To deter, or to destroy? To try to dissuade adversaries from attacking one’s people or interests, or to take the gloves off and try to eliminate them? It’s a question central to Israel’s history, and its predicament. Today, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would claim he is trying to do both. But deterrence and destruction as strategic goals drive in different directions. Deterrence is based on acceptance that the enemy, for the time being, will continue to exist. Deterrence is not an automated thing, but rather an interaction of choices: don’t do “x,” or we will do “y.” If the enemy cooperates, if it elects to “be” deterred and therefore not do “x”, the deterrer must then withhold punishment. Otherwise deterrence loses its value and force. Hence Ukraine’s willingness to strike into Russian territory despite Russia’s capacity for retaliation, given Moscow is trying to destroy Ukraine regardless. Deterrence entails threats of violence, but has a flip-side, a bargain that the deterrer must fulfil. It is part of living with an enemy that won’t go away.
Netanyahu and his supporters repudiate that logic. Operation Rising Lion, Netanyahu’s long-planned assault on Iran with air strikes at its nuclear facilities, its governmental, scientific and military officials, its energy supplies and population centres, is a gamble that marks the loosening of restraint. It is a gamble born of frustration with the limitations that deterrence requires. Netanyahu is in the business of uprooting and destroying enemies, from Gaza to Tehran. After the October 7 massacre, he is not alone.
As Tel Aviv’s pronouncements make clear, the architects of the campaign hope that the air assault will finish the Iranian regime, if not via physical decapitation, then by inducing a revolution in Iran, one that calls forth a new order Israel can live with. Short of that, it aims at minimum to degrade Iran’s capabilities, skilled personnel and infrastructure. It seeks to suppress both Iran’s nuclear programme and its nuclear ambitions, as well as killing its ability to project power in the region, thereby taking the country off the geopolitical board. This is a war of temptation. In the words of Lawrence Freedman, it represents the “lure of the decisive.”
Let’s step back to view this historically. The trouble with projects of enemy-destruction is that while defeat is real and possible, the eradication of enemies is harder and rarer. I’m not about to repeat the mid-wit axiom that “you can’t kill an idea.” Successful operations can discredit and weaken ideological movements: Argentinian fascism still exists in pockets of opinion, but has never enjoyed the appeal it held before defeat over the Falklands. Rather, I want to suggest that maximalist war aims are optimistic, and even if they initially succeed.
It would be a brave bet that the offensive eliminates Iran’s nuclear will
Many in the West are shaped by a collective memory of decisive endings, of World War Two and the end of the Cold War, as though those ideal-types of conflict termination are normal. They are not. Both were anomalies. Most conflicts don’t end in a decisive, page-turning capitulation. Most long struggles don’t end in one side losing its will, dramatically collapsing and ceding its empire. Granted, both things are possible. But they happened only after struggles either of abnormal intensity or long grinding time.
All this is generally true. It applies particularly to Israel. The small state’s founder and strategic guide, David Ben-Gurion, realised as much. He discerned that in a region surrounded by adversaries, present and future, for a state of limited scale there would be no final victory. No last, argument-settling triumph. Even successful rounds of hostilities would not provide finality. It was one thing to hammer and terrorise the Palestinians, the nearer adversary, as he had done and as Palestine’s more hardened factions wanted in return (let’s not mince words here). It was quite another to suppress the countries who either wanted Israel destroyed, or were happy from time to time to incite hatred of Israel as a political deflection. Whereas Israel, lacking the depth of space and time and population, might not withstand a decisive defeat. Its annihilation was possible. Prudent war-avoidance was part of this picture, only war avoidance achieved partly by the credible threat of punishment. To deter, Israel needed to signal what it would not accept, maintain the forces to back up its threats, and at the nuclear level, maintain a policy of amimut (opacity), not declaring its nuclear arsenal in order to avoid pressuring other regimes into proliferation. In Ben-Gurion’s words, “We need deterrence, not victory in war. The Sinai Campaign won’t happen again.”
Even the 1967 Sinai Campaign’s territorial gains were short-lived, and became part of the problem. After victory, the region could go quiet. But the quiet would be temporary and, as with Hamas recently, could at times be symptomatic not of regional stability but of slaughter being prepared. The notion of a region-wide settlement, of transformational “solutions” based on mutual toleration may be the demand of well-intentioned liberal internationalists and “conflict resolution” Whigs. Until that distant day, managing enemies is required. Israel was doomed to engage in a continuous conversation with those who meant it harm, a conversation with violent threats at its core. As the Mossad agent quips in the film Munich after a Black September bombing, “They‘re talking to us. We’re in dialogue now.” Violent dialogue, defined also by holding something back.
This is not to recast Ben-Gurion simplistically as the anti-Netanyahu. Ben-Gurion had civilian blood on his hands, and at times well beyond the bounds of arguable necessity. Rather, it is to regard their contrasting views of security as part of a continuous tide in Israel’s argument with itself about survival.
Ben-Gurion’s eyes were fixed particularly on the rejectionist rulers of Arab-majority states. A similar logic, though, holds with Israel’s other coalition of opponents, centred in Iran. Israel and its enemies are where they are partly because of the collapse of Iranian deterrence. Iran grew too confident in its own instruments of retaliation, in particular Hezbollah and its large missile arsenal, the northern front and dagger at Israel’s throat. Tehran’s regime, too, refused to exercise the restraint deterrence needs. It openly celebrated the pogrom of October 7, seemingly assuming Israel wouldn’t dare go big in response, just as it had sowed violent chaos far and wide without suffering unacceptable punishment. A different story today. With Iran’s proxies reeling, its air defences depleted and with an emerging modus vivendi between Israel and the Gulf monarchies, Netanyahu felt the wind at his back. Iran’s latent nuclear capability, supposed to be a deterrent in itself, became more than ever the target.
And yet. Killing off enemies and, more to the point, their nuclear ambitions is a hard task that often fails, or proves to be a cure worse than the disease. That is true even for superpowers with large forces on the ground. The repudiation of deterrence, or rather the fallacy that one can have deterrence and enemy-elimination all at the same time, accompanied the excesses of the War on Terror. It is harder still for small states with high quality but numerically limited militaries. Again, there is a historical rhythm here. Contrary to Ben-Gurion’s logic, in 1982 Prime Minister Menachem Begin struck hard into Lebanon to smash the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, only to end up in a protracted and demoralising occupation, one that helped spawn Hezbollah in the first place. The PLO lost talented people and bases, but Islamist militancy took on new and murderous forms.
True, there was more decisive action only a year before — Operation Opera — Israel’s bombing of Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor. A more achievable goal, even this was an ambiguous case. It increased rather than reduced Iraqi nuclear aspirations. It did not prevent Saddam reconstituting the program and getting closer to nuclear capability. At least it bought enough time for Baghdad to blunder into its own failure in Kuwait and via that, to the end of its nuclear programme.
Israel scored a more straightforward success with its strike on Syria’s nuclear infrastructure in 2007. But Syria’s nuclear ambitions were weaker and more easily discouraged, its facilities more vulnerable to air strikes, and it was not part of a confrontation as intense as Israel’s contest with Iran or Iraq. The temptation to go further was fainter. Israel wisely went to the trouble of not publicly declaring that it had done the bombing, minimising pressure on Bashir al-Assad to retaliate. The point was to reduce a potential threat without it blowing up into a consuming war.
Against the catch-cry, heard in and beyond Israel, that Israel’s enemies are too turbulent and risk-prone to be deterrable, there is the surprising case of ISIL. As Graham Allison observed almost a decade ago:
Israel’s approach to ISIS is straightforward. Israel seeks to persuade ISIS not to attack it by credibly threatening to retaliate. If you attack us, the thinking goes, we will respond in ways that will impose pain that exceeds any gain you can hope to achieve … Israel has conveyed three “red lines”. No attacks on Israel; no transfer of advanced conventional weapons (namely precision-guided missiles and rockets) to terrorist groups that threaten Israel; and no transfer of chemical weapons to terrorist groups. The “dozens” of Israeli airstrikes in Syria that Prime Minister Netanyahu recently acknowledged are calculated components of a strategy that reminds all adversaries of the cost of even minor violations of its rules.
Hence Israel’s success deterring, for instance, a group that had declared affiliation with ISIL, Wilayat Sinai. On the Golan, the Yarmouk Brigade controls a ten-square-kilometre area where some forty thousand civilians live. Despite the fact that the group stands, as one Israeli newspaper put it, ‘several hundred meters away from reaching Israeli school buses,’ it has not conducted a single attack against Israel.
Nothing is certain. We cannot know where the current campaign against Iran is headed. It will set Iran’s capabilities back in important ways, to be sure. But it would be a brave bet that the offensive eliminates Iran’s nuclear will. If anything, by rejecting deterrence and striking at Iran’s vitals, it may tip the regime over the decision threshold. And by providing a clear and present threat Iranians can unite against, it may not create political meltdown. Iran’s weakness and disarray, the very state of affairs that tempted Israel to strike in the first place, may now be mixed up with an intensified sense of collective resistance. By weakening Iran further, it may also have an unintended price, for some time removing an important counterweight to Sunni militant groups backed by Gulf states. Abandoning deterrence and pursuing destruction will likely lead not to finality on Israel’s terms. If history rhymes in this case, it will meet with unforeseen problems, later to be followed by a rediscovery of Ben Gurion’s insight.
