Israel Cannot Survive as a Pariah State

The escalation of hostilities is the culmination of a short-sighted strategy.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses the United Nations, September 27, 2024. (Pacific Press/Contributor).

What’s happening this week is what everybody has been afraid of for a year. The low-boil conflict between Israel and Hezbollah has erupted into an expansive shooting war, with Israel launching missiles and air strikes as far north as Beirut and Baalbek and sending ground troops across the border into southern Lebanon. Meanwhile, Iran has responded with missile strikes hitting Israel and Israel has vowed to retaliate.

It’s hard to avoid the impression that we are now entering a full-blown Middle Eastern war—what Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a belligerent speech to the UN last week, called “a seven-front war.” 

It’s such a fluid—and horrific—situation that it almost defeats any attempt to work up a smart analysis. But let’s try to understand the unfolding events in broad geopolitical terms. 

What seems to be happening is that Netanyahu is laying all his trumps down on the table. From a military perspective, Israel has reached something like a satisfactory outcome in Gaza: Yahya Sinwar is not dead, the majority of the hostages have not been recovered, but Hamas is vastly reduced as anything like a military threat. Israeli observers of the conflict like former prime minister Ehud Olmert assume that Israel has already achieved all its military objectives in Gaza and is continuing the campaign solely for political reasons. Meanwhile, Israel has been able to make use of its technological advantages to dismantle Hezbollah’s communications networks and to carry out an assassination of long-time Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Israel is essentially daring Iran to do its worst, but Iran’s missile strike Tuesday resulted in no fatalities in Israel, and Iran’s announcement that it would launch no further strikes indicates that its support of Hezbollah ends at its own direct self-interest. 

The timing of Israel’s escalation appears carefully considered and is (from a purely tactical point of view) in many ways propitious. The United States is consumed with elections, and Netanyahu is able to evade his minders in the foreign policy establishment: there is little question that, over the next months, the United States will not seriously consider any kind of halt to Israel’s flow of armaments. Meanwhile, the October 7th anniversary ensures that Netanyahu has a heightened degree of internal support even as he leads Israel into a wildly dangerous regional conflict. 

Many of Netanyahu’s gambles seem already to have paid off. Domestically, Netanyahu is, as The New York Times somewhat begrudgingly put it, “bask[ing] in a rare triumph.” And Hezbollah—which has been peppering northern Israel with rocket fire for the past year—seems already to be significantly weakened as it struggles to recover from Nasrallah’s death.

But the attack into Lebanon, following a year of brutal fighting in Gaza, following the brazen assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, represents the culmination of Netanyahu’s go-it-alone strategy. From a geopolitical perspective, it is hard to understand how a strategy like that could possibly be sustainable for a nation as small and embattled as Israel. 

Netanyahu’s speech at the UN, as well as his video directed at the Iranian people, were interesting above all as a departure from Israel’s existing communications strategies. Simply put, Israel, over the course of the last year, has barely even bothered to justify its conduct to the international community. In an interview two weeks ago with The Jerusalem Post, Eylon Levy, a former government spokesperson and international media advisor, said, “Israel simply does not have an information war machine to [broadcast its message internationally]. It built one at the beginning of the war and then allowed it to fall into disrepair.” 

Netanyahu’s twin speeches seemed designed to address the kind of criticism that Levy was lobbing at his administration. “These savage murderers, our enemies, seek not only to destroy us, but they seek to destroy our common civilization,” Netanyahu said at the UN, proposing a framing in which Israel represented democracy and the rule of law in an existential, civilizational struggle with Iran and its proxies. 

What is striking, though, is that arguments like that have been so rare over the past year. Israel has appeared largely indifferent as widespread sympathy after October 7th turned to international condemnation over the conduct of the Gaza War. Netanyahu opened his United Nations address by saying that he hadn’t planned to attend the General Assembly and deigned to do so only because the “lies and slanders leveled at [Israel]” had reached such a fever pitch. 

What is behind Israel’s reluctance to make its own case is, above all, a belief among many Israelis that Israel is in such a unique geopolitical situation that its Western allies can’t even begin to understand it. The argument is that Israel is surrounded by enemies who are entirely dedicated to its destruction and that Israel can survive only through the preemptive and punishing use of force. International norms are unimportant. Proportionality in warfare is unimportant. All that matters is the existential issue of Israel’s survival—and, if necessary, that survival will be achieved by assassinations in the sovereign territory of foreign states or by the full-on invasion of neighbors. The premise of Israel’s attitude is that there is almost no longer any point in explaining itself to the liberal West, which continues to fantasize about a “two-state solution” and about sovereignty for Palestine. The gulf in political theory between Israel and the West is just too wide. 

That sensibility has become so widespread in Israel—and certainly underpins the Netanyahu administration’s theory of national security—that it is easy to miss how many senior Israeli figures fundamentally disagree with it. Another former prime minister, Ehud Barak (also the most highly-decorated soldier in Israel’s history), argued in a September interview that there was absolutely no military reason for Netanyahu not to accept ceasefire talks and wind down the Gaza operation. “The real objective is to make sure that this chapter of the war is not going to end. For different reasons, political and others, he needs it,” Barak said of Netanyahu’s stalling of ceasefire talks. Major General Itzhak Brik, a former ombudsman for the Ministry of Defense, was even more scathing about Netanyahu’s policies. “The country really is galloping towards the edge of an abyss,” he wrote in Haaretz in August. “If the war of attrition against Hamas and Hezbollah continues, Israel will collapse within no more than a year.” What Brik was thinking of in particular was Israel’s growing isolation within the international community, and the likelihood of impending boycotts and arms embargoes. 

Israel, in its current militant state of mind, has simply chosen not to be bothered by any of those concerns, but a single-minded reliance on force alone is a luxury that a country as small as Israel cannot afford. Israel receives around 15% of its defense budget from the United States, as well as significant military aid from Germany. In January, an Israeli military advisor, attempting to be hubristic, told the Financial Times, “We can continue for another year or more [in Gaza] and we’ll see who breaks first.” That assessment, if properly parsed, is a less-than-overwhelming vote of confidence in Israel’s long-term war-making capacity. Meanwhile, Israel’s economy has shrunk over the last year, lagging significantly behind other developed countries. And Israel relies on the United States to run interference for it at an increasingly hostile UN. 

After October 7th, Israel had a rare opportunity to reset its international relationships and regain the support of the international community. Instead, under Netanyahu, Israel has gone in the other direction. That isolationary mindset passes itself off as tough realpolitik, but, from a geopolitical perspective, it’s short-sighted and unsustainable. No nation can survive without allies. By ignoring diplomacy and by neglecting even to make its case internationally, Israel is bringing itself to the brink. 

Sam Kahn is an associate editor at Persuasion and writes the Substack Castalia.

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