbored the conviction, inherited from his father Benzion Netanyahu, that the Jewish people face a constant threat of extermination. “Jewish history is in large measure a history of holocausts,” Benzion told the New Yorker in the 1990s. For the elder Netanyahu—a deputy of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the father of militant “Revisionist Zionism”—this meant that Jews needed a state of their own to escape the endemic Jew-hatred of Europeans, and that this state needed to subjugate Jew-hating Arabs or evict them from Israel’s periphery.
For the younger Netanyahu, it means Israel can and must use military force to vanquish implacable regional foes, including, especially, Iran. Given this worldview, Netanyahu is understandably exuberant about Israel’s recent tactical successes—and about his own personal success in finally, after decades of tireless effort, getting the U.S. to attack Iran on Israel’s behalf.
The prime minister wasn’t the only Israeli leader who bragged that Israel had, as it were, arrived on the world stage. Another such boast came from Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, an ultra-nationalist politician and West Bank settler. A long X post from Smotrich on Saturday sheds much light on how senior members of Netanyahu’s extremist government understand the 12-day war and its regional implications. The statement also unwittingly exhibits serious flaws in the Israeli project to become a world power and regional hegemon. Smotrich writes:
These two weeks are a continuation of the determined and successful campaign we have been waging for twenty months to eradicate the terror arms of the Iranian octopus, positioning Israel as the greatest and strongest power in the Middle East and one of the strongest in the entire world.
Put differently: Following Hamas’s atrocities on October 7, 2023, Israel degraded Tehran’s proxies and partners (its “terror arms”) and engineered a fleeting opportunity to strike an exposed Iran, the final boss in Israel’s quest for regional hegemony. In Smotrich’s estimation, that strike succeeded in “eliminating the immediate existential threat posed to us by Iran.”
In fact, Israel’s campaign, though impressive, failed to eliminate the Iranian threat, and probably made it worse in the long run. Israel killed dozens of military commanders and around a dozen nuclear scientists, but it also kicked off an intense rally-around-the-flag effect among ordinary Iranians, boosted the political influence of Tehran’s hardliners, and gave the Islamic Republic extra incentive to dash for the bomb.
Military success coupled with political failure has been a theme of Israeli foreign policy. As Vali Nasr, an Iranian-American political scientist, told the Financial Times last week, Israel isn’t able “to bring conflicts that it starts to a political end through negotiations…. So, it’s subscribing to a doctrine of perpetual war.”
Smotrich is either unaware of this chronic failure or indifferent to it. Either way, he seems determined to perpetuate it. He allows that Israel, following its recent victory, can sign peace accords with its Arab neighbors, but he rejects the idea that this should require Israeli compromise. Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries want Israel to recognize Palestinian statehood, but they “are the ones who need to ‘pay’ us for these alliances,” Smotrich declares. Israel, he adds, will not “pay” for peace by establishing a “Palestinian terror state.”
These comments are remarkable not only for their sheer cheek, but for the counter-productive mindset they reveal.
The Palestinian issue is central to Israel’s deep unpopularity in the Middle East. The country’s founding in 1948 came at the expense of Palestinians who had lived for generations in what is now Israel but were displaced by Zionist terrorists and, later, by the Israeli military. The region’s enduring hostility toward Israel traces back to this episode, called al-Nakba in Arabic, “the catastrophe.”
Not quite two decades later, in 1967, Israel launched a war against Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, easily defeating these adversaries and, in the process, capturing the Palestinian territories Gaza and the West Bank (along with Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and Syria’s Golan Heights). While Israel won the war, it failed to win the peace, as regional animosities festered amid the worsening plight of Palestinians.
Today, the ongoing, 21-month assault on Gaza and, to a lesser extent, the slower-motion ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, have rendered Israel a rogue state in the eyes not only of Mideast Muslims, but of much, perhaps most, of the world’s population.
Smotrich’s emphatic opposition to compromising on Palestine to make peace with Arab countries, alongside the grandiose claim that Israel eliminated the threat from Iran—a nation roughly 10 times its size in population and 80 times in territory—suggests that Israel will fail, again, to translate military triumph into political success. And this time, even the military triumph was questionable, with many analysts saying Israel simply needed a pause in fighting to restock missile interceptors.
But Smotrich’s statement reveals an even more fundamental flaw in Israel’s project to dominate the region: taking for granted the significant military support Israel receives from America, the preeminent global superpower. Smotrich mentions the U.S. three times in the post, touting the “strong alliance” between it and Israel and, in essence, presenting the two nations as co-equal partners.
But Israel is not a coequal partner of the United States. The “special relationship,” in fact, may be the least balanced alliance in the history of international relations.
During the 12-day war, the U.S. once again extended its superpower shield over Israel, aiding not only its air defense but its offensive operations, providing it with Hellfire missiles, intelligence, and refueling services for warplanes. The U.S. has bankrolled Israel’s military for decades, and the Gaza war has brought an intensification of American support. At roughly the one-year mark of the conflict, Brown University assessed that Washington had shouldered around 70 percent of Israel’s war costs. America also runs diplomatic cover for Israel and gives it indirect support, for example, through massive foreign aid to Egypt, largely intended to buy off an erstwhile adversary of the Jewish state.
America’s vast, unconditional support for Israel is peculiar and cannot last forever. Mostly it results from the singular success of the Israel lobby, which exerts tremendous influence in the U.S., including over the Trump administration.
During the Gaza war, however, a dam has burst in U.S. public opinion, as more and more Americans have grown opposed to funding Israel’s assault on the beleaguered Gazans. By extension, they’ve grown opposed to funding Israel.
The trend in public opinion is not confined to any one faction or political party. On the left, Zohran Mamdani recently won the Democratic primary in the New York City mayoral contest, an election that the media had turned into a referendum on Israel. Evidently, some Democrats in the Big Apple resonated to Mamdani’s stinging criticisms of Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians. On the right, MAGA influencers Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, Matt Gaetz, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) have issued their own stinging criticisms of Israel and its American supporters.
Among U.S. adults, a slim majority—53 percent—express an unfavorable view of Israel, according to a Pew survey published in April. Israel’s unpopularity may only deepen in the years ahead: While Republicans remain more supportive than Democrats, half of those under 50 expressed an unfavorable view. These figures represent a stunning transformation in Americans’ attitudes toward the Jewish state.
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Israel cannot expect to maintain significant U.S. support under such circumstances. And without significant U.S. support, Israel couldn’t maintain regional hegemony even if it somehow managed to achieve it. “A true regional hegemon doesn’t have to rely on others to dominate its neighborhood,” writes Stephen Walt, an eminent political scientist at Harvard, in Foreign Policy.
Governments often live beyond their means, but few have attempted the strategic overreach that Netanyahu’s coalition is enacting. Israel has used its superpower boost to inflame the hostility of its neighbors and worsen the Palestine crisis. If U.S. aid dries up, the Jewish state—a country roughly the size of New Jersey in both population and territory—will find itself in a harrowing security environment.
Netanyahu may view himself as a man of destiny and guarantor of Israel’s security. History may record instead that he precipitated Israel’s self-destruction.
