Israeli Defence Forces over Lebanon (1982) | IDF Spokesperson’s Unit / CC BY-SA 3.0
Over a long twentieth century of regional tussles, Israel’s local foreign policy focus has shifted from preventing the emergence of a regional hegemon toward a campaign for outright domination. The strategy has shattered the Middle East’s fragile and imperfect status quo, the stability of which was closely connected to the question of diplomatic recognition of Israeli and Palestinian statehood. But a strategy of “Gazification” of the Middle East may ultimately be Israel’s undoing.
A “secret” stabilizer
Iran and Israel used to have a different type of relationship; they were allies until 1979 and even secret partners during the 1980s, when Israel covertly supported Iran by providing them with military assistance in their war with Iraq. Pre-revolutionary Iran, Turkey, and Ethiopia were part of Ben Gurion’s “periphery doctrine” of strategic partnerships between Israel and non-Arab countries to counterbalance Iraq, Syria, and Egypt. The periphery doctrine allowed Israel to successfully prevent any other power from becoming a regional hegemon. Other nations shared this strategic interest. The threat that the republican Pan-Arabism championed by Egypt’s President Nasser posed to Saudi Arabia and other Arab monarchies resulted in a regional cold war, with republican nations such as Egypt and Syria backed by the Soviet Union, and the Arab monarchies, supported by the United States.
Saddam Hussein’s fantasies of a Middle East ruled from Baghdad and Iran’s vision of a Shia Crescent stretching from Tehran to Beirut similarly antagonized Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries, which openly welcomed the United States as a counterbalancing force and tacitly supported Israel’s shadow wars against both Iraq and Iran. Through its periphery doctrine, Israel was able to locate itself as the region’s “secret” guarantor of stability, gaining sympathy from the traditional Arab monarchies and conservative military republics vested in the status quo.
After the Gulf war in 1991, no country in the region dared to challenge US dominance, effectively guaranteeing Israel’s security. It was at this juncture, post–Cold War with a contained Iraq and a weak Iran, that Israel seemed set to normalize relations with its neighbors. Middle East relations could not be untied from Palestinian statehood, and the Palestinian question might be addressed at this moment of relative stability—but American dominance meant Tel Aviv could dictate the terms and timetable of “the Palestinian question.” Israel could then go forward with the Oslo Accords of 1993 and normalize relations with Jordan in 1994 without recognizing the elephant in the room.
But Israel might have not had any other alternative than to seriously engage with the Palestinians, had not the regional context radically changed in 2003.
The rise of Iran
After invading Iraq in response to 9/11, US leadership expected that the democratic model imposed in the regime would be emulated by surrounding countries, leading to a stable, peaceful, and prosperous Middle East no longer capable of fostering international terrorism. However, the collapse of Saddam triggered two interrelated consequences: massive regional instability and Iran’s ascendency. Without Saddam’s regime, neighboring countries could no longer contain Iranian influence within Iraqi society. Israel and Saudi Arabia suddenly faced their nightmare scenario of a Shia crescent. The United States’ role had shifted from maintaining the regional balance of power to becoming an exogenous source of disorder.
Tehran’s strategic patience has helped the regime capitalize on the failure of American “democratic messianism.” Learning from Nasser’s and Hussein’s mistakes, Ali Khamenei had avoided, at least for a little while, direct confrontation with Israel and the United States. Neither the multiple assassinations of nuclear scientists, nor cyber-attacks, nor the killing of IRGC members ever led to an overt Iranian retaliation; even when Qasem Soleimani was assassinated, Iran’s response was telegraphed in advance and calibrated to avoid an all-out war.
But the upheavals of the Arab spring, which seemed to further cement the end of US hegemony in the region, did prompt Iran to double down on its proxy war with Saudi Arabia. This came at the cost of the regional legitimacy the country had gained in the previous years; while targeting Americans and ISIS was popular across Arab societies, liquifying anti-Assad cities in Syria was not.Still, Iran had achieved a land bridge to Lebanon and was not about to relinquish it.
The growth of Iran’s axis of resistance, enabled by America’s failure of containment, triggered Israel and Saudi Arabia to launch two parallel shadow wars against Tehran. Israel was back to acting as a balancing counter to regional hegemony, this time against Iran. The importance neighboring countries placed on this check to Iranian ascendancy provided Israel another extension on addressing the Palestinian question once again.
After America’s exit
Following the Iraq war quagmire, the United States shifted from directly intervening in the region to providing logistical, intelligence, and material support to allies to contain Iran and its proxies. Starting with Obama and maturing under Trump, coalition operations targeting ISIS, Bashar al-Assad’s forces, and Iranian militias in Iraq were the exception and not the rule. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Jordan could count on US arms, satellites, and air refueling for their respective interventions in Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Iraq but could not get American troops—on the ground or in the air—in campaigns against Iran.
Washington’s pivot away from the Middle East convinced Israeli leadership that it was up to Israel to remake the region on its own terms: Israeli military and technological power, supported by Saudi energy and financial assets, would transform the Middle East into a bridge between South Asia and Europe. Such a grab for regional power would, of course, only be possible with behind-the-scenes American support and tacit Arab acceptance.
It’s this vision of hegemony that is now driving Israel’s regional policy—and has catapulted the Middle East to the brink of war. After October 7, the Netanyahu government obliterated Gaza, then tried to uproot Hezbollah all together from Lebanon. Israel has bombed Yemen to punish the Houthi— now under an intense American bombing campaign—and has continued hitting pro-Iranian militias in Syria and Iraq. All these actions, reinforced by the lack of US pressure on Tel Aviv, prompted Khamenei to abandon strategic patience and directly engage Israel by means of ballistic missile attacks. Israel responded with three waves of strikes targeting more than 20 military sites in Iran.
Israel’s current unhinged bid for hegemony is unprecedented in the history of the state. Begin, Shamir, Rabin, and Sharon eventually chose negotiation and limited disengagement; they never attempted a full reconfiguration of the entire region. In the West Bank, settler violence and Palestinian displacement has rapidly increased since October 7, and the Israeli government has quietly altered the legal system of the occupation to facilitate eventual annexation. Since Trump’s statement on the future of Gaza, there are fears of a potential transfer of three million Palestinians into Jordan and two million into Egypt.
Meanwhile, the fall of Assad’s regime in Syria was appropriated by Benjamin Netanyahu, who added it to his Axis of Resistance trophy room, further cementing Israeli seriousness in assuming the role of regional hegemon. Tehran’s bridge to Beirut is no more, effectively preventing Iran from supplying arms to Hezbollah. And Israel has now achieved complete aerial supremacy over Syria, clearing the path for the possibility of future strikes on Iran. After destroying Iran’s Shia Crescent, Netanyahu expects that “normalizing” attacks on Iranian military assets will trigger regime change. We’ve seen this rationale before. Realizing they have no conventional deterrence strategies left, leaders in Tehran seem poised to accelerate their nuclear program.
But should Tehran’s regime change, the strategic alignment of Israeli and Arab interests would end, and Israel would be forced to negotiate a solution to the Palestinian question.
“Gazification” of the Middle East
By exclusively relying on war and aiming for the total obliteration of its enemies, Israel seeks a regional domination that does not integrate the defeated but excludes them and transforms them into “new Gazas.” But the cycle of Palestinian resistance through violence and Israeli retaliation should serve as evidence that a regional tactic of “Gazification,” meaning the exclusive use of total war to achieve regional hegemony, may ultimately be the ruin of Israel.
Hamas’s strategy of derailing peace talks through massive violence on October 7 to demand Palestinian agency had been used by a much earlier Palestinian insurgent group. In the Coastal Road massacre of March 1978, Palestine Liberation Organization militants killed dozens of Israelis on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. The objective was to torpedo the Israeli-Egyptian peace negotiations and prevent normalization of relations between the two countries without Palestinian involvement, just the attempted normalization with Saudi Arabia in 2023. Instead, Israel signed the Camp David, accords with Egypt and withdrew from the Sinai, without addressing Palestine—a trade-off guaranteed by US financial and military assistance to states willing to normalize relations. Israel then invaded Southern Lebanon, where the PLO was by this point headquartered.
Israel’s second full invasion of Lebanon in 1982 resulted in the installation of a reactionary, pro-Israel Christian Maronite government and the extirpation of the PLO from Lebanon. This was achieved through the obliteration of Palestinian refugee camps and the execution of ethnic cleansing targeting Palestinian, Sunni, Druze, and Shia Lebanese communities. Most of these massacres were led by Christian phalangists coordinated and supported by the IDF. In that period, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf states were focusing on hindering the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and containing the Iranian Revolution. Israel taking on USSR-funded Assad and Arafat forces in Lebanon was not entirely unwelcome to Cairo and Riyadh. Israel came very close to extinguishing the PLO in 1982, but it halted its siege of Beirut due to American pressure and domestic backlash. The PLO relocated to Tunisia, and the vacancy it left behind was filled by insurgent groups that saw Israel as an ally of the phalangists in the civil war and, therefore, a threat to Lebanese self-determination. Eventually, Hezbollah emerged as the main political group championing Shia Lebanese communities and targeting Israeli forces within Lebanon and eventually Israeli territory itself.
The liquidation of Palestinians in Sabra and Shatila four decades ago resembles the one happening today at Jabalya. For over a year, we have witnessed Israel’s reaction to the October 7 massacre. Its declared strategic goal is to eradicate Hamas from Gaza to prevent any future threats by making Gaza uninhabitable to Palestinians. Genocide might not have been meticulously planned or intentionally organized but it is clearly the outcome.
This is almost the exact same playbook Israel followed in Lebanon in 1982. That war resulted in the birth of Hezbollah and ushered the Israeli-Iranian rivalry that would slowly start to monopolize Israeli foreign policy post-1991. Now, by choosing to make a desert of Gaza and call it peace, Israel might have inaugurated its own slow suicide.
