Valdai Club

By dint of the extremity of its intentions and actions towards the Palestinians, and the images of the cruelty it is inflicting in Gaza, Israel may be feared, but it is more reviled than respected. The conclusion increasingly being drawn is that Israeli war crimes are the primary destabilising and radicalising influence in the region that must be reined in, Daniel Levy writes.

Israel and its leader Benjamin Netanyahu are in a somewhat perplexing strategic moment vis-à-vis Iran and their broader strategic positioning after their 12-day war in June. For decades, Israel and Iran have been in something of a shadow rather than direct confrontation. In 2024, there were brief direct exchanges of fire. Israel had for years undertaken covert operations, assassinations, and cyberattacks on Iran and some of its military and scientific leadership, while Iran built what it saw as defensive and what Israel saw as offensive capacities in Israel’s more immediate neighbourhood (Hezbollah being the supposed jewel in that crown in that respect).

Israel and in particular Netanyahu had, in those decades, also invested in trying to pull the US into a direct military confrontation with Iran and had sought to undermine any prospect of negotiations and to collapse the JCPOA deal once it was agreed (something that Netanyahu succeeding in during Trump’s first term in office when the US withdrew from the deal in 2018).

Israel’s designation of Hamas as simply being another Iranian proxy was always more propaganda spin than factual attribution. Hamas is a Palestinian resistance movement rooted in the Palestinian experience – its relationship with Iran is better described as mutually instrumental rather than derivative.

Nevertheless, as part of Israel and its prime minister’s positioning following the October 7th attack, the decision was made over time to enter a new phase vis-à-vis Iran.

The perplexing element is as follows: Israel significantly weakened Iran’s military allies (primarily Hezbollah, but also the collapse of the Assad regime, and the significant side-lining of al-Hashd al-Shaabi Iraqi groups) and, most importantly, brought the US to directly bomb Iran. It undertook this war undertaken in the most precipitous of circumstances – and yet the results seem underwhelming on both the military and political level. 

Iran was hurt, no doubt about that: Its nuclear sites have been damaged, certain scientists and military leadership targets were taken out; its airspace vulnerable; its media, prisons, and other institutional infrastructure were hit; as well as suffering many civilian casualties. But state structures not only held together, they emerged with a newly empowered domestic narrative of resilience and resistance strengthened. And despite Israeli and US claims, the Iranian nuclear program was neither decimated nor sent into oblivion.

Netanyahu, unsurprisingly, has revisited and embellished his 30-year narrative which argues that once Iran is brought down to size and defanged then the entire region, liberated from this Iranian threat, can be reconfigured. That was the Netanyahu storyline and, however divorced it is from reality, it was the one that he took with him on the July 7th to his almost week-long trip to Washington D.C. and to his meetings with Trump and senior administration officials.

However, while Netanyahu and Trump shared their victory lap and claims of huge military success, there are more questions than answers regarding Israeli-US alignment when it comes to next steps on Iran.

While the Israel First wing of the Trump administration and base may have won out on Iran, the America First camp have ruptured the previous consensus on Israel, and this dynamic is only likely to intensify. Israel and its echo chamber in Washington D.C., notably the neoconservative military hawks, won the argument in its most concrete manifestation–namely that the US undertook a one-day bombing campaign on June 22nd. Rather than that becoming consensus, it became a source of unprecedented internal rupture in the American Right and the MAGA camp.

Key influencers and some elected politicians, from Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon to Marjorie Taylor Greene and Joe Rogan, seem to carry much of the MAGA movement with them in their opposition to an Israel First agenda. Netanyahu and his supporters may be able to pull Trump into further conflict with Iran, but this cannot be taken for granted. They are apparently not aligned on the merits of negotiations, what the outcomes of those negotiations should be, and whether this was a first foray into ongoing military confrontation or a ‘one-and-done’ avoidance of mission creep by the US, in other words, escalating to de-escalate.

Israel’s preference is becoming increasingly clear, already threatening further military strikes against Iran and pushing for terms of negotiation that seek to prevent rather than secure diplomatic progress.

Israel therefore has something of a dilemma. It has demonstrated just how dependent it is on the US in every respect (the constant need for American weapons supplies, alongside American direct involvement, both defensive and offensive, in Israel’s wars) while being under a more intense microscope in the US than has previously been the case. Support for Israel is no longer a consensus, either on the Democrat or Republican side. The extent of Israeli embeddedness in the US system, the density of relations, the multiple points of access and lobbying capacity, as well as the gullibility of the D.C. blob policy-making world and how primed they are to buy into spurious Israeli schemes and claims mean that Israel may well ride out this wave, but the longer-term sustainability of this posture is more under question than ever.

In the shorter-term, Israel will be looking to get the Trump administration to deliver benefits to its side, where the hard-lifting and the costs are borne by the US. Specifically, Israel will lean into this narrative of a post-12 day war ‘New Middle East’ to test the prospects of a Trump-led push to bring additional states to normalising bilateral ties with Israel. Remember, Trump is the godfather of the Abraham Accords, something that he is proud of and would like to progress. Also remember that those accords were premised on America offering its own deliverables to third countries in exchange for benefits to Israel: recognition of the Western Sahara in the case of Morocco; news arms sales in the case of the UAE; removing Sudan from sanctions list, etc.

Paradoxically, given this background, Trump has made a point of not insisting that upgrading US relations with Gulf states be conditional on advancing normalisation with Israel (a shift from the Biden approach) and in circumstances of genocide in Gaza, Arab states are far more reluctant to advance such an agenda. Netanyahu does not see even minor steps toward Palestinian statehood as a price worth paying for progress on normalisation. For Netanyahu, it would be enough for the blame in the eyes of the US as to why normalisation has not advanced to be placed at the door of the Palestinians and the Arab states.

The anticipated exception to this was an expectation of some US-brokered understanding on the Israel-Syria front under the new leadership in Damascus. That was much hyped in advance of Netanyahu’s visit to D.C., and may still happen, possibly non-aggression and defence coordination, not full relations. As of mid-July, though, Israel has escalated its military action in southern Syria, including targeting government forces, rendering short-term progress less likely (although perhaps using military pressure in an attempt to achieve that end.)

But as noted, the conditions are not favourable, especially given Israel’s extreme positions vis-à-vis the Palestinians.

As Harvard commentator Stephen Walt has noted, hegemonic power without legitimacy or restraint is unsustainable. Israel offers neither a political horizon to its neighbours that is realistic or is minimally acceptable, nor any measure of forbearance. A project based entirely on hard military power is backfiring. Israel is deeply unpopular, and is apparently in a period of strategic overreach, not seen as a reliable regional or global partner.

By dint of the extremity of its intentions and actions towards the Palestinians, and the images of the cruelty it is inflicting in Gaza, Israel may be feared, but it is more reviled than respected. The conclusion increasingly being drawn is that Israeli war crimes are the primary destabilising and radicalising influence in the region that must be reined in – not where Israel thought it would be five years after the signing of the Abraham Accords.

Moreover, Israeli vulnerabilities were exposed, and those have strategic implications. There is growing acknowledgement that Israel took serious hits in its 12-day war with Iran, further exposing not only its dependency on the US, but also Israel’s low threshold for pain and the limitations of its resilience–social, as well as political, and even military given the depleted stocks of interceptor missiles and the exhaustion being felt by its military and in particular reservists.

Israel also faces the prospect of Iran deepening its own strategic alliances, not only with Russia and China, but also in the context of the broader membership of, for instance, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and BRICS. This is happening at a time when the US and the West, on which Israel is dependent, sees their geopolitical standing on an accelerated downward trajectory.

For Iran, once the threat of regime change was put forward by Israel, that its structure remained intact offered victory of a kind. In addition, Israel’s goal was transparently one of generating chaos in Iran and turning it into a failed state, not something popular with the surrounding states and especially the Gulf, which would be most negatively impacted by such a development.

Another strategic challenge Israel may have stored up for itself is in the realm of nuclear proliferation. Israel is the region’s only nuclear-armed state. Ignoring that reality is now less possible. Many now look at the region as one that will either have to address all WMDs, including Israel’s, or become something of a WMD free-for-all, with other states exploring such an option.

Actors in the region may well look to build new and previously unlikely alliances to counter the threat of Israel.

Finally, all of the above must also be weighed against the internal fractures, divisions, and faultlines inside Israel itself and its rambunctious domestic politics. These are a prime driver and factor influencing Netanyahu’s considerations and it is a polity which for all the unity around aspects of war, remains deeply polarised and in crisis.