Flailing for a Strategy

Israel and the Continued Lack of Political Policy

Jalaa Marey/AFP via Getty Images

I’m supposed to be on vacation right now, so I intend to keep this relatively brief. I just saw the former Israeli PM Naftali Bennett's Op-Ed and the sheer absurdity of what he’s calling for made me want to at least write something short.

I should be clear up front to create a proper context that there’s no existential threat to Israel at the moment. Hamas is a horrendous terror organization but does not threaten the IDF in any serious sense. Hezbollah seems fit to merely engage in small-scale skirmishes along the border, and there’s no sign that Nasrallah will ever care to do much of anything.

There have of course been attacks that have caused casualties on American forces in Iraq and Syria, but the attacks have largely been beneath the threshold that would cause an escalatory cycle. The most concerning threat has been the Houthis interdicting shipping, but the United States has already assembled a coalition to keep the Red Sea open.

I say all this to make the point that the region has weathered this storm remarkably well, and the escalatory actions seem to have peaked. There’s no sign that there’s about to be a mechanized offensive into Israel or anything like that. Israel is not under threat of ceasing to exist.

As for the article by Bennett? It can be relatively neatly summarized as being a call by Bennett for the United States to take a leading role in a policy of regime change in Iran.

While he mentions that it doesn’t have to take the form of a “full-scale” war, it’s relatively unclear exactly what would make him suspect that the Iranian regime would fall otherwise. If sanctions and tit-for-tat strikes were all it took to create regime change, then North Korea should have transitioned to liberal democracy 50 years ago.

Calling for the United States to topple a foreign government on your behalf in this context is bizarre and makes essentially no sense outside of being a way to avoid having to deal with Israel’s actual primary political issue—coming to a lasting political settlement with Palestine.

The tenor of the Bennett piece would also leave you with the impression that Iran was the central culprit of the massacre that occurred on 10/7. It was of course Hamas. A terror organization that has arisen due to Palestinian anger and desperation engendered by a continual refusal by Israel’s government to create conditions for a lasting peace.

It is nothing more than flailing around in the dark for a way that enables Israel to punt its own political issues.

Israel’s war in Gaza has so far not managed to produce anything tangible in terms of their actual stated goals for the war. Hamas has not been defeated, and there’s still no clear image of what governance will look like in Gaza once the war has been concluded. It is also almost certain that the conditions created by Israel’s military campaign will fuel the creation of the next cadre of Hamas fighters.

It is still entirely unclear to me if there’s even an actual plan for what an end state would look like in Gaza—although some in the Israeli government continue to call for ethnic cleansing.

Netanyahu has burned through the last remaining shreds of Israel’s international image in pursuit of his military campaign to nowhere, and the new Bennett piece just solidifies in my mind one key feature of Israeli policymakers. I know I’ve said this before, but this does seem to be a fairly solid example of the complete death of actual policymaking in Israeli policy circles.

It is a sort of political laziness that has been engendered by decades of a security approach based on targetted killings rather than genuine attempts at political settlements, and the United States has in part aided this laziness by politically backstopping Israeli campaigns like the current war in Gaza.

The United States can’t keep providing cover for the Israeli government, and we certainly can’t agree to anything that Bennett was proposing.

The United States has actual issues that we need to focus on. The war in Ukraine is nearing its second year, and we have yet to appropriate desperately needed funds to help the Ukrainian military win an actual existential fight. The United States is of course now also actively working to keep the Bab al-Mandab Strait open from Houthi attempts to close the strait.

There is of course our military competition with China that demands our attention. We are also still in a long-term counter-terrorism campaign against the Islamic State and Al Qaeda to prevent their regeneration as serious threats.

You know what we don’t need to focus on? Solving Israel’s domestic inability to make actual difficult political choices in coming to a lasting political agreement with Palestine by starting a conflagration in the Middle East. Israel is an American ally, but it’s not our responsibility to save them from their inability to create actual policy.