By Marc Lynch* – Foreign Affairs
Israel Cannot Destroy Its Way to Peace
The regional order of the Middle East is rapidly evolving, but not in the way many Israeli and U.S. officials assume it is. U.S. President Donald Trump’s push to end the war in Gaza delivered the release of all the surviving Israeli hostages and a respite from the relentless killing and destruction that has so scarred the territory. That breakthrough raised hopes of a broader regional transformation, even if what comes after the initial cease-fire remains hugely uncertain. Trump himself speaks of the dawn of peace in the Middle East. If his deal prevents the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza and the annexation of the West Bank, many Arab governments may once again be eager to explore normalizing ties with Israel. Indeed, Israelis saw how Arab leaders pressured Hamas to accept Trump’s deal as evidence that normalization could be back on the table.
But even if the Gaza deal holds, this moment of U.S.-Israeli convergence won’t last. Israel’s mistaken belief that the country has established permanent strategic superiority over its adversaries will almost certainly lead it to take increasingly provocative actions that directly challenge the goals of the White House. The Gulf states that Israel dreams of bringing into its fold doubt that it is willing or able to protect their core interests. They are now less concerned about confronting Iran—and less convinced that the road to Washington leads through Tel Aviv. And Israel seems not to grasp the extent of Trump’s affinities with the Gulf states.
Wishful thinking has pervaded the Israeli government and national security establishment, which have reveled in the opportunities created by the country’s exercise of strength. After the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, Israel embarked on a cascading series of airstrikes and interventions across the region aimed not just at Hamas but at the entire Iranian-led axis, repeatedly crossing redlines that had long governed the regional shadow war, killing leaders who had been viewed as untouchable: Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah with a massive bomb dropped in central Beirut, Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in an Iranian safe house, multiple Iranian military commanders in Syria, and the Houthi prime minister of Yemen. Its bombing of nuclear and military sites in Iran represented the culmination of Israel’s long-held desire to strike at the heart of its greatest foe.
An attack in the Gulf, however, has proved to be a surprising turning point. Israel’s shocking attempt to assassinate Hamas leaders gathered for U.S.-brokered negotiations in Doha in September represented a dramatic escalation of its bid to reshape the Middle East by airpower. That was the kind of gambit undertaken only by leaders completely convinced of their immunity from the consequences of their actions. But Trump decided that this time, Israel had gone too far. The indelible image of a scowling Trump watching Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sheepishly read a scripted apology on a phone call to the emir of Qatar seems emblematic of the shifting geopolitical moment that led to the initial cease-fire in Gaza.
It is unclear whether Trump’s irritation with Israel will produce meaningful changes beyond the cease-fire. Citing supposed Hamas attacks in the south of Gaza, the Israeli military has resumed bombarding parts of the territory this week. Israel would be far better served by stepping back from the brink and embracing the opportunity offered by the cease-fire to dial down its military adventurism and seek the kind of sustainable regional order that can be reached only through serious movement toward a Palestinian state. Protracted conflict has exposed Israel’s shortcomings: its missile defenses do not offer perfect security, its economy cannot sustain endless war, its domestic politics are convulsed after the long period of strife in Gaza, and its military remains deeply dependent on the United States. The devastation of Gaza has destroyed Israel’s standing in the world, leaving the country increasingly isolated and alone.
Israel cannot bomb the Middle East into a stable new order. Regional leadership requires more than military primacy. It also demands some degree of consent and cooperation from other regional powers. But nobody in the Middle East wants Israeli leadership, and all states now increasingly fear its unchecked might. Some in Washington celebrate the prospect of an unrestrained Israel laying waste to U.S. adversaries. But they should be careful what they wish for. Israel’s interests are not the same as those of the United States—and Israel is writing a lot of checks that the United States might not be willing or able to cash.
THE ONCE AND FUTURE ORDER
Israel’s bid to remake the region has gone further than most imagined it ever could, but it swims against strong currents. The Middle Eastern regional order has been remarkably stable over the last 35 years. Beneath the turbulence, violence, and seemingly nonstop churn, the basic structure of regional politics has experienced only a few moments of potential change—none of which lasted. That structure consists of an uneasy, unpopular, and largely unwanted American primacy at the international level and a highly robust, if only occasionally acknowledged, division of the region into two competing blocs.
This regional order arose with American global primacy following the collapse of the Soviet Union. During the Cold War, countries in the region had the option of playing the two superpowers off each other, while Washington and Moscow worried excessively about the possible loss of valuable local proxies and allies. After 1991, all roads ran through Washington. The critical question became whether countries fell inside or outside that order. Those inside—Israel and most of the Arab states—enjoyed security guarantees, access to international institutions and financing, and diplomatic protections. Those outside—Iran, Iraq, Libya, and Syria—faced crippling sanctions, frequent bombings and covert interventions, and routine demonization. Small wonder that Libya and Syria spent much of the 1990s and early 2000s trying to find their way back into Washington’s good graces and back into the U.S.-led regional order.
American primacy, weakened by the debacle of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the 2008 global financial crisis, no longer looks as ironclad as it was in previous decades. But multipolarity remains a distant prospect. Russia had only one ally in the region—the enfeebled regime of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Now, after Assad’s 2024 ouster, it has none. China’s inexorable economic rise and daunting array of strategic agreements with regional powers has not manifested in any serious challenge to the U.S.-led regional order. Beijing has been largely invisible on Gaza and merely condemned the Israeli and U.S. bombing of Iran. China maintains only one naval base in the region, a small post in Djibouti that is used for counterpiracy efforts in the Gulf of Aden, but it did nothing when the Houthis blockaded Red Sea shipping as retribution for Israel’s campaign in Gaza. For now, China seems content to keep free-riding on American military dominance in the Gulf despite Chinese dependence on Middle Eastern oil and gas. Although states in the region are trying to diversify their military and economic partnerships and strike more favorable bargains with Washington, no alternative to American primacy has yet emerged.
Israel cannot bomb the Middle East into a stable new order.
Middle Eastern states have all been comfortably ensconced, since 1991, in a functionally bipolar regional order that arrays a U.S.-led bloc comprising Israel, most Arab states, and Turkey against Iran and its regional partners. Gulf leaders feel comfortable with Trump’s transactional approach and his hunger for the kind of deals that wealthy oil states can readily offer. The Abraham Accords, in which several Arab states normalized relations with Israel in 2020 at Trump’s behest, changed little but the optics, as many of those Arab states had long maintained strategic relations with Israel against Iran.
This U.S.-led order has proved remarkably robust. The collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process in 2001 and the brutal second intifada didn’t disrupt it in any meaningful sense. Nor did the September 11 attacks, the catastrophic invasion of Iraq, or the pursuit of extremely unpopular policies in the name of the global “war on terror.” Those disasters did strengthen the position of the Iranian bloc, which for decades seemed to be rising inexorably as its allies reached dominant positions in Baghdad, Beirut, and Sanaa; the Assad regime clung to power in Damascus; and Hamas and Hezbollah developed formidable arsenals of missiles and other military capabilities.
During the great disruptions of the era of Arab uprisings after 2011, that bipolarity turned into something recognizably tripolar. Iran’s “axis of resistance” mostly held together. But the threats and opportunities opened by those momentous political changes drove intensely destructive competition across multiple regional fronts, splitting the U.S.-led coalition in two: Qatar and Turkey on one side, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates on the other, and Washington struggling to keep them working toward the same goals. The Emirati-Saudi blockade of Qatar from 2017 to 2021 severely hampered efforts to maintain a unified front against Iran. But that ill-begotten spat resolved itself quickly when U.S. President Joe Biden took office, with all the major parties reconciling, resuming the traditional order despite the failure of the Biden administration’s monomaniacal pursuit of an Israeli-Saudi normalization agreement.
In the wake of the war in Gaza, however, Arab regimes have rediscovered their interest in the Palestinian question. Always fearful of a renewed wave of popular uprisings and carefully attuned to potential triggers for new protests, the region’s leaders are keenly aware of the depth of public outrage over the ethnic cleansing and devastation of Gaza. The Saudi reassertion of the Arab Peace Initiative, which predicates peace with Israel on the creation of a Palestinian state, shows how potent the shift has been. That shift was reflected in the terms of the Gaza cease-fire, which ruled out the expulsion of Palestinians and the Israeli annexation of the territory, conditions that aligned more closely with Gulf preferences than with those of Israel.
ISRAEL’S LOST MOMENT
And yet this turn has been lost on Israeli leaders. They dwell instead on how Israel’s campaign against Iran and Iran’s allies has upended the balance of power in the region. The decapitation of Hezbollah’s leadership and the destruction of much of its missile arsenal removed one of Iran’s critical military assets. The fall of the Assad regime deprived Tehran of an easy path to rebuilding its Lebanese ally, while Israel systematically destroyed Syria’s military arsenal, attacked Iranian assets in the country, and claimed effective sovereignty over a large swath of Syria’s south.
Israeli national security thinkers and officials believe that each escalation has proved only that the concerns of critics were overblown. Their mistake prior to October 7, they now insist, had been to allow threats to fester without dealing with them decisively, whatever the cost. Their gamble is that order can be imposed by force and from the air and that Arab leaders are either so intimidated or so weak that they would never risk responding. Israel seems convinced that normative concerns don’t matter much: legitimacy, its actions suggest, simply follows the gun. Arab leaders might grumble but will ultimately toe the line set by the ascendant regional hegemon. Israel has always been the most realist of regional powers. It prefers a region where might makes right, where no self-interested state would sacrifice its interests for the Palestinians, where international law has no binding force, and where military power reigns supreme.
But Israel’s military primacy and grumbling Arab acquiescence won’t make a sustainable order. Consolidating Israeli regional leadership would require Arab states to share with Israel either a sense of purpose or a sense of threat. Israel has undermined both. The destruction of Gaza and moves toward the annexation of the West Bank have ripped away any pretense of Israel allowing a path toward a just solution to the question of Palestinian statehood. Even before Israeli attacks decimated Iran’s regional military power, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states had been moving toward rapprochement with the Islamic Republic. After the strike on Doha (and, before that, Israeli threats to expel millions of Palestinians into Egypt and Jordan), Israel now appears as much a threat to Arab regimes as does an enfeebled Iran. And Arab countries will not feel as inclined to countenance an unpalatable alignment with Israel if the threat from Iran no longer keeps them awake at night.
Unchecked power and unbounded ambition lead to tragedy. Israel has proved notably unwilling to take any meaningful steps toward building the shared sense of purpose that might allow its military success to be translated into regional leadership. Israelis remain consumed by the trauma of the October 7 attack. Large majorities of the Israeli public reject the international condemnation of the country’s war crimes in Gaza, with most simply refusing to believe reports of famine or mass civilian casualties. And Netanyahu is more concerned with maintaining his narrow far-right government than with addressing international criticism and reviving plans for Palestinian statehood that are anathema to his coalition partners. The Gaza cease-fire offered an opportunity to change direction, but the continuing skirmishes, ongoing obstruction of humanitarian aid, and escalating settler violence in the West Bank do not bode well.
Arab regimes have rediscovered their interest in the Palestinian question.
It doesn’t help that Israel also holds an exaggerated view of its military strength. For all its audacious surprise strikes and clear air superiority, Israel does not have the kind of military that can occupy and hold territory beyond the Palestinian and Syrian lands it seized 55 years ago. It has shown that it can advance many of its tactical goals through assassinations and bombings from afar. But it has not shown that it can actually accomplish any of its strategic objectives: Hamas remains the most powerful force in Gaza, Hezbollah refuses to disarm despite taking significant losses, and the massive 12-day campaign against Iran failed to end Iran’s nuclear program or inspire Iranians to rise up and overthrow the Islamic Republic.
Israel’s military dominance is real, but it remains contingent. Israel could sustain its war on Gaza only with American resupply of munitions. Its Iron Dome defenses against Iranian missile strikes ran dangerously low of interceptors before the United States imposed a cease-fire in the 12-day war. Israel’s emergency appeals over the course of the last two years to Washington reveal how deeply dependent the country remains on the United States. Regional powers have surely taken note of this potential vulnerability in a protracted conflict.
Netanyahu has been playing the game of American politics for decades and has good reason to assume Israel’s hold on U.S. policy will persist indefinitely despite current turbulence. But warning lights should be flashing. Netanyahu’s partisan embrace of the Republicans and Israel’s conduct in Gaza have badly eroded what was once a bipartisan consensus in favor of Israel. Majorities of Democrats now sympathize more with the Palestinians than with the Israelis, and Democratic politicians are increasingly questioning military aid to Israel. Republicans continue to support Israel, but the nativists in “America first” circles seem less willing to subordinate U.S. interests to Israel’s. Trump is aging, unpredictable, and erratic and has deep personal and financial ties to Gulf regimes; his potential Republican successors, such as Vice President JD Vance, have no particular commitment to Israel. Without a blank check from the United States, Israel’s primacy could evaporate much faster than anyone expects.
Israel may view itself as the region’s new hegemon, but in fact it has made itself both less necessary and less useful. After the attack on Qatar, leaders of the Gulf states are unlikely to continue pointing all their air defense systems toward Iran and Yemen. Perhaps they could accept Israel’s obliteration of Gaza, but now Israel has made itself a threat to their own security. That Israel has avoided paying any serious price thus far for its military expansionism in the region and for the devastation of Gaza has fed the sense in Israel that it never will. But that is as misguided as the Israeli belief in 1973 that no Arab state would ever dare attack it again after its sweeping victory six years earlier or its notion, prior to October 7, 2023, that Hamas would remain forever contained in Gaza.
*Marc Lynch is Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University and the author of America’s Middle East: The Ruination of a Region.