Foreign Policy: The Serious Decline of Israeli Strategy

For decades, the Zionist project has gotten worse at defending itself.

Israel is in serious trouble. Its citizens are deeply divided, and that situation is unlikely to improve. It is mired in an unwinnable war in Gaza, its military is showing signs of tension, and a broader war with Hezbollah or Iran remains a real possibility. The Israeli economy is suffering badly, and the Times of Israel recently reported that as many as 60,000 businesses could close this year.

Moreover, Israel’s recent behavior has seriously damaged its global image, and it has become a pariah state in ways that were previously unimaginable. After the brutal attacks by Hamas on October 7, 2023, Israel received a large and appropriate outpouring of sympathy from around the world, and it was widely accepted that Israel was entitled to respond forcefully. But more than a decade later, Israel’s genocidal campaign against Palestinians in Gaza and increasing settler violence in the West Bank have squandered that initial wave of support. The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has filed arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Galant for war crimes and crimes against humanity; the International Court of Justice has issued preliminary findings describing Israel’s actions as genocidal in nature and intent; and the court has finally declared that Israel’s occupation and colonization of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem constitute a clear violation of international law. Only the most ardent Zionist apologists for Gaza can be deeply disturbed, if not horrified. Support in the United States for Israel’s actions is declining sharply, and younger Americans (including many younger American Jews) are opposed to the Biden administration’s sluggish response to Israel’s actions. Read this tweet by Eran Etzion, a former deputy head of Israel’s National Security Council, and you’ll get a good idea of the damage Israel has done to itself. Then read this account of a recent visit by historian Omer Bartov, one of the world’s leading scholars of genocide, and you’ll get an idea of how deep the problem runs.

It’s tempting to blame all these problems on Netanyahu, and he certainly deserves the criticism he’s received at home and abroad. But pinning all the blame on Bibi ignores a deeper problem: the gradual erosion of Israeli strategic thinking over the past 50 years. The country’s achievements and tactical prowess during its first two decades tend to obscure—especially among its elders—the extent to which key strategic choices Israel has made since 1967 have helped undermine its security.

The early Zionists and the first generation of Israeli leaders were strategic savvy. They tried to achieve something that seemed almost impossible: a Jewish state in the middle of the Arab world, even though the Jewish population of Palestine in 1900 was tiny and they were still a distinct minority when Israel was founded in 1948. The founders succeeded by being extremely pragmatic: they seized opportunities, built capable paramilitary forces (and later a first-rate army and air force), and worked hard to win the support of the world’s dominant powers. It is worth noting, for example, that the Soviet Union and the United States supported the UN partition plan of 1947 and recognized Israel shortly after its founding. David Ben-Gurion and his fellow Zionist leaders were often willing to accept arrangements that did not achieve their long-term goals, at least temporarily, provided that the agreement brought them closer to their ultimate goals. After achieving statehood, the new government worked hard to garner international support through relentless propaganda and working alliances with France, South Africa, and several other countries. Most important, 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 state surrounded by hostile powers must carefully calculate and do its utmost to win international support. Clever diplomacy and no small amount of deception also helped Israel develop a secret arsenal of nuclear weapons and conceal the harsh facts of Israel’s founding, which did not become widely known until the pioneering work of Benny Morris, Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim, Simha Flapan, and other “new historians” in the 1980s. No government is perfect, and Israel’s early leaders occasionally made mistakes. Ben-Gurion erred when he conspired with Great Britain and France to attack Egypt in the Suez Crisis of 1956 and then suggested that Israel might not withdraw its forces. But he soon abandoned this position when the Eisenhower administration made it clear that it would not tolerate such unjustified expansion. But overall, the Zionist state’s strategic prowess 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 seemed at the time (among other things, U.S. intelligence predicted that Israel would win easily), but the speed and scope of the victory surprised many and helped foster a sense of hubris that has undermined Israeli strategic judgment ever since.

The main mistake, as insightful Israeli scholars have repeatedly argued, 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 sought to reduce the number of Palestinians within the new Jewish state, but retaining the West Bank and Gaza meant that Israel now controlled a rapidly growing Palestinian population that was almost as numerous as the Jewish population of Israel. The resulting occupation, as it is often called, created an inevitable tension between Israel’s Jewish character and its democratic system: it could remain a Jewish state only by suppressing the political rights of the Palestinians and establishing an apartheid regime, in an era when such a political regime was anathema to growing numbers of people around the world. Israel could deal with this problem through further ethnic cleansing and/or genocide, but both were crimes against humanity that no true friend of Israel could countenance. But the decision to create a Greater Israel was soon followed by other mistakes. Israeli leaders (and their American counterparts, including Henry Kissinger) overlooked signs that Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was willing to make peace in exchange for the return of the Sinai Peninsula, which Israel had occupied in 1967. Moreover, Israeli intelligence mistakenly assumed that the Egyptian army was too weak to challenge the IDF in Sinai, and thus deterred it 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, combined with pressure from the United States, convinced Israeli leaders to begin serious negotiations to give up the Sinai. This shift ultimately led to Sadat’s historic visit to Jerusalem, the Camp David Accords, and the subsequent Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty (which was brokered by then-US President Jimmy Carter’s persistent and skillful mediation). Unfortunately, because of then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s deep commitment to the goal of Greater Israel and his unwillingness to end the occupation, he squandered this promising opportunity to address the Palestinian issue once and for all.

The next clear sign of the erosion of Israeli strategic judgment was the ill-fated invasion of Lebanon in 1982. This scheme was the brainchild of hardline Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, who convinced Begin that a military invasion there would disperse the PLO (which had a significant 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-lived military success, but it led to the IDF’s occupation of southern Lebanon, which in turn led directly to the creation of Hezbollah, whose increasingly powerful resistance eventually forced Israel to withdraw from Lebanon in 2000. The expulsion of the PLO from Lebanon did not stop Palestinian resistance: it paved the way for the first intifada in 1987, another clear signal that the Palestinians would not abandon their homeland or submit to permanent Israeli subjugation.

Although farsighted Israelis realized that the Palestinian issue would not go away, successive Israeli governments continued to act in ways that exacerbated the problem. For example, although the Palestine Liberation Organization accepted Israel’s existence with the signing of the first Oslo Accords in 1993, no Israeli leader was ever willing to offer the Palestinians a Palestinian state of his own. And while then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s supposedly generous offer at the Camp David summit in 2000 went far beyond any previous Israeli proposals, it still fell far short of giving the Palestinians a viable state. The best Israeli offer was to create two or three separate, demilitarized cantons in the West Bank, with Israel retaining full control over the new entity’s borders, airspace, and water resources. This was not a viable state, let alone one that any legitimate Palestinian leader could accept. Little wonder, then-Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami later admitted, “If I were a Palestinian, I would have rejected Camp David.” Achieving peace with the Palestinians requires Israel to halt settlement expansion in the occupied territories and work with the Palestinians to establish a competent, effective, and legitimate government. But Israel’s leaders—particularly the governments led by Sharon and Netanyahu—have done the opposite. 

They have refused to halt settlement expansion, worked hard to keep the Palestinians weak and divided even when this meant tacitly supporting Hamas, and repeatedly blocked U.S. efforts to achieve a two-state solution. The result has been a series of devastating but inconclusive clashes (such as Operation Cast Lead in 2008-09 and Operation Protective Edge in 2014). But these repeated efforts to “mow the grass” have not ended Palestinian resistance, and they ultimately culminated in Hamas’s cross-border attack on October 7, the worst blow to Israel in decades.

The final clear example of Israel’s strategic shortsightedness is its vehement opposition to international efforts to negotiate limits on Iran’s nuclear program. Israel, for good strategic reasons, wants to remain the only nuclear-armed state in the Middle East, and it does not want to see Iran, its most important regional adversary, acquire the bomb. Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders should have been pleased and relieved when the United States and other major powers persuaded 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 by the International Atomic Energy Agency, thereby putting an Iranian bomb out of reach for a decade or longer. Many senior Israeli security officials wisely supported the deal, but Netanyahu and his hardline supporters, along with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the most hawkish groups in the Israeli lobby in the United States, vehemently opposed it. 

These hardliners played a key role in convincing then-President Donald Trump to withdraw from the deal in 2018, and today Iran is closer to building a nuclear bomb than ever before. It is hard to imagine a more shortsighted Israeli policy. But what explains the sharp decline in Israeli strategic prowess? One important factor is the sense of arrogance and impunity that comes from the United States’ protection and deference to Israel’s wishes. If the world’s most powerful country supports you no matter what you do, there is less need to think through your actions. Moreover, Israel’s tendency to view itself as a victim and to blame all opposition to its policies on anti-Semitism does little to help, because it makes it difficult for Israeli leaders and their publics to see how their actions might arouse the hostility they face. 

Netanyahu’s reign as Israel’s longest-serving prime minister is another part of the problem, especially since his actions are driven largely by self-interest (i.e., a desire to avoid prison for corruption) rather than by concerns about what is best for his country. Add to this the growing influence of the religious right—whose messianic views on foreign policy were recently summarized in a chilling Haaretz article—and you have a recipe for disaster. When a country starts making strategic decisions based on apocalyptic prophecies and expectations of divine intervention, beware. 

Why should we care? Because the United States demonstrated in its response to the 9/11 attacks that countries that do not think intelligently about their strategic choices can do great harm to themselves and others. Israel’s actions threaten its long-term prospects, so anyone who wants a bright future for it should be deeply concerned about the decline of its strategic judgment. Its shortsighted, vindictive behavior has done enormous harm to innocent Palestinians for decades, and continues to do so today, but its chances of ending Palestinian resistance are slim. In fact, too close an erratic and ill-advised partner is also a serious problem for the United States, because it consumes time, attention, and resources and makes the United States look impotent and hypocritical. 

This could also inspire another wave of anti-American terrorism, with all the obvious harm that would entail. Unfortunately, how this situation can be fixed is not clear. The best that Israel’s supporters in the United States can do is to pressure Democrats and Republicans alike to use a heavy dose of tough love toward the Jewish state until it begins to reconsider its current course. Of course, this would also require lobby groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to reflect on their role in leading Israel to its current predicament. Sadly, there is no sign of that happening anytime soon. Instead, Israel and its supporters in the United States are doubling down. That is a recipe for endless trouble, if not disaster.