Foreign Policy magazine published an article by Stephen Walt, the Robert and Rene Belfer Professor of International Affairs at Harvard University, entitled “The Serious Deterioration of Israel’s Strategy,” in which he said: “Israel is in a dangerous situation. Its citizens are deeply divided and this situation is unlikely to improve. It is stuck in a war it cannot win in Gaza. Its military is showing signs of fatigue. A large-scale war with Hezbollah or Iran remains possible. Israel’s economy is in dire straits. The Times of Israel reported that 60,000 businesses could close this year.”

Walt added that Israel’s recent behavior has damaged its global image and that it has become a pariah state in ways that no one had previously imagined.

He pointed out that after the Hamas attacks on October 7, Israel received a great deal of sympathy around the world and that Israel had the right to respond forcefully. But after 10 months of genocidal warfare against Palestinians in Gaza and settler violence in the West Bank, the initial sympathy has worn off. The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has sought arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defense minister, Yoav Galant, on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The International Court of Justice issued a preliminary ruling that described Israel’s actions as genocidal in nature and intent.

The court has long held that Israel’s occupation and colonization of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem are in clear violation of international law. Only Zionists with their heads in the sand can look at what is happening in Gaza without feeling deeply disturbed, if not horrified, says Walt. Support in the United States for Israel’s actions is declining, he adds, and young Americans, including a significant number of young Jews, oppose the Biden administration’s timid response to Israel’s actions.

Just read a tweet by Eran Etzion, a former deputy national security adviser to Israel’s president, and you’ll get a sense of the damage Israel has done to itself. Then read what historian Omer Bartov, one of the world’s leading scholars of genocide, wrote about his recent visit to Israel to understand the depth of the problem.

It is easy to blame Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Walt said, and he certainly deserves the criticism he has received at home and abroad. But pinning all the blame on Netanyahu ignores a deeper problem: the gradual erosion of Israeli strategic thinking over the past 50 years. Israel’s achievements and tactical prowess in its first two decades tend to obscure—especially among older people—the role that key strategic choices Israel has made since 1967 have played in undermining its security.

The early strategists and the first generation of Israeli leaders were distinguished by strategic ingenuity and tried to do the impossible: establish a Jewish state in the heart of the Arab world, even though the Jewish population in Palestine was small at the beginning of the twentieth century and was a clear minority with the declaration of Israel in 1948.

The founders succeeded through their harsh realism and taking advantage of favorable opportunities in building paramilitary forces and then building a distinguished army, according to the author. He added that they worked hard and diligently to gain the support of the dominant world powers.

It is worth noting, for example, that the Soviet Union and the United States supported the 1947 UN resolution to partition Palestine and recognized the state shortly after its declaration. David Ben-Gurion and his comrades were distinguished by their constant readiness to accept arrangements that did not serve their long-term goal, even temporarily, as long as these arrangements brought them closer to their ultimate goal.

After the establishment of the state, the new government worked hard to establish international relations through “hasbara” or propaganda, and established practical alliances with France, South Africa and a number of other countries. Most important of all, it established a “special relationship” with the United States, based largely on the growing influence and power of the “Israel lobby.” Israel’s early leaders understood that a small country surrounded by hostile states needed to carefully calculate its actions and go to great lengths to win international support.

Smart diplomacy and a modicum of deceit helped develop a secret arsenal of nuclear weapons, and concealed the harsh realities that led to Israel’s creation, which did not become widely known until the groundbreaking research of Benny Morris, Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim, Simcha Flapan, and other “new historians” in the 1980s.

No government is perfect, Walt points out, and Israel’s early leaders sometimes made mistakes. Prime Minister Ben-Gurion made the mistake of colluding with Britain and France to attack Egypt in the 1956 “Suez Crisis,” then saying that Israel might not withdraw its forces. But he quickly abandoned this position when the Eisenhower administration made clear that it would not tolerate such unjustified expansion.

Overall, the Zionist state’s strategic acumen in its early days was impressive, especially when compared to its adversaries. The pivotal point was its victory in the 1967 war. It was not as miraculous as it seemed at the time; American intelligence predicted the outcome and that Israel would win easily. But the speed and extent of that victory surprised many and helped foster a sense of arrogance that has undermined Israel’s strategic judgment ever since.

Perhaps the most significant mistake, as rational Israeli scholars have noted, made by Israel’s leaders was the decision to occupy and colonize the West Bank and Gaza as part of the “Greater Israel” plan. While Ben-Gurion tried to reduce the population inside Israel, keeping Gaza and the West Bank meant controlling a rapidly growing Palestinian population, as numerous as the Jewish population in Israel.

This occupation created an unavoidable tension between the Jewish character of the state and its democratic system. Israel can only remain a Jewish state by suppressing Palestinian rights and establishing an apartheid regime, in an era when this political system has become anathema to increasing numbers of people around the world.

Israel could deal with this problem through further ethnic cleansing and/or genocide, but both constitute crimes against humanity, and no true friend of Israel would support them, followed by the establishment of a Greater Israel.

The second mistake occurred when Israeli leaders, and US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, ignored signals from Egyptian President Anwar Sadat that he was prepared for peace in exchange for the return of the Sinai Peninsula, which Israel occupied in 1967. However, the Israeli military assumed that Egypt was in a weak position to confront Israel. The result was the October War (Yom Kippur) in 1973. Israel was able to overcome the crisis after the surprise, but not in the negotiations that led to Israel’s withdrawal from Sinai.

The operation culminated in Sadat’s historic visit to Jerusalem, followed by the Camp David negotiations. Unfortunately, Menachem Begin, who was devoted to the dream of Greater Israel, missed an opportunity to address the Palestinian issue once and for all, according to the author.

This mistake was followed by the decision to invade Lebanon in 1982, as an example of the erosion of the Israeli strategic vision. This decision was the brainchild of Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, who convinced Begin that the operation would expel the PLO from Lebanon, lead to the establishment of a pro-Israel government in Beirut, and give Israel a free hand in the West Bank and Gaza.

Despite the short-term success of the invasion, it led to the occupation of southern Lebanon and the emergence of Hezbollah as a powerful resistance movement that forced Israel to withdraw in 2000.

The war did not deter the Palestinians’ dreams of resistance, despite the PLO’s departure from Lebanon. Its departure led to the first intifada, a sign of the Palestinians’ refusal to leave their homeland or submit to Israeli subjugation.

Despite the recognition by Israelis with visions that the Palestinian issue will not disappear, successive Israeli governments have acted in ways that have made it worse.

Israel has not given the Palestinians or the PLO, which signed the Oslo Accords in 1993, any chance of a viable state. The closest concession was what Ehud Barak offered at Camp David, a demilitarized Palestinian state with Israeli control over airspace and water resources. Shlomo Ben-Ami, the former Israeli foreign minister, said: “If I were a Palestinian, I would reject Camp David.” Achieving peace with the Palestinians required Israel to halt settlement expansion in the occupied territories and work with the Palestinians to establish a functioning government, but the Israeli governments, especially Sharon and Netanyahu, did the opposite.

They refused to halt settlement expansion and worked hard to sow discord among the Palestinians, even if it meant supporting Hamas, even if only tactically, and they obstructed the United States’ efforts to achieve a two-state solution. The policies led to devastating and inconclusive confrontations, from Cast Lead in 2008-2009 to Cast Lead in 2014, culminating in Hamas’ breach of the security fence on October 7, the worst blow Israel has received in decades.

The author adds a final example of Israeli strategic shortsightedness, represented by its opposition to international efforts to negotiate limits on Iran’s nuclear program. Israel, for what the author sees as good strategic reasons, wants to remain the only nuclear state in the Middle East, and does not want to see Iran, its most prominent regional rival, possess 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. The reason, he says, is that the agreement set conditions on uranium enrichment, along with strict international inspections of nuclear facilities and other conditions that would have delayed Iran’s nuclear program for a decade or more.

A number of Israeli security officials supported the agreement, but Netanyahu, AIPAC and hardline groups in the United States rejected it, playing a significant role in Donald Trump’s withdrawal from it in 2018.

The author believes that the explanation for Israel’s strategic erosion is the sense of arrogance and impunity that comes from protecting the United States and complying with Israel’s wishes. If the most powerful country in the world supports you no matter what you do, you have less need to think about your actions.

Moreover, Israel’s tendency to present itself as a victim, blaming all opposition to its policies as anti-Semitism, doesn’t help, because it makes it harder for Israeli leaders and their public to see how their actions might be fueling the hostility they face. Netanyahu’s tenure as Israel’s longest-serving prime minister is another part of the problem, Walt adds, especially since his actions are driven in large part by self-interest (i.e., a desire to avoid prison for corruption), not just by concerns about what’s best for his country.