Israel traditionally takes an aggressive military stance toward its adversaries, but the war in Gaza has become more deadly than ever in the past ten months, with some 40,000 people killed there alone. This confirms to Israel’s critics that its goal is to destroy the Palestinian people, but the real explanation for this change is more complicated than all that.

With this introduction, Foreign Policy magazine opened an article by David Rosenberg in which he said that even Israel’s friends abroad find it difficult to understand its behavior in the Gaza war and its secondary conflicts with Hezbollah, Iran, and the Houthis.

While some may tolerate large numbers of civilian casualties as an inevitable part of urban warfare, as the author says, many find it difficult to comprehend Israel’s prevention of sufficient humanitarian aid from entering Gaza and its apparent indifference to the massive deaths. Some are also puzzled by its willingness to risk what could be a devastating war with Hezbollah or Iran, with its successive showy assassinations that would be classified as state violence by any government’s standards.

The author explained that the goal of the far right in Israel is to make life unbearable for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, noting that the leaders of this right have no strategy other than to see the suffering of the Palestinians and the continuation of the war, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has acquiesced to their will in order to ensure their survival in the ruling coalition, and so he has been tough on ceasefire negotiations and has not allowed sufficient humanitarian aid to reach Gaza.

The erosion of deterrence

The writer recalled the statement of the leader of the right-wing Religious Zionist Party and Minister of Finance, Bezalel Smotrich, in this context, that he would have no problem allowing the people of Gaza to starve, and that Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, allowed the inhumane conditions in the Sde Teiman detention center for Palestinians arrested in the war to worsen.

Some observers confirm that the Israelis have become more violent, or at least more tolerant of violence, especially since the violence between extremist settlers towards the Palestinians has increased and has come to be seen as a legitimate tool to achieve their political goals.

In the wake of the 1967 war, the Israelis felt that the existence of their country was no longer threatened, and they concluded peace agreements with Arab countries that recognized their existence, such as Egypt, Jordan, the Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco, and normalization with Saudi Arabia seemed on the horizon. Therefore, Israel abandoned the first pillar of its three defense strategy, which is victory in the war, and allowed the second, which is deterrence, to erode, and became overly dependent on the third, which is intelligence.

Since the 1980s, the author says, Israel's wars with unconventional forces have not ended in a decisive victory, and thus its ability to deter its enemies has diminished. Instead of achieving a decisive victory and effective deterrence, it has become increasingly dependent on defensive measures such as walls, fences, and high-tech early warning systems.

The author concluded that Israel paid a heavy price for these policies on October 7 out of existential fear, saying that Israelis believe that the survival of their country is now in doubt, adding that although Israel responded quickly to the attack by the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), Iran and its proxies understood the extent of its intelligence and organizational failure.

Source: Foreign Policy+ Al Jazeera