Israel secured three strategic victories in the past 15 months.

One — Israel has managed to acutely downgrade the military and logistical capabilities of its most ardent enemies, Hamas and Hizbollah. That it has done that in a relatively short period of time, and while effectively operating on multiple fronts, has restored within the Israeli military and security establishment its confidence and sense of being able to achieve major objectives.

Two — Israel has decimated Iran’s strategic position in the eastern Mediterranean. This is Israel’s primary long term victory in the past three decades, because the strategic presence that Iran had built in the eastern Mediterranean - mainly in Lebanon and Syria - in the past three decades, transcended military and logistical capabilities. Iran is the only major Middle Eastern country with a strategic doctrine blatantly hostile to Israel. Despite that, Iran had managed in the past two decades, to surround Israel with allies who, in several calculations, were able to effect a balance of deterrence with Israel. This allowed Iran to project power right on Israel’s borders, which gave it bargaining chips in negotiations with western powers, especially the US, concerning other dossiers of importance to Iran. Also that Iran had managed to build that presence in the eastern Mediterranean and to create that deterrence with Israel, was considered in many regional and western capitals, a strategic success. And strategic successes bestow advantages. And so, Israel’s decimation of this Iranian presence and power in the eastern Mediterranean marks a major shift, in Israel’s advantage, in its power dynamic with its primary opponent in the region.

Three — Israel now senses that it can go further. Whereas its military confrontations in the last two decades (primarily with Hizbollah in 2006) left Israel planning for a rematch and unable to pursue further objectives, the confrontations of the past 15-months have left Israel contemplating a bigger prize. That is forcing Iran’s Islamic Republic to accept highly restrictive measures on the potentiality of having serious nuclear capabilities, or subject Iran to further military strikes (such as the one Israel dealt Iran in October 2024). The objective here is not merely to further weaken Iran and expose the weakness of its regime to its population; the objective is to lay the ground for potentially attempting to topple the Iranian regime.

But successes give rise to challenges, and Israel’s strategic successes in the past 15-months entail in them three major challenges, to the region and to Israel.

One — Serious conceptions of peace between the Israelis and Palestinians were missing for at least a decade. But the scale of the deaths and destruction that took place in Gaza in the past 15-months has engendered amongst large sections of Palestinians not only a desire for revenge, but also a highly obvious conviction that struggle and not negotiations would shape the future. This coincides with feelings, amongst large segments of Israelis, particularly after the attacks of 7 October 2023, that waging wars is the route to security in their neighbourhood. That these feelings fester at a time the Israeli far right is at its strongest since the founding of Israel in 1948, shrouds the region, and especially Israel, in a mindset of war. This creates a cycle in which fear and ferocity feed on each other.

Two — Israel has been undergoing a slow transformation for at least a quarter century now. The Israeli society has moved far from the secular, socialist experience that was attempted there in the period from the 1950s to the 1980s. Demographic and sociopolitical trends that have been emerging in Israel in the past three decades have exacerbated divisions, not only about values and cultural frames of references, ways of life, and the role of religion in society, but more importantly, about the essence of the Israeli project, within the state and in the Middle East. This last point - Israel’s place in the Middle East - has, arguably, been at the core of the clash between the most important views within Israel about its future. Irrespective of talk about geo-economic integration and co-investments with the largest financial pockets in the Middle East, if fear and ferocity take hold of the collective psyche, war, not peace and integration, will follow.

Three — I have argued in Foreign Affairs magazine in June 2020 that Israel might attempt to change the strategic landscape in its neighbourhood. But that attempt, successful as it has been so far, has not ended the strategic projects of other key powers in the region, whether Arab or non-Arab. This means that as long as Israel keeps pushing for a vision of the Middle East that clashes with those of others, it would need to continue to impose its view and interests on other actors. This necessitates a perpetual power-advantage relative to those other actors. The United States’ support to Israel goes a long way at securing this necessity. Still, imposing one’s will and interests on others - in a highly confrontational, fluid dynamic and amidst inflamed feelings - also necessitates a continuous level of internal mobilisation, let alone major resources of capital, human power, and attention and concentration. In essence, this condemns Israel to living with this war mindset for the foreseeable future.

The past three articles in this series looked at the Turkish, Iranian, and Israeli positioning in the tumultuous Middle Eastern strategic landscape. The coming few articles will look at the Arab world, especially at the question that the first article in this series presented: whether the projects of the key Arab countries are aligned, or at least not opposed? Or whether the Arab world is drifting towards a constellation of smaller worlds, connected by forms of economic links and of course cultural bonds, but unable, in the foreseeable future, to forge a cohesive strategic project?