The Dangerous Decline in Israeli Strategy
For decades, the Zionist project has been getting worse at defending itself.
Israel is in serious trouble. Its citizens are deeply divided, and this situation is unlikely to improve. It is bogged down in an unwinnable war in Gaza, its military is showing signs of strain, and a wider war with Hezbollah or Iran remains a possibility. The Israeli economy is suffering mightily, and the Times of Israel recently reported that as many as 60,000 businesses may close this year.
Moreover, Israel’s recent behavior has gravely damaged its global image, and it is becoming a pariah state in ways that were once unimaginable. After Hamas’s brutal attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, Israel received a considerable and appropriate outpouring of sympathy from around the world, and it was widely accepted that Israel was entitled to respond vigorously. But more than 10 months later, Israel’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinians in Gaza and increased settler violence on the West Bank have squandered that initial wave of support. The International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor has applied for arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on the charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity; the International Court of Justice has issued preliminary findings describing Israel’s actions as plausibly genocidal in nature and intent, and the court has at long last declared Israel’s occupation and colonization of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem to be a clear violation of international law.
Only the most head-in-the-sand defenders of Zionism could look at what is happening in Gaza and not be deeply troubled, if not horrified. Support in the United States for Israel’s actions is declining sharply, and younger Americans (including many younger American Jews) oppose the Biden administration’s supine response to Israel’s actions. Read this tweet by Eran Etzion, former deputy head of Israel’s National Security Council, and you’ll get a good sense of the damage Israel has inflicted on itself. Then read this account of a recent visit to Israel by historian Omer Bartov, one of the world’s leading scholars of genocide, and you’ll get a sense of how deep the problem is.
It’s tempting to blame all these problems on Netanyahu, and he surely deserves the criticism he’s received both at home and abroad. But pinning all the blame on Bibi overlooks a deeper problem: the gradual erosion in Israel’s strategic thinking over the past 50 years. The country’s achievements and tactical prowess during its first two decades tend to obscure—especially among older people—the extent to which Israel’s key strategic choices since 1967 have helped undermine its security.
The early Zionists and Israel’s first generation of leaders were astute strategists. They were attempting something that seemed nearly impossible: to establish a Jewish state in the middle of the Arab world, even though the Jewish population in Palestine in 1900 was minuscule and was still a distinct minority when Israel was founded in 1948. The founders succeeded by being ruthlessly realistic: taking advantage of favorable opportunities, building up capable paramilitary forces (and later a first-class army and air force), and working overtime to win support from the dominant world powers. It is worth remembering, for example, that both the Soviet Union and the United States supported the 1947 U.N. Partition Plan and both recognized Israel shortly after its founding. David Ben-Gurion and his fellow Zionist leaders were often willing to accept arrangements that fell short of their long-term goals, at least temporarily, provided that the agreement moved them closer to their ultimate aims.
Upon achieving statehood, the new government worked assiduously to cultivate international support through relentless hasbara (propaganda) and to forge working alliances with France, South Africa, and several other countries. Most importantly, it established a “special relationship” with the United States, based primarily on the growing power and influence of the “Israel lobby.” Israel’s early leaders understood that a small country surrounded by hostile powers had to calculate carefully and go to great lengths to win international support. Clever diplomacy and no small amount of deception also helped Israel develop a clandestine arsenal of nuclear weapons and conceal the cruel realities of Israel’s founding, which did not become widely known until the seminal work of Benny Morris, Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim, Simha Flapan, and the other “new historians” in the 1980s.
No government is perfect, and Israel’s early leaders did make mistakes on occasion. Ben-Gurion erred when he colluded with Great Britain and France to attack Egypt in the 1956 Suez Crisis and then suggested that Israel might not withdraw its troops. He quickly abandoned that stance, however, when the Eisenhower administration made it clear it would not tolerate such unwarranted aggrandizement. But overall, the strategic acumen of the Zionist state in its early days was impressive, especially when compared to its adversaries.
The turning point was Israel’s stunning victory in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. The outcome was not as miraculous as it appeared at the time (among other things, U.S. intelligence had predicted that Israel would win easily), but the speed and scope of this triumph took many by surprise and helped foster a sense of hubris that has undermined Israel’s strategic judgment ever since.
The main error, as thoughtful Israeli scholars have argued repeatedly, was the decision to retain, occupy, and gradually colonize the West Bank and Gaza, as part of a long-term effort to create a “Greater Israel.” Ben-Gurion and his followers had sought to minimize the number of Palestinians within the new Jewish state, but keeping the West Bank and Gaza meant that Israel now controlled a rapidly growing Palestinian population that was nearly as large as the population of Israeli Jews. This resulting occupation, as it is commonly called, created an unavoidable tension between Israel’s Jewish character and its democratic system: It could remain a Jewish state only by suppressing the political rights of Palestinians and creating an apartheid system, in an era when such a political order was anathema to growing numbers of people around the world. Israel could deal with this problem through additional ethnic cleansing and/or genocide, but both are crimes against humanity that no true friend of Israel could endorse.
Other errors soon followed the decision to pursue a Greater Israel. Israeli leaders (and their American counterparts, including Henry Kissinger) missed the signs that Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was ready to make peace in exchange for the return of the Sinai Peninsula, which Israel had captured in 1967. Moreover, Israeli intelligence incorrectly assumed that the Egyptian military was too weak to challenge the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in the Sinai, and thus was deterred from going to war. The result of this misjudgment was the October War of 1973. Despite initial setbacks, Israel prevailed on the battlefield, but not at the negotiating table after the war. The costs of the war, coupled with pressure from the United States, convinced Israeli leaders to begin serious negotiations to relinquish the Sinai. This shift eventually led to Sadat’s historic trip to Jerusalem, the Camp David Accords, and the subsequent Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty (midwifed by then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s persistent and adroit mediation). Unfortunately, because then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin was deeply committed to the goal of Greater Israel and unwilling to end the occupation, he missed this promising opportunity to address the Palestinian issue once and for all.
The next clear sign of eroding strategic judgment was Israel’s ill-fated invasion of Lebanon in 1982. This scheme was the brainchild of hawkish Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, who convinced Begin that a military incursion there would scatter the Palestine Liberation Organization, or PLO (which had a substantial presence in Lebanon), establish a pro-Israel government in Beirut, and give Israel a free hand in the West Bank. The invasion was a short-term military success, but it led to the IDF occupying southern Lebanon, which, in turn, led directly to the creation of Hezbollah, whose increasingly potent resistance finally forced Israel to withdraw from Lebanon in 2000. And removing the PLO from Lebanon didn’t halt Palestinian resistance: Instead, it paved the way for the First Intifada in 1987, another clear sign that the Palestinians were not going to leave their homeland or submit to permanent Israeli subjugation.
Making peace with the Palestinians requires Israel to stop expanding settlements in the Occupied Territories and to work with the Palestinians to establish a government that is competent, effective, and legitimate. Instead, Israel’s leaders—especially the governments led by Sharon and Netanyahu—have done the opposite. They refused to stop settlement expansion, worked overtime to keep the Palestinians weak and divided even when this meant tacitly supporting Hamas, and repeatedly stonewalled U.S. efforts to achieve a two-state solution. The result was a recurring series of destructive but inconclusive clashes (such as Operation Cast Lead in 2008-09 and Operation Protective Edge in 2014). These repeated efforts to “mow the grass” did not end Palestinian resistance, however, and eventually culminated in Hamas’s cross-border assault on Oct. 7, the worst blow inflicted on Israel in decades.
A final, telling example of Israeli strategic myopia is its fervent opposition to the international effort to negotiate limits on Iran’s nuclear program. Israel, for good strategic reasons, wants to remain the only country in the Middle East with nuclear weapons, and it does not want to see Iran, its foremost regional adversary, acquire the bomb. Thus, Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders should have been pleased and relieved when the United States and the world’s other major powers convinced Iran to sign the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Why? Because it required Tehran to reduce its enrichment capacity, shrink its stockpile of enriched uranium, and accept highly intrusive inspections from the International Atomic Energy Agency, thereby putting an Iranian bomb out of reach for a decade and possibly longer. Many senior Israeli security officials wisely supported the deal, but Netanyahu and his hard-line supporters, along with AIPAC and the more hawkish groups in the U.S. Israel lobby, were staunchly opposed. These hard-liners played a key role in persuading then-President Donald Trump to walk away from the deal in 2018, and today Iran is closer to building a bomb than ever. It is hard to imagine a more shortsighted Israeli policy.
What explains the dramatic decline in Israeli strategic acumen? One important factor is the sense of hubris and impunity that comes from U.S. protection and deference to Israel’s wishes. If the world’s most powerful country backs you no matter what you do, the need to think carefully about your actions is inevitably going to diminish. In addition, Israel’s tendency to see itself solely as a victim and to blame all opposition to its policies on antisemitism doesn’t help, because it makes it harder for Israeli leaders and their public to recognize how their own actions might be triggering the hostility that they face. Netanyahu’s rule as Israel’s longest-serving prime minister is another part of the problem, especially since his actions are driven in good part by self-interest (i.e., the desire to avoid jail time for corruption), not just by concerns about what is best for his country. Add to that the growing influence of the religious right—whose messianic views on foreign policy were recently summarized in a chilling article in Haaretz, and you have a recipe for disaster. When any country starts making strategic decisions based on apocalyptic prophecies and the expectation of divine intervention, look out.
Why does this matter? Because as the United States showed in its own response to Sept. 11, countries that are not thinking intelligently about their strategic options can do considerable harm to themselves and to others. Israel’s actions threaten its own long-term prospects, so anyone who wants it to have a bright future should be especially concerned by its declining strategic judgment. Its vengeful and shortsighted behavior has inflicted enormous harm on innocent Palestinians for decades and continues to do so today, yet it stands little chance of ending Palestinian resistance. Being closely tied to an erratic and unthinking partner is also a serious problem for the United States, because it keeps eating up time, attention, and resources and makes the United States look both ineffectual and hypocritical. It may also inspire another wave of anti-American terrorism, with all the obvious damage that this result would entail.
Unfortunately, it’s also not clear how one fixes this situation. The best thing Israel’s supporters in the United States could do is pressure both Democrats and Republicans to employ a heavy dose of tough love toward the Jewish state so that it begins to reconsider its current trajectory. Of course, that would also require groups in the lobby like AIPAC to reflect on their own role in leading Israel into its present quandary. Regrettably, there’s no sign of that happening any time soon. Instead, Israel and its supporters in the United States are doubling down. This is a prescription for unending trouble, if not disaster.
Stephen M. Walt is a columnist at Foreign Policy and the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University. Twitter: @stephenwalt