In the fantasy of Altneuland, the racist Dr Rabbi Geyer’s party is resoundingly “beaten in almost all the districts where it had presumed to set up candidates”. As of this morning, Prime Minister Netanyahu’s bloc is at 56 seats, with over 60% of the votes counted, while Gadi Eisenkot’s so-called Change Bloc is on 48 seats, a number expected to rise slightly as its heartlands come in. The remainder of the Knesset’s 120 seats look set to go to a pair of Arab parties.

Every Israeli has woken up knowing the existential question this projected hung Knesset, with Arab parties as kingmakers, is asking of them: what kind of democracy is Israel? But one thing is clear. This election was a referendum on Netanyahu himself, and he seems to have lost that poll. It looks like the Bibi bloc has collapsed from a 68-seat majority in the last Knesset, to a minority this morning. Early numbers suggest most Israeli voters have rejected him and his allies. We will have to wait until Thursday for final results, and these may well prove slightly different.

But either way, it is not clear this morning, despite probably losing his majority, if this removes Bibi from power. Because in the real contest here — the election to form a new government — the four-party opposition bloc itself failed to achieve a majority.

For generations, Israel has prided itself on being a multi-ethnic democracy within its 1967 borders. Around a fifth of Israeli citizens are Arabs, and their parties surged in this election. This result is a test of that. It looks like a majority of Jewish voters supported the Bibi bloc despite him likely losing his majority. That means that anti-Bibi parties will probably only have a majority in the Knesset if one combines the Change Bloc, made up of Jewish and Zionist parties, with the Arab parties. The issue is that many of the four-party leaders in the alliance have ruled working with the Arabs out.

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The upshot? Unless these leaders break their promises to reflect the electoral math, there are several ways for Bibi to survive. Should Israel truly have a hung Knesset, the country potentially faces a new election. This offers Netanyahu the opportunity to cling on in a caretaker government until then. This has happened before: in 2019 and 2020, Israel had three elections in under a year, and Bibi remained Prime Minister throughout.

The real politics begins now. For the Israeli opposition, this is not just the usual politics of tensely brokered backroom deals, but something much more fundamental. Can they truly embrace Israel’s promise of multi-ethnic democracy? The opposition has campaigned vociferously that Bibi is to blame for October 7, and remains a danger to Israel’s future. They now face a choice: form a minority government with one Arab party inside the coalition, and supported by another outside it to block Netanyahu, thus relying on Arab-Israeli politicians — or let Bibi’s rule continue by choosing to spurn them.

There is a precedent for collaboration. Before October 7, in the brief Naftali Bennett-led government of 2021-2, the Ra’am party, led by Mansour Abbas, was a member of the ruling coalition. Despite Ra’am being an Islamist-rooted party, albeit one that talks about coexistence with Jews, Netanyahu even flirted with including Abbas in a coalition of his own. But post October 7, with the Bibi bloc pointing to the fact that Ra’am has been evasive about whether or not Hamas is a terrorist organization that needs to be “destroyed”, this is a more fraught task.

To better position himself for government, Abbas has made his number two on his party list a Jewish former Israeli police chief. But it seems unlikely the Change Bloc and Ra’am alone have enough to reach the 61 seats needed to form a majority in the Knesset. They may also need to rely on the votes of the Arab Joint List, a coalition of overtly Palestinian nationalist parties, and Hadash, the old Communist party. These would not want to join any Change coalition, but have explicitly said their votes would be available to ensure a minority government could dispatch Bibi.

What Ra’am wants to see from any deal is urgent action on Arab-Israeli’s main priority: rampant organized crime, dramatically worsened during ultranationalist Itamar Ben-Gvir’s tenure as the minister who oversees the police. Abbas has put Yoav Segalovitch, the former police chief, as his number two precisely with the hope he could take over from Ben-Gvir as a bridge figure between the Jewish and the Arab public. Abbas has also signaled he would want action against racism, and a change in policy towards Israeli authorities being trigger-happy around demolishing illegally built Arab homes. Together with the Joint List, they also want investment in development for their communities and in their educational facilities.

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On the Palestinian issue, looming over everything, Ra’am’s demands are relatively muted, with Abbas avoiding the topic. The moderation of their platform is testament to the Arab sector’s growing participation in Israeli society, with rising rates of integration from university attendance to involvement in the professions, especially healthcare. Both Arab parties as a result have a small Jewish activist base, committed to fostering what they see as an incipient multi-ethnic social partnership.

Overnight, in Israel, pro-opposition voices were calling on Eisenkot to act with absolute confidence and determination, as Netanyahu surely would, to bring this Jewish-Arab partnership about. This is because very few of those supporting the Change Bloc believe that they would fare better in new elections. A confluence of factors — high Arab turnout; disorganization among the ultra-orthodox Haredi Jewish parties; the hyper-mobilization of liberal Israelis, with a Knesset-seat-or-two’s worth flying back from abroad to vote — are all unlikely to repeat.

Eisenkot’s party, too, would certainly lose seats. This time around, he ran a list of former IDF generals who entered politics to oust Netanyahu. But they, in their soldiers’ naivete and unformed expectations about honor, have been found out as not truly political enough. In this, they resemble Benny Gantz, another former officer who nonetheless went from 35 seats to dropping out of this election for lack of even minimal support. His great error was to shore up a Bibi government, as if he were another reliable general, on the promise of a turn as premier that never arrived.

This, then, is the anti-Bibi coalition’s chance. Should the results stay roughly in line as predicted, what happens next will come down to character. Does Eisenkot have it in him? Or is he, like his critics say he sounds, a flat military man, used to giving orders and the army’s square world, up against one of the world’s most ferocious political animals?

For the moment, there seems a path forward for Eisenkot to install an Arab-supported minority government, open a long-promised Commission of Inquiry to expose Netanyahu’s failures on October 7, and then potentially seek to expand his coalition through defectors from the Right, or even build a unity government with a post-Bibi Likud. This would be fragile indeed, and may not last long, but it could be decisive in ending Netanyahu’s career as he faces both a corruption trial and his failings on October 7 without the shield of government at his disposal.

If it is unclear whether the opposition can grasp the nettle, Netanyahu’s strategy going forward is obvious. On the one hand, he will try to do everything possible to delegitimize Arab parties and Arab votes, while fostering an atmosphere of hate and incitement — all to discourage the opposition from embracing the Arab parties and the votes they can offer to push him out of power. His tactic, in particular, is likely to bully and frighten opposition Right-wingers like Naftali Bennett and Avigdor Lieberman out a Jewish-Arab partnership for change.

At the same time, Bibi will try what he has done before: “unite the Zionist majority” around him in a government where he remains prime minister. He will offer to drop the extremist religious Zionist parties led by Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, detested by the opposition and sanctioned by many Western countries. Expect him to enlist Donald Trump in this effort, and claim it is necessary to restart the war on Iran. There is widespread fear among the opposition that Netanyahu, even as caretaker leader, will leap into a major new confrontation with Tehran to force the military-minded Eisenkot to line up behind him. This could scramble things politically, as IRGC rockets again start to fall.

The utmost priority for Bibi is to avoid losing power, which would entail a serious risk of jail time. This is why the Change politicians are so frightened by what he might pull on Iran: a wounded political animal is at his most dangerous. Netanyahu’s ultimate dream is to pressure enough opposition parties to agree to a unity rotation deal, where he is prime minister first — on the condition that his corruption trial is waived and he is parachuted into the presidency for his 79th birthday, in two years time, when the incumbent’s term is up. To get a deal across the line, he might rule out staying in office for longer. Netanyahu may well get there, along the way evading accountability for October 7 and everything else.

To stop him, the opposition will not only need to hope the final results stay roughly in line with what is currently predicted — but also to show unflinching conviction in itself and what Israeli democracy is supposed to be. “Perhaps you believe that that is to your immediate advantage,” prophesied Herzl through one of his liberal Zionist puppets as he defended Arab rights against the racism of Dr Rabbi Geyer. “But it is not. If you adopt that stupid, narrow-minded policy, the land will go to wrack and ruin.”

As so often in Israel, the shouty foreign fixation on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seems to fade into the persistent rhythm of daily life in places like Ramla. This is clear across the town itself, a ramshackle place in Israel’s fertile center. Scarred by a history of conquests and earthquakes, only a handful of ancient buildings survive. Yet they serve as a reminder that in the 8th century, the Umayyad Caliphate founded Ramla as the flourishing capital of its province of Palestine. Over a millennium on, its population remains mixed. Jews form the majority, while roughly a quarter of its residents are Arabs, around 5% of whom are Christian. This reality is casually vivid: just across the street from the market stands the town’s Great Mosque, once a crusader church. On its metal fence hangs an old bilingual sign from Ramla’s Jewish mayor, wishing Muslim residents a happy Eid.

Many Israelis regard the upcoming election as critical, perhaps the most consequential in the country’s history. Arab voters, whose theoretical electoral weight exceeds 20 seats in the 120-member Knesset, largely share the goal of the Jewish opposition’s so-called “change bloc”: to unseat Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and bring down the most Right-wing government in Israel’s history. With the polls suggesting a closely fought election, Arab voters could emerge as the Jewish State’s ultimate kingmakers — with consequences that could transform not just the Knesset, but Israeli society as a whole.

The prospect of such political cooperation is more remarkable given the deep divisions exposed in the dramatic events of 2021, described by some as the “Unity Intifada”. That May, in mixed cities across the country, thousands of Arab citizens took part in violent riots, arson attacks and even attempted lynchings, while from Gaza, Hamas actively encouraged both Arab Israeli citizens and Palestinians in the West Bank “to rise up”. The people of Ramla experienced this unrest for themselves. During the riots, Jews and their property were attacked, while Jewish far-Right activists, encouraged by supremacist politicians like Itamar Ben-Gvir, spread chaos in their turn.

When I visited Israel a month after the unrest, an atmosphere of distrust between Arabs and Jews still lingered. Though Ramla managed to contain much of the violence through decisive cooperation between the municipality, the police and local Arab community and religious leaders, these tensions have not totally disappeared. Even now, Yehuda, an aging Jewish vegetable seller in the Ramla market, tells me that “the bond between Arabs and Jews is growing weaker”.

These sentiments have deep historical roots. For the first 18 years of Israel’s existence, most Arab citizens lived under military rule, facing curfews and restrictions on their movement, justified on security grounds following the existential 1948 war. The darkest episode of these years came in 1956, when the Israeli Border Police massacred 49 Arab civilians at Kafr Qasim; most of them were returning from work and unaware that a curfew had just been imposed on their village.

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Today, Arabs make up just over 20% of Israel’s population. The majority, about 85%, are Muslim, while the remainder is divided roughly equally between Christians and Druze. Most Arab citizens are descendants of those left in Israel proper following the 1948 war, but also Palestinians in East Jerusalem and Druze in the Golan Heights, both occupied by Israel in 1967. Many Golan Druze have since acquired Israeli citizenship, but for Palestinians in East Jerusalem, the process has long been hampered by bureaucratic hurdles, including lengthy application procedures and rejections on security grounds. Even for Arabs living within Israel’s legally recognized borders, inequalities with Jews remain, particularly around access to building permits and services like policing. Though Arab citizens enjoy equal rights, meanwhile, many felt further alienated by the 2018 Nation-State Law, which reserved national self-determination exclusively for Jews.

Yet this is only part of the picture. Despite inequalities and political tensions, Arab citizens have also experienced significant economic and social integration. As Dr Arik Rudnitzky, an expert on Arab society in Israel at the Israel Democracy Institute, points out, we should “distinguish between political rhetoric and what actually happens in terms of government policy”. Whatever their inflammatory statements against Arab Israelis and their politicians during election campaigns, both Netanyahu and, later, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, approved major investment plans for Arab communities, helping to reduce economic disparities. All the while, you can now find Arab Israelis represented in almost every realm of public life — from Druze senior army commanders, to Christian Supreme Court judges, to Muslim news anchors on mainstream channels.

October 7 and its aftermath are key here. Hamas and its late leader Yahya Sinwar hoped the attack would presage a broader rupture between Jewish and Arab Israelis. It wasn’t to be. Though most Arab Israelis are exempt from serving in the IDF, they kept employment numbers up when their Jewish compatriots went off to fight. Arab contributions to the healthcare system were vital too, with around a quarter of Israeli doctors either Christian, Muslim or Druze. Add to that Hamas’s targeting of Arab citizens during their rampage — terrorists killed 26 that day in 2023, including a baby shot in her mother’s womb — and no wonder four-in-five Arab Israelis have condemned the October 7 atrocity. That reflects a broader shift, with a May 2026 survey finding that over a quarter of Arab Israelis now see their citizenship as the main pillar of their identity, though ethnicity and religion remain important too.

Rudnitzky describes all this as “a fragmentation of identity”, shaped by more than seven decades in Israel. Divisions within the Palestinian leadership; the uncertain prospects for Palestinian statehood; and the Arab world’s gradual normalization with Israel — all these have reinforced a pragmatic recognition that Arab citizens must build their future within the Jewish state. “Israeli citizenship, despite its shortcomings, provides opportunities and a degree of security,” Rudnitzky says, even if solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank endures.

This survival-driven pragmatism is clearest in politics, with the rise of Ra’am the most striking example. Ra’am grew out of Israel’s Islamic Movement, whose founder was involved in a militant group in the late Seventies, and which hoped to establish an Islamic state in Palestine. Parts of the movement gradually softened, embracing participation in Israel’s politics; by 2021, Ra’am’s current leader Mansour Abbas had taken the historic step of joining an anti-Netanyahu coalition alongside Jewish parties. Another taboo also fell recently: when Abbas placed Yoav Segalovitz, a Jewish Zionist and former police commander, in second place on Ra’am’s electoral list. Segalovitz is also a former deputy minister of public security, and led a successful initiative to combat organized crime and blood feuds in Arab communities, a particularly pressing concern among voters.

This is not the first time that Arab parties were part of a broader coalition. Arab citizens have participated in Israeli elections since 1949, and their early political representation was largely channeled through satellite parties of Mapai, the Left-wing outfit that dominated Israeli politics in the years after independence. Later, after these satellite parties disappeared, independent Arab parties typically preferred the backbenches, largely due to their anti-Zionist agendas. Ra’am’s decision to join the 2021 coalition — especially as a conservative, religious Arab party — therefore shook the political system. It’s worth adding, here, that even Netanyahu invited Ra’am to join his coalition in 2021; the only reason the gambit failed was because of opposition from the far-Right politician Bezalel Smotrich. Ben Gvir, whatever his rhetoric today, wasn’t against it either.

While Arab candidates appear on Jewish-led party lists across the political spectrum, from Left to hard-Right, much of the Jewish political establishment remains reluctant, following October 7, to embrace non-Zionist Arab parties. Yet Segalovitz’s presence ought to help “kosherize” Ra’am for any future coalition. The Joint List, an alliance of Arab Left-wing and pro-Palestinian nationalist parties, has also announced it would support the formation of an anti-Netanyahu government from outside the coalition — despite usually remaining aloof. The last time this happened was in the Nineties, when a pair of Arab parties provided parliamentary support to Yitzhak Rabin’s government, helping sustain the Oslo peace process. Though the Joint List is now offering a similar parliamentary lifeline, its priorities seem to have shifted: alongside political demands for Palestinians, its focus is also on more humdrum civic issues.

And if all this speaks to the growing integration of Arab politics into national life, Israel’s electoral math are equally crucial. Recent polls give Netanyahu’s bloc around 50-55 seats, against roughly the same number for the Jewish-led opposition, leaving neither with the 61 needed for a majority. Meanwhile, Ra’am is polling at five to six seats, and the Joint List at eight to nine — potentially enough to tip the balance.

The obstacle, then, is political rather than mathematical. While Yair Golan, leader of the Left-wing Democrats, supports including Ra’am in a future coalition, other opposition figures, including Bennett and Gadi Eisenkot, have ruled out governing with Arab parties — for now anyway. Once the votes are counted, their tune may soon change, especially if politicians are faced with gridlock in the Knesset, while trying to topple Netanyahu.

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With declining personal security, seemingly endless wars, and an increasingly hostile atmosphere for Arab citizens, it is hardly surprising that Arab civil-society organizations have also launched initiatives to get their friends and neighbors out to vote. “Today, there is a consensus: the current government must go,” says Hesham Mahagna, headteacher of a high school near Umm al-Fahm, a major Arab hub north of Tel Aviv. Mahagna himself is particularly concerned about his children and students. “Before the current government, teenagers in my school aspired to study in Israel,” he explains. “But now, most say they don’t want to invest in learning Hebrew because they want to study abroad.”

Lourd Atia, a 19-year-old Muslim activist, offers a more positive case. Raised among Jewish Israelis in the conservative bastion of Jerusalem, she concealed her Arab identity for years. Ironically, it was her best friend, a Jewish settler, who helped her embrace it. “Her family had suffered numerous terrorist attacks and tragedies,” Atia tells me. “I asked her how she could be my friend after everything they had been through. She cried with me and said, ‘Why should I care what you are? You’re a human being. I love all of you, Lourd — the Arab, the Muslim and the Israeli.’”

Atia, who herself lost Israeli friends on October 7 and over the subsequent war, became even more attached to her Israeli identity, which she describes as her “safe ground”. Earlier this year, she publicly challenged Ayman Odeh, the former leader of the Joint List, in a viral interview in the Knesset TV channel, criticizing his focus on Palestine over the everyday concerns of Arab Israelis. Odeh, like other leading figures in his Hadash party, has repeatedly refused to designate Hamas a terrorist organization, despite condemning the October 7 massacre and attacks on civilians. “Do you understand the implications of refusing to condemn Hamas as a terrorist organization?” Atia retorted. “Do you realize how much damage that ultimately causes me?”

Meanwhile, Atia has begun advocating for Israel internationally, both via delegations and online, sharing her unique perspective as both a young Muslim woman —  and a proud Arab Israeli. Not that things are perfect. While traveling to Germany on an advocacy mission, she recalls being pulled aside for an intrusive security check at Ben Gurion Airport, apparently because of her Arab background. Atia’s belongings were searched in front of other passengers, while her father looked on helplessly. “I realized,” she says of the experience, “that I would never be 100% Israeli, and that we have many problems. I don’t want to paint a perfect picture — quite the opposite. But I enjoy my life here, and there is nowhere else for me. This is my country. I would rather fight for my home.”

By focusing on the here and now, the wider Palestinian conflict can seem further from Ramla or Umm al-Fahm than it does from the endless protests in Trafalgar Square. Here, the radical pragmatism of Israeli Arabs wins. As the country’s diverse Arab community continues to evolve, meanwhile, we see not only unlikely friendships between young Arab Muslims and Jewish settlers, but even mixed marriages. These friendships and family ties, alongside the broader “Israelization” of the 1948 Arabs that Sinwar so despised, may continue to shape Arab Israelis into an increasingly distinct society, different from Palestinians both in Gaza and the West Bank. Meanwhile, in Ramla’s market, Arabs as well as Jews will continue filling their baskets, worrying about rising prices and wondering which pomegranate is sweeter.

When the latest but probably not last Iran war started on 28 February 2026, the first victims, for once, were not innocent bystanders but rather Iran’s rulers and executioners, the supreme dictator Ali Khamenei; the Chief of the General Staff and head of Iran’s armed forces, General Abdolrahim Mousavi; the Minister of Defense, Aziz Nasirzadeh; the head of military research & development, Hossein Jabal Amelian; his predecessor Brigadier General Reza Mozaffari Nia, Esmail Khatib, the Minister of Intelligence; his deputy for Israel affairs, Yahya Hosseini Panjaki; some other officials, and also the private citizen Mojtaba Khamenei, son of Ali Khamenei but utterly unqualified for the emphatically non-hereditary supreme leader position. Mojtaba Khamenei has not been seen nor heard since the bombing, and is certainly mutilated if still alive.

Iran’s furious response to this mass decapitation was the launch of ballistic missiles — not just against Israel and US bases in the region but also against mere bystanders. Of the 1,471 launched missiles from the start on 28 February until 20 April, some 650 were aimed at Israel, 563 landed in the territory of the United Arab Emirates that has long helped Iran’s wrecked economy, 265 landed in Kuwait, where some US aircraft are based but which has always aided Iran, 215 attacked Qatar, which shares its vast natural gas field with Iran, a country that Qatar has never harmed, 194 struck Bahrain, the main regional base of the US Navy, and 135 were aimed at Saudi Arabia, in spite of its complete neutrality.

Iran’s very primitive missiles have been much less lethal than the German V2s of 1944 — some 3,225 of which killed more than 7,000 people in England and Belgium — but with their huge mass of metal they inflicted much property damage even if their warheads did not explode. The older and more abundant Kheibar Shekan weighs 17 metric tons with its 750kg warhead, the newer and larger Khorramshahr weighs close to 20 tons and delivers multiple warheads weighing up to 1,500kg.

What Iran achieved with its 650 missiles aimed at Israel was to damage many buildings and kill 27 civilians and one off-duty IDF soldier, though some 3,000 more were injured across the country, some of them seriously.

While Iran attacked civilians with its very inaccurate missiles, both the US and Israel relied on extreme precision to destroy underground missile assembly plants, detected missile launchers, rocket fuel depots and mixing plants. This entire subterranean industry was the result of many years of very high spending, largely funded by the diversion of the funds urgently needed to provide water supplies for Iran’s second city Mashad, historic Yazd and other cities but for Tehran above all, which may even have to be evacuated, according to Iran’s only elected leader, president Masoud Pezeshkian.

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The dam-building and water supply budgets were not enough, so the nation-wide electrical generation funds were also diverted to the Revolutionary Guards’ missile industries, and also the funding needed to pipe the country’s unlimited natural gas supplies to every city. As a result, last winter and into March when the war started, horribly polluting mazout, residual oil, had to be burned to keep Tehran’s people from freezing, because neither electrical nor gas heating was sufficient in the winter months, even with global warming.

The regime was thus on the edge of systemic failure on the eve of the war, but has now been saved by the way the war was fought — and not fought. The mass decapitation of 28 February allowed surviving Revolutionary Guards officers to take over in Tehran, very much as the SS did in Berlin after Hitler’s death on 30 April 1945, eagerly killing anyone who wanted to surrender until Russian troops arrived two days later.

But this time no troops were approaching Tehran, truly mission impossible because of geography alone if nothing else. Nobody in his right mind could contemplate an advance over 800 miles of desert and mountains on the only road from the Bandar Abbas on the Gulf coast to Tehran, with its 13 million people. If only a tenth still support the regime — that many are salaried in the army, police, part-time militia, Revolutionary Guards and the Bonyad foundations that own much of the economy — it would be enough to start a long season of urban warfare.

No such invasion plan had even been suggested by anyone, so there was no justification for the pre-emptive “boots on the ground” hysteria loudly manifest from isolationist backwaters and White House Vice Presidential staffers alike. As it turned out, however, the hysteria generated by wholly imaginary invasion plans had very real consequences, which in fact determined the outcome of the war till this day.

To understand how fears over a non-event brought about a veritable defeat, one must return to the other military action that occurred just before the start of the bombing, on 28 February. This already seems a long time ago, because everybody in the White House would have laughed at the suggestion that President Trump would ever come to terms with the Revolutionary Guards. Some 3,000 paratroopers of the rapid-response force of the 82 airborne division were sent to the Gulf, to join the 5,000 Marines of the 11th and 31st Marine expeditionary units already there.

They were more than enough to counter the entirely predictable — and predicted — Revolutionary Guard response to the bombing, which was to try to stop the flow of tankers and bulk carriers delivering crude oil, liquefied natural gas and fertilizer down the narrow seaways in the mostly shallow Persian Gulf from Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar and — partly — from Saudi Arabia, which can send half its oil by pipeline to the Red Sea, and the United Arab Emirates, which has a pipeline to the Indian ocean for half its oil.

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The Revolutionary Guards and Iran’s navy could not attack the tankers and bulk carriers with their warships, armed motorboats or submarines, all of which were efficiently sunk soon after the bombing started. But they could endanger navigation by dropping sea mines from any traditional dhow or fishing vessel, and even by attacking passing tankers with their anti-tank missiles. That would be enough to cause insurance companies to suspend their coverage, thereby stopping Persian Gulf supplies to the world economy.

That is where the airborne troops and Marines could be highly effective. With ample helicopter transport to take up positions for hours or days on uninhabited Persian Gulf islands and deserted coastal tracts to secure nearby navigable channels, and with strong tactical air support only minutes away to minimize combat risks, they were fully capable of defeating any interfering enemy forces.

By sending them into action, the US could have denied any oil shipments from Iran’s oil terminal at Kharg Island and from lesser terminals at Qeshm and Jask on the Indian Ocean beyond the Gulf, thus cutting off most of Iran’s oil export revenues. At the same time, those ground and air forces could minimize any interference with the tankers and fertilizer bulk carriers transiting from Iraq, Kuwait, the Emirates, Qatar and Saudi Arabia into the Indian Ocean, minimizing the war’s impact on global commodity markets.

Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu had asked only for assured resupplies of aerial munitions when it came to the pre-emptive bombing of Iran’s ballistic missiles, hoping to avoid the danger of an all-out attack that could overwhelm Israel’s defenses. He was surprised and pleased by Trump’s decision to join in and take command of the offensive. He did not pause to consider the possibility that he was forming an alliance with a weaker power, which would let him down.

By then, 28 February 2026, a total of 1,150 Israeli soldiers and local security officers had been killed since the war started on October 7, 2023, the equivalent of 39,100 dead US soldiers given the 1:34 population ratio.

Netanyahu, who was widely unpopular even before the war, was politically unaffected by the loss of more than 1,000 soldiers, but 1,150 killed in action — let alone 39,100 — would have quickly ended the Trump presidency via a fast impeachment with enough Republican votes, among vast coast-to coast mass protests. In other words, Netanyahu’s exclusive reliance on his personal dialogues with Trump, which left Israel’s Foreign Ministry and Intelligence a mere bystander, blinded him to the great change that had transformed the United States into a post-heroic country, no more willing to engage in combat than our NATO allies. Nor is it a political or even a cultural transformation that might be undone by strong leadership, but rather the unavoidable consequence of the collapse in female fertility, now down to 1.6. It means that very few American families have two or more boys, such that one might fall in combat without the family’s extinction. Almost every US combatant is now a “Private Ryan”.

That is why a prudent opposition to more wars in pursuit of quixotic aims — such as the 2003 Iraq war that I testified against before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, seeing no chance of bringing democracy to Baghdad, and the Afghan war to modernize unwilling populations — has been transformed into a “boots on the ground” psychosis. Also present within the White House, it equates small-scale and short-lived commando actions with another endless war, nullifying the tremendous strength of US air power, allowing the Revolutionary Guards to win with very few fighters and very few small boats.

So this war fought by an irresolute President has not only allowed America’s worst enemies to come out the winners in spite of their utterly disastrous national policies, primitive missile engineering and clumsy military operations, but has also degraded US military strength down to European levels, because troops that cannot be risked in combat even for great gains are of little military value.

Back then, as the rabbis first struggled to sum up Judaism without a Temple, in what became known as the Mishnah, they preached against the temptations of kingship and Rome. “Love work,” they said, “abhor taking high office and do not seek intimacy with the ruling power.” Today, the Mishnah’s essential portion, The Ethics of The Fathers, reads like an almost incantatory list of generations of exclusively religious Jewish leaders. Originally, it was shocking because of who it omits: the rabbis had written out of history not only King Herod, but the messianic political leaders of the three great revolts against Rome.

The truth is that when it comes to national leaders, Jews have precious few examples to go by, having not held their homeland for over 1,800 years. Which is why it is telling, in the final build up to the war on Tehran, that Benjamin Netanyahu spent time rediscovering those rulers whom the rabbis wished to forget. He has done this by reading a new book,  Jews vs. Rome: Two Centuries of Rebellion Against the World’s Mightiest Empire, by Professor Barry Strauss. “Well, we lost that one,” Netanyahu explained to a reporter about the work. “I think we have to win the next one.”

This is perhaps the most unintentionally revealing thing Bibi has ever said. As his war planning with Washington gathered pace, the Israeli Prime Minister was reading a book about a vast historic reversal — how, in the space of a single lifetime, Jewish royalty went from playing politics in Rome, as their people gathered privileges and respect in the imperial center, to watching helplessly as the legions burnt the Temple and carried off its Menorah, their nation marched into slavery, humiliation and exile. At its core, this is the story of King Herod and the failure of his heirs: how a combination of runaway fundamentalism and diplomatic failure doomed a highly successful people to the status of near outcasts.

You cannot understand King Herod — or the depths of Bibi’s mind — without looking again at a map of Rome. The empire in the east was different from that of the west: not the uniformly subjugated barbarian provinces of Gaul and Britannia, but a patchwork of wealthy, civilized statelets, client kingdoms and provinces. Judea was one of those kingdoms, home to the largest temple complex of the ancient world at Jerusalem. It was a city whose sanctuary was so gilded, writes the inescapable ancient historian Josephus, that in the morning it “cast a fiery light”; so white was its marble that from a distance the sanctuary looked like a mountain capped with snow.

This, moreover, was a city that had produced in the Torah a literary tradition its people believed rivaled that of the Greeks, a city whose diaspora was spread across the known world’s two empires — the Roman, stretching west to the pillars of Hercules, and the Parthian, stretching east to the Hindu Kush, each studded with Jewish trading communities paying their own tithe back to the Temple.

Strauss calls this Judea “in essence a Temple state”; it had become ungovernable by 63 BC, when its elites first appealed to Rome to adjudicate in a civil war within its failing Hasmonean monarchy. Twenty-three years later, after a period of chaos, the Roman Senate made their most promising local ally King of all Judea, then sent him back with military support to conquer his kingdom. His name was Herod.

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By Ben Judah

This king would become so hated in both the Jewish and the Christian tradition that his actual reign was blotted out. But reading Jews vs. Rome, it is easy to realize what Netanyahu might see in him. It is all about the emperor. Herod, after all, made himself a Roman politician and not just a Jewish one. To avoid the territorial designs of Cleopatra, he sought and won the support of Mark Antony. But after his patron’s demise at the hands of Octavian, known to history as Augustus, Herod had the skill to then become the first Roman emperor’s greatest loyalist.

To succeed in Roman politics, Herod Romanized himself, naming his grandson after Augustus’s favorite general Agrippa, and even becoming president of the Olympic Games. To emphasize his loyalty, he also Romanized his landscape, raising a new city called Caesarea, on the coast south of modern-day Haifa. All this would pay off, not just for him, but for his Rome-educated grandson Herod Agrippa I, who was such an impressive Roman politician that in the chaos that followed the murder of his friend Caligula he installed Claudius as emperor.

There is no way Herod’s precedent was not on Bibi’s mind as he read this book, in those months when he pursued Trump with the most outlandish flattery — a man he has named a settlement after; offered the nation’s highest honors to; and sought to speak to through every Fox and Friends or Hannity. All this as he shuns his own media at home. Bibi knows that his bilingual, Israeli-American political identity, in a country where few in its traditional political-military class speak flawless English, is the source of his power, his ability to play politics in Rome.

Because of how it ended, the very Roman power of the Herodian dynasty has been forgotten. First came Herod the Great, who renovated the Temple, but his large kingdom disintegrated almost immediately on his death. Revolts broke out everywhere against the backdrop of his sadistic divide-and-rule, culminating in the murder of his own sons. But what the empire gifted, it could also take away. The second, Romanized generation, such as Herod Antipas of Galilee who executed John the Baptist, were demoted into ruling mostly as lesser Roman-appointed “tetrarchs” or “ethnarchs” of scraps of their old kingdom.

50 years later, the now extensively Romanized third generation would enjoy a brief resurgence, when Herod the Great’s grandson Herod Agrippa I ruled as King of all Judea: but only for around three years. The fourth generation, such as Herod Agrippa II of Galilee, were demoted yet again to minor clients. They were the last to rule in the land of Israel. The Herodians’ once very real regional influence would leave no mark on history. The Jewish-Roman alliance was doomed.

This is where Strauss’s account becomes a study in failure. Successive generations of Herodians became more and more hated by their people for their Hellenized foreignness. By the end, the rulers could do nothing but hide from their subjects’ religious passions, let alone steer or hope to calm them. It meant nothing that Herod Agrippa II of Galilee ended up fighting on the same side as the Romans in the Great Revolt that began in 66 AD. Nor that his sister Berenice was the lover of General Titus. Maybe he saved Galilee, and she a few of the captives, from worse reprisals, but neither of them could save the Temple nor Judea. Their stewardship had failed. After this disaster, the dynasty continued, but not in Judea and not as Jews. King Herod’s descendants would rule as kings in Armenia and Cetis in Anatolia, or serve as Roman senators, magistrates, and even a consul or two. Yet they did all this firmly as pagans.

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Jerusalem is Israel's future

By Ben Judah

Herod the Great’s heirs failed because they did not keep the zealots close enough to control them. And it is impossible, here, to read Strauss’s account and not see the signature of Bibi’s entire career: the zealots will be my zealots. For 30 years, Israel’s most American, most foreign of leaders has used fundamentalist rabbis and settlers as his auxiliaries and shields. This, in the end, is the political meaning of Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir. Of course, there is the cynicism, through which Netanyahu will do anything to stave off an election and avoid jail. But there is also a dark pessimism about the Jewish people that glues it all together, a sense that Netanyahu truly believes you cannot rule the Jews except when flanked by their zealots.

This was the Herodian legacy: Judea’s priests driven to hilltop villages in the Galilee, its princes pagans in the courts of Asia Minor. By the end of the Great Revolt in 70 AD, the Jews were now a people without a leadership, their temple and their monarchy in ruins. Incontinent, apocalyptic fanaticism spread like wildfire among the people. Two further revolts followed, in 115 AD and 135 AD. The result was what we would now call ethnic cleansing and genocide. Archaeological work in modern Israel has confirmed a scale of atrocity that shocked even Rome’s ancient historians. By the end of the first revolt, Titus’s slavery and butchery had reduced the population of Judea by a third. By the end of the third, by driving the Jews out of Judea and eradicating their settlements there, Hadrian had reduced it by as much as two thirds. During the second Trajan had, to quote the historian Appian, “utterly destroyed the Jewish people in Egypt”. Their doom, to a reader like Netanyahu, only confirms a conviction that the Diaspora is only safe if Israel succeeds.

In the space of a lifetime, the Jews had not only lost Jerusalem, their great spiritual city with all its treasures, but also Alexandria, their great diasporic port with all its wealth. The Jews were finished. Not as a nation, but as a great people in the ancient world. Their homeland was renamed Palestine — as the Greeks had long known it — to insult them. They were humiliatingly singled out by Rome to pay the fiscus Judaicus, a special tax to the emperor’s coffers and the city’s great temple of Jupiter, in lieu of the old tithe they had once so gladly paid their own temple. A vertiginous fall, in short, from privileges granted by Julius Caesar himself.

I don’t doubt that, reading Strauss’s book, Netanyahu imagines himself as Herod the Great: the only sound intercessor between Rome and the Jews. But there is another, unnerving reading, in which Netanyahu has got it all wrong. By betting everything on the House of Trump, is he not making the same mistake as the Herodians? From educating their children together to tying generations of friendships together, the House of Herod bet everything on the House of Augustus. But that didn’t work so well with the dynasties that came after: the cold military men of the Flavians and the Nerva-Antonines. After all,  dynasties could, and did, fall. What Judea needed, and so obviously lacked, were friends and allies across the Senate and the People of Rome.

Why the Temple was destroyed is one of the great aching questions of Judaism. In Jews vs. Rome, Strauss has attempted to answer it through politics. His own view is that disunity was key. The Jews were factionalized beyond belief, and broken into zealots and Hellenizers, fundamentalists and accommodationists, all at each other’s throats. Fractured like this, the people of Israel never stood a chance against the imperial legions.

And here too Bibi’s rule resembles that of King Herod — and not in a way that would please him. It’s not just the way he has got Trump to bully the Israeli President to grant him a pardon for his corruption trial, nor his benches of Knesset yes men and hate men. It’s also 30 years of stoking endless provocation and division. It’s the hate marches against Yitzhak Rabin, the anti-Arab rhetoric, his attempts to gut the Supreme Court, the relentless march to “baseless hatred”.

This odd phrase is what the Talmud uses to describe the political climate in ancient Israel when it seeks its own answer as to why the Temple was destroyed. And it is a term I recognize when I see Itamar Ben Gvir prancing in the Knesset with a bottle of champagne, celebrating a death penalty unique for Palestinians, as Bibi looks on and smiles.

Netanyahu thinks he is leading with the zealots close; but rather they are leading him. This is a mistake that Herod the Great did not make. Two millenniums later, it is clear that the King of Judea, in his decision to rebuild and glorify the Temple, understood, unlike most of his heirs, something fundamental about the passions of Judaism. In the soul of Israel, they are inescapable and volcanic. And a leader who seeks to be their ruler, must channel them, not follow them. Herod did so in the vast effort to rebuild the Temple. It is by its surviving Western Wall that we still pray. Netanyahu has done quite the opposite, governing by endless concessions to settler construction projects or draft-dodging Haredim. Their demands are pulling him ever closer to splitting the nation, and sparking the fury of Rome.

These are the limits to Bibi’s cynicism and pessimism. For it has no spiritual force to answer the prophetic warning of Gershom Scholem, the great scholar of Jewish mysticism. Scholem warned that on the far side of so much destruction and displacement, Israel would need to withstand its own impulses and not succumb to what he called “the messianic claim which has virtually been conjured up” — by returning to the land of our ancestors. After 1,800 years, we have abruptly picked up this uncannily familiar history of zealots, client-kings and emperors. And we need to learn from it, or pay the price, once again, for fundamentalism and baseless hatred.

At first glance, Hezbollah’s actions over the last week seem baffling. Despite having been bruised militarily by Israel — and politically marginalized by pro-American politicians in Beirut — the group fired several rockets and drones against a military facility near Haifa. Bolder still, if reporting from Cyprus is correct, Hezbollah also launched a drone against the RAF base at Akrotiri, marking a previously unthinkable expansion of its offensive operations. The way to understand these attacks, of course, is precisely as a mark of weakness. With the Ayatollah dead, the Revolutionary Guards scrambling, and Israeli warplanes operating essentially at will, Hezbollah’s strikes were a last-ditch attempt to remain relevant, an appeal to heaven to retain whatever remained of its “resistance” credentials.

The contrast with Israel couldn’t be clearer, with the IDF relentlessly hammering Lebanon’s south, the Bekaa Valley, and Beirut’s suburbs. Then there’s Israel’s renewed ground incursion, leading to dozens of deaths so far. Just yesterday, meanwhile Israel warned all civilians south of the Litani River in southern Lebanon to evacuate, suggesting at best preparations for a wide-scale ground assault — but possibly also a broader occupation. Yet if all that’s grimly familiar to students of the region (Israel last invaded Lebanon less than two years ago), things today feel different. Unlike nearly all Israel’s previous campaigns, this one was triggered not by imminent, large-scale threats to its national security, but instead by pre-emptive opportunism. 

Right after the October 7 attacks, Hezbollah began sporadic bombardments of Israel’s north, leading to the mass evacuation of Israeli civilians and, the following October, an IDF advance towards Beirut. This time, the militant group’s attack wasn’t even in the same ballpark; indeed with only around 20% of its original arsenal remaining, Hezbollah was hardly ready for another war against Israel. But having developed plans for the group’s final destruction months ago, Netanyahu saw his chance and decided to take it. 

While Israel has all but neutered Hezbollah over the last few years — not least via Mossad’s pager-bomb annihilation of its senior leadership — this new campaign is yet another expression of Netanyahu’s maximalist logic. Buoyed by Trump, Israel and its prime minister are clearly willing to eliminate even potential threats to their interests, whatever the human cost. 

Yet more than Israel, what really matters here are political developments inside Lebanon. Channeling the rage of a people drawn into yet another war, Prime Minister Nawaf Salam has declared all Hezbollah’s military activity illegal, ordering that the group finally give up its substantial stock of weapons. Against the odds, Salam’s move is already having real-world consequences. This week, the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) has reportedly arrested a dozen Hezbollah members, something unthinkable even a year ago. 

The appointment of Salam as prime minister — and Joseph Aoun, an anti-Hezbollah Maronite general, to the presidency — dramatically altered the political landscape in Beirut. At the behest of the Americans, and taking advantage of Hezbollah’s new weakness, Lebanon’s civilian politicians could finally begin to make progress toward replacing the group’s hegemony in southern Lebanon. In the first place, that meant bringing in the LAF, with the Lebanese government announcing in January that it had completed the first phase of a weapons control plan. 

Forced to reckon with this challenging new reality, Hezbollah played along with Lebanon’s government where it had to, while holding jealously to what remained to its political power and military arsenal. Indeed, despite the Lebanese state’s piecemeal efforts at disarming Hezbollah, the group may well have enjoyed a slow and gradual post-conflict decline — had it chosen not to martyr itself alongside the Islamic Republic. 

Now, though, not only has Hezbollah given Israel an excuse to finish it off entirely, it has also alienated its most ardent allies among Lebanon’s Shi’a electorate. The Amal Movement, another Shi’a party that had long provided Hezbollah with cover within Lebanon’s explicitly sectarian politics, have abandoned the militants. Just this week, two Amal ministers voted in favor of a cabinet resolution banning Hezbollah’s military activity. Given the broader context, that’s unsurprising. Shi’a-majority regions of Lebanon suffered more than anywhere else during the 2024 conflict. Lacking both funding and political stability, swathes of the country remain in ruins, even as a new war threatens to bring yet more misery. No wonder even Shi’a strongholds like the Bekaa are expressing open frustration with Hezbollah — perhaps the first time this has happened since the end of the Lebanese Civil War in 1990. 

Taken together, Nabih Berri, Amal’s leader and the veteran speaker of parliament, has clearly decided that Hezbollah now threatens his own political survival. Paradoxically, this means that only by meeting Israel’s demands, and allowing Hezbollah to be disarmed, can Berri give his constituents the space and support they need to rebuild their homes and lives. Over the longer term, this may also allow him to lead Amal into the political vacuum once Hezbollah leaves the stage.

Of course, Hezbollah won’t vanish overnight. The group still commands fierce respect among its diehard base, especially among Shi’a in the south. But if the Islamic Republic truly does collapse in Iran, whatever funds Hezbollah may have still been receiving from Tehran will quickly dry up, leading to an eventual collapse of not only its military procurement capabilities, but also its state-within-a-state network of clinics, food banks, and other social services. And with the central government in Beirut for the first time trying to confiscate its weapons, Hezbollah will be lucky if it emerges from Israel’s onslaught with even its electoral future intact.

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Yet as so often these days, Israel remains a wildcard. Despite proclaiming victory over the militants in 2024, Netanyahu and his war cabinet have always wanted more. Indeed, given American and Israeli pressure on Lebanon over the last year, their new campaign isn’t just about smashing Hezbollah, but also about forcing Beirut to normalize relations with Israel for the first time since 1948. Whatever Lebanon’s eagerness for going after the militants, this would be a hard pill to swallow. Regardless of the pro-US, anti-Hezbollah posture of the current Lebanese government, even they understand that they cannot afford to alienate a populace that nonetheless remains deeply opposed to Israel. Though they have signaled an openness to negotiations with Tel Aviv — itself a major step — a full-blown peace treaty, and all the Israeli demands that’ll accompany it, may be a bridge too far. That tension, it goes without saying, would set the stage for yet another destabilizing confrontation between Israel and Lebanon: and all at the worst possible geopolitical moment.

Given Israel’s current confidence, meanwhile, there’s no reason to think it wouldn’t push its luck and demand a degree of security enforcement over Lebanon’s south as a corollary to its peace treaty, and perhaps even seek to manage Beirut’s military affairs too. While a new occupation is certainly possible, you’d hope that Netanyahu would have learned enough from decades of Israeli errors in Lebanon to know that such a move would only catalyze the rise of Hezbollah’s successor.

While Hezbollah’s downfall may be imminent, in short, it won’t happen smoothly — and when it does, new challenges will inevitably emerge. The future behavior of Lebanon’s Shi’a will be decisive here, as will the ability of the country’s newly assertive government to quash sectarian rivalries. Violence between the state and Hezbollah, once off the table, is now a very real possibility, but so is the sort of backroom maneuvering that is a hallmark of Lebanon’s bureaucratic politics. While Israeli power is very directly and violently on the minds of Lebanese today, a sectarian civil war could yet loom tomorrow. 

One thing, however, is abundantly clear — despite Trump and Netanyahu’s desire to carve out a new American-Israeli order in the Middle East, one where Iran is nowhere and they alone call the shots, Lebanon will hardly be a pliable vassal. With or without the Party of God, this country’s long-suffering people have long memories, and the wounds of the last two years won’t soon be forgotten.

And though the last few weeks have shown hints of optimism — the hostages are home, and Gaza is free from the buzz of IDF drones — the Holy Land’s basic problems feel just as intractable. Whatever Donald Trump might claim, this truth can ultimately be encapsulated in his deal’s very last line. “The United States will establish a dialogue between Israel and the Palestinians,” the document proclaims, “to agree on a political horizon for peaceful and prosperous co-existence.” This, after all, has been the promise of peace negotiations since I was in the army — and so far they’ve achieved pretty much nothing.

We know, of course, that the current Israeli government, the most Right-wing coalition ever assembled in the nation’s history, has no intention of facilitating the creation of a Palestinian state. Long before he formed this government, in late 2022, Benjamin Netanyahu spent his entire career preventing that very possibility. As far back as his incitement against Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin during the negotiation over the Oslo Accords — which led to Rabin’s assassination in 1995 — Netanyahu has been a vehement and consistent enemy of Palestinian statehood.

As recently as 6 October 2023, indeed, Netanyahu thought he could “manage the occupation” rather than putting an end to it through a political compromise. Hamas’s massacre the following day smashed that idea. But even if it hadn’t, Netanyahu’s colleagues would still have remained, with Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich both eager to dispossess the Palestinians and annex certainly the West Bank if not Gaza too. Either way, the triumvirate aspires to a very different future from that envisioned in the Trump plan Netanyahu has reluctantly endorsed.

If, as some fear, the Prime Minister ultimately manages to derail the plan, the demolition of Gaza and the slaughter of its Palestinian population will continue, even as some Jews hope to resettle the territory themselves. Those Palestinians remaining in Gaza will be squeezed into less than a quarter of the territory and subjected to conditions resembling a cross between a ghetto and a prison camp. This is all part of the openly professed government target of “encouraging” them to leave.

As for the West Bank, once conditions in Gaza require fewer Israeli troops, the illegal and plausibly apartheid regime in place there already will accelerate the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the territory, whose initial phases include moving the rural population into the urban centers in the south; taking over and demolishing the refugee camps in the north; separating both regions from each other; and progressively turning Palestinian communities into isolated outposts. Whether or not Israel succeeds in annexing parts of the West Bank, it aims to perpetuate a sense of poverty, siege, intimidation and despair intended to similarly “encourage” Palestinians in the West Bank to quit the territory altogether.

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Gaza is the endpoint of liberal democracy

By Omer Bartov

Many decades have passed since the start of Israel’s occupation in 1967, and its transformation into a nation ruling more or less equal numbers of Palestinians and Israelis. One of developments since has been the growing dehumanization of Palestinians in the collective Jewish Israeli mind. The “social death” that Palestinians have undergone, insulated as they are behind the security barrier, means they’re encountered by Israelis only as a population to be controlled and oppressed. That becomes clear enough if you turn on the television, with one Channel 14 host claiming he doesn’t “sleep well” unless more of Gaza is flattened. Or else go on social media, with many comparing Palestinians to “Amalak”, a Biblical enemy that God commanded the Israelites to annihilate. As late as August, a Haaretz poll found that 82% of Israelis were untroubled by reports of famine in the Strip.

These societal attitudes are also reflected in law. Palestinian citizens of Israel still enjoy equal rights under Israeli law, with many pursuing successful careers from medicine to the law. Yet the Nation State Law, passed in 2018, defines Israel as the historical homeland of the Jewish people, and grants them the exclusive right to national self-determination in the country. At the core of this transformation is the gradual emergence of a thoroughgoing apartheid state, not only in the occupied territories, but increasingly in Israel proper as well. This is already manifested in the treatment of Palestinian citizens of Israel as an undesirable population that should similarly be “encouraged” to leave. As Haaretz again reports, over half of Israeli Jews now back expelling their Arab compatriots wholesale, up from 31% in 2003.

No less important, these hardening attitudes are now boomeranging back against Israeli Jews. The country’s beleaguered Attorney General and Supreme Court, seen before October 7 as the last bastions of the rule of law and civil rights for Jewish citizens, now remain silent in view of the widespread severe abuses of international law vis-à-vis Palestinians under occupation. More than that, they ignore or even condone the war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocidal actions of the IDF in Gaza. Taken together, these institutions can no longer be expected to act in defense of Jewish citizens protesting their regime’s brutalities.

In other words, if Netanyahu scuttles Trump’s plan, using his own infamous bag of tricks, and relying on Trump’s notoriously short attention span, the future of Israel — quite apart from, but also related to, the catastrophic fate of Palestinians — is dire indeed. Even before the war, secular Israeli Jews feared that the growing demographic weight and political clout of their religious compatriots would change the nature of Israeli society. Since October 7, these fears, exacerbated by intensifying messianic rhetoric and the erosion of the rule of law, as well as the deteriorating economic situation, have led thousands of young professionals and their families to leave the country, with many more considering their own migration. Certainly, this exodus won’t be counterbalanced by the influx of Jews making Aliyah from the diaspora, notwithstanding the many examples of genuine antisemitism they face in Europe and elsewhere.

If this trajectory were to continue, in the coming decades Israeli society risks changing even in such strongholds of tolerance as Tel Aviv, with Israeli nationalism focused not only on its ethnic but also on its religious Jewish identity — one which rejects all other non-orthodox versions of Judaism. Religious coercion would greatly increase, and secular, progressive, and liberal Jewish life in Israel risk diminishing into ever-more isolated enclaves. Israel may not be the next Iran, but a mix of theocracy and authoritarianism may well be the destiny for a state largely founded by secular socialist Zionists who had rebelled against what they saw as the stranglehold of backward-looking religious leaders in the diaspora.

In foreign policy, too, Israel would suffer. If it were to become the apartheid state its critics have long accused it of being, it wouldn’t be able to maintain strong economic, political, and military ties with its main European allies and the United States. It would gradually lose the support of growing parts of the diaspora: even as things stand today, around two-in-three American Jews believe Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza. None of this is helped, of course, by the claim of Israel itself — a claim disputed by many Jews living beyond its borders — that it represents the Jewish people as a collective.

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The No-State Solution

By Rajan Menon

As an increasingly unstable and feeble pariah state, Israel could continue to exist for a couple of decades: mostly, perhaps, because it may still be perceived as a strategic asset by the United States. But the weaker it got, and the more extremist it became, the less of an asset Israel would be for any rational actor in the White House. All the while, keeping down millions of occupied Palestinians would only become harder, all of which would distract from Israel’s external security. In an unstable and violent region, that’ll only make it less attractive as a strategic ally to Europe or the US.

Taken together, this is not a country that I would want to live in, nor wish for my children and grandchildren to make a life in. It would also be the very opposite of what the visionaries of Zionism, the prophets of the Haskalah — the Jewish Enlightenment — or the Jewish religious sages throughout the generations, had hoped and prayed for.

In the long run, of course, the grim reality may lead Israelis to develop a more robust civil rights movement together with their Palestinian cousins, in a country which, combined with the occupied territories, now has a population of seven million Jews and seven million Palestinians. Optimists might even suggest that this will culminate in what was called for during the heyday of the Oslo negotiations: a “state of all its citizens”. But that is far from certain, considering how oppression and racism seems sure to generate ever more extremism: whether from Hamas or hill-top settlers. We may want to believe that, eventually, Israel will go through the same process as South Africa in the early Nineties. But there is no assurance that a Mandela or a de Klerk will emerge, and even if they do, current conditions in South Africa demonstrate that dismantling apartheid does not undo the long-term damage it inflicts on society.

This is why we must hope that the vague promises and hopes expressed in Trump’s plan do end up opening the path to another future. Despite the justified cynicism and skepticism expressed by its critics, and the obvious bad-faith of many of the politicians and advisers associated with it, the President’s plan broadly points in the right direction.

It’s clear, in the end, that the Gaza Strip must be ruled by its Palestinian population, and that it must be joined with the West Bank as a single political entity: the only way it can hope to be economically viable. Once the necessity of this process is recognized, it must also be acknowledged that the Jewish and Palestinian populations of this land have no choice but to find a way to share it with equality, justice, security, and dignity for all. The goal, then, is not to determine who has a greater right on the land, or who has committed worse atrocities, or who was there first — but to devise a plan that would allow both Jews and Palestinians to rule over themselves and to live side-by-side with members of the other group.

Such a blueprint actually exists, and the vague outlines of Trump’s plan do not in any way contradict it. That blueprint, known as “A Land for All”, and previously known as “Two States, One Homeland”, was founded under joint Israeli-Palestinian leadership in 2012. Now led by the Israeli Jew May Pundak, and the Palestinian citizen of Israel, Dr Rula Hardal, the movement has variously involved journalists, scholars and activists, both Israelis and Palestinians and on both sides of the Green Line.

Overall, the plan envisions a confederation between the States of Israel and Palestine, located more or less along the 1967 borders, and based on shared principles of equality, freedom and dignity. All the while, it would distinguish between citizenship and residence: so that Israeli citizens would be allowed to live in Palestine, and Palestinian citizens would be allowed to live in Israel, as long as they respected the laws of both states. Because the infrastructure of the land on both sides of the 1967 ceasefire Green Line is so inextricably linked — true from water, to electricity, to the “972” dialcode that unites Ramallan phones with their Haifan cousins — this confederation’s institutions would have to create mechanisms for sharing resources and institutions.

In this Israel-Palestine Confederation, people would have their own national identity, and each state would enjoy the right of return for its group to be implemented as it sees fit within its own borders. But in the more distant future, the confederation, having shown that Jews and Palestinians can live productively, creatively, and safely side-by-side, may decide to transform itself into a single state of all its citizens — not through a violent struggle, but through a process of reconciliation, mutual respect and trust, and a recognition of the benefits of diversity and the creative power of fusing cultures and traditions, rather than striving to eradicate them.

Implementing this plan would require a radical change in Israeli political thinking and leadership — but also among Palestinians. Hamas is clearly no longer a plausible partner, if it ever was, meaning the only viable alternative is the Palestinian Authority based in Ramallah. But the PA is both deeply corrupt and discredited as a collaborator in the occupation. It hardly helps that, just like Hamas, the PA’s security forces have often been accused of torture, something which is incidentally also true of Israel itself.

But just as there are Jewish Israelis today who might yet be able to offer a different vision after decades of failure, so too can new Palestinian leaders emerge. Some potential leaders are currently in Israeli jails. Others are still unknown to us, or perhaps even to themselves. But once the political space for change is created, I believe that more pragmatic leaders will invariably emerge, as has happened more than once before when nations emerge from the darkness of colonialism and oppression.

If and when such a confederation is eventually created, it could become the very light to the Gentiles that some of the early and more humanistically inclined prophets of Zionism had hoped it would become. A city on a hill, not a pariah among the nations. And if you accuse me of utopianism, amid the slaughter in Gaza and the bubbling violence in the West Bank? Well, barely a century ago, the idea of a Jewish state in the Holy Land would have been dismissed as utopian too, and indeed was by Jews and non-Jews alike.

Yet as Theodor Herzl famously said, “if you will it, it will not remain a dream.” Besides, the status quo doesn’t need dreamers to condemn it: continue down this path and extremism will only grow. As for myself, I may not live long enough to see this different future, if it ever comes at all. But I pray that one day, my grandchildren, and the grandchildren of my Palestinian friends, will be able to experience the realization of that promise — and finally consign the region’s endless wars to history.

In and of itself, this is extraordinary. For decades, the recognition of formal Palestinian statehood was held out as a reward for a final treaty between the two sides. Now, though, the message to Israel (and indeed the United States) is unmistakable: the old orthodoxy has failed, and recognition is now not the prize for peace, but a tool to obtain it.

Complicating it all — as always in the most mediated and fraught conflict since 1945 — is emotion: on both sides. On the one hand, everyone from Hamas to the Green Party is delighted. On the other, the Israeli government, Jewish diaspora communities, and those rightly fearful of Islamist terror, are enraged, arguing that the move rewards Hamas for its barbarism on October 7.

For his part, Keir Starmer was at fastidious pains to deny this was the case. “Hamas is a brutal terror organization,” he said. “This solution is not a reward for Hamas… Because it means Hamas can have no future. No role in government. No role in security.” Either way, his move was inevitable. The cumulative toll of Israel’s campaign — tens of thousands of dead, alongside the absence of any realistic plan to end the war and indeed Benjamin Netanyahu’s explicit opposition to Palestinian statehood — has had its effect.

In this sense, it’s clear that recognition is a rebuke of Israel more than an expression of unqualified support for Palestine. Though other Western countries from Sweden (in 2014) to Ireland (in 2024) had already gone down this path, London, Ottawa and Canberra all held out. This was partly due to strong relations with Jerusalem, especially on security coordination, as well as a desire not to upset the United States.

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But with the US still against recognition, and Israel intransigent, the three middle powers decided this was the time to move. Sources tell me that the Government feels that recognition may be the only leverage they have left to try and change Israeli behavior on the ground.

Then, of course, is the question of domestic politics. For Labour voters, Palestine is not just a cause célèbre: it is a hugely effective mobilizing tool. They want action. And with sectarian issues now front and center for parts of the Muslim vote, and indeed costing Labour parliamentary seats, it’s no surprise that the party has moved to shore up its Left flank.

That said, it’s important to understand what recognition does and doesn’t — do. In the end, there is no escaping the fact that the state of Palestine is simply not a reality on the ground. Gaza is a war zone; the West Bank is ruthlessly contested. For now, recognition is solely a legal and political act. It won’t create mutually agreed borders, kick out settlers, and rid both the Israelis and the Palestinians of Hamas. Nor does it end the war or solve Israel’s legitimate security concerns.

Recognition does, however, do three concrete things. First, it formalizes Palestine’s diplomatic relationships with the rest of the world. Embassies replace missions; ambassadors present credentials. That matters for everyday statecraft: aid, trade, consular issues, and the slow, tedious work of institution-building.

Second, it reframes the conflict politically. By declaring Palestine a state, these three governments must now judge Israeli actions not merely through the lens of counterterrorism and occupation, but also inter-state norms. More robust pressure around the recognition of borders based on 1967 lines will follow — as will intensified scrutiny of settlement expansion, and more explicit linkage between Israeli policy and Western support.

Third, recognition pressures the Palestinians. Officials from London and Canberra alike know that recognition without reform will go nowhere. But by recognizing Palestine now, there is a political (and moral) imperative on its officials to ensure that it begins to function like one.

This will require two changes above all else. First, a decisive break with the tactics of October 7. Many Palestinians — and millions of their supporters globally — are desperate to relativize a massacre that was undoubtedly a crime against humanity. A leadership that cannot take an unequivocal stance against such violence must forfeit the support of the very states now recognizing it.

Second, Palestine needs serious governance reform: both in the West Bank and Gaza. The antisemitic school curricula; the Palestinian Authority’s “pay to slay” policy of making payments to the families of those killed or wounded during terror attacks; not to mention the widespread Islamist and jihadist presence across both territories — all this must go. A technocratic interim leadership, with a mandate to unify the security services and hold proper elections, is the minimum diplomats must demand in exchange for recognition.

That is currently impossible, what with a murderous Hamas and a corrupt and sclerotic Palestinian Authority. Britain, Australia and Canada will therefore now need to pour cash and various other forms of support, designed to both build and increase institutional capacity into the nascent state.

Israel’s response to all this has been predictably furious. Netanyahu and those around him feel that Hamas is being rewarded for October 7. According to a Netanyahu spokesperson, the Israeli prime minister’s message to nations recognizing Palestine is that “the people of Israel aren’t going to commit suicide because of the political needs of European politics.”

While Netanyahu lashes out, Israeli opposition figures blame him for what has happened. In a tweet, Yair Golan, leader of The Democrats Party, said that recognition was a “direct result of Netanyahu’s political abandonment: refusal to end the war and the dangerous choice of occupation and annexation.”

But Israel’s problems run deeper than internal dissension. I have seen, first hand from on the ground, how the country’s choices since October 7 have been driven by trauma. From the very beginning, the operational logic to destroy Hamas collided with humanitarian catastrophe, the absence of a plan and a nation’s collective anguish.

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Starmer’s posturing is a gift to Hamas

By Giles Fraser

The longer Israel fights without a credible political solution, the more it loses the goodwill of those it needs most: the Arab states who signed normalization to better contain Iran; the Europeans who defended its right to self-defense; and even parts of the Pentagon security establishment that have stuck with it for so long.

UK government sources have repeatedly made one thing clear to me in recent weeks. Recognition, they explain, is a warning from friends: security without politics produces only perpetual war and international isolation.

Israel also has another problem. Recognition happened despite US objections. Traditionally, the Anglosphere follows Washington on Israel-Palestine. But yesterday, it didn’t, a divergence that says two things. First: the Gaza war has disordered not just Middle Eastern but Western politics. Western leaders are recalibrating their positions in light of domestic opinion and international law. Second: the US monopoly over the Israel-Palestine “peace process” is gone. If Washington cannot or will not propose a credible pathway, others will try to improvise one, and publicly too.

Critics question why, if the UK, Australia and Canada were really so determined to put recognition on the table, they couldn’t at least dangle it as a prize for releasing the hostages. They also argue that recognition rewards intransigence: that it will embolden maximalists on both sides. Some of this will prove true. Israeli far-Right ministers are already spouting annexationist rhetoric; hardline Palestinian factions will claim the world has moved their way without the need for genuine concessions. And, of course, a Donald Trump who feels snubbed may offer yet more support to Netanyahu out of pure spite.

But those who support recognition will feel justified in arguing that the status quo led only in one direction: further West Bank annexation, more Gaza bloodshed, and decades more conflict. In the end, then, recognition is not a peace plan: but a stratagem to force one. The gamble, and it is a big one, is that it’ll finally force the Palestinians to accept serious, political and ideological reform — and Israelis to accept that perpetual war and endless occupation are not strategies worth pursuing. Whether or not it is realistic, this is now the policy. And, for the sake of both sides, we must hope it works.

But normal is a distant memory now. As I’m writing this, I can hear the whine of an Israeli drone hovering over my neighborhood in central Gaza. We lost two relatives earlier this month: teenage boys sheltering in the basement of a UN school. All of our old open markets and food shops are gone. And the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, set up by Israel and America to distribute food aid, has quickly become a death trap.

Our days now begin with the only food we’ve got: lentil soup. We’ve had no bread for six days, and no meat for five months. At some point most mornings, one of us will head out to investigate what food we can buy, searching not for what we want, but just whatever is available.

In place of the old food shops, a handful of makeshift street stalls have cropped up, run by people we don’t know who control the prices, and who have raised them to extortionate levels. But these can disappear at any moment — because of bombing, or because there’s nothing left to sell. Before the war, one kilo of onions was less than £3. Now it costs £50. A kilo of sugar is £100.

Despite the prices at these stalls, I, like many others, have stopped going to aid centers and won’t let my family go either. My nearest Foundation distribution center is four kilometers away at Netzarim. Getting there means walking through unsafe, open areas; we have heard about many who went there and never came back. Others did return, but with life-changing wounds. The safety of my sons, nephews, and other relatives is more important than food, and I will not gamble their lives for help we might not even receive. That’s why we rely on the stalls.

On a good day, if our trip to the stalls hasn’t been in vain, we will have one more meal: soup again, with maybe a few vegetables.

Not everyone can afford the stalls though. My neighbor Ahed lost his job at a sweet shop, so now he’s completely dependent on humanitarian aid. As the head of a family with five children, including twins who were born during the war, he is at the mercy of aid centers for his children’s basic needs, like infant formula, which is not available from the market stalls.

The first time Ahed went to the distribution center, he managed to get a box of supplies and made it home safely. But on the second occasion, he was stabbed and robbed by another Palestinian civilian. Security in Gaza is now non-existent and there are no police, so such events are commonplace. The third time, he was hit in the eye by an Israeli tear gas canister, which caused permanent damage to his vision. After these injuries, he stopped going to the aid centers out of fear for his life. Even though he urgently needs help, he now has to scramble to find other ways to get what his children need. In practice, this means asking the families of his wife and brother to share what little they have. They do their best, but there is never enough.

After the hunt for food comes the day’s second major task: waiting in a queue for hours on end to fill a few bottles from relief trucks or wells. It’s over 30°C every single day at this time of year, and the humidity is always high. Much of our water and sewage network has been destroyed, many municipal workers have been killed, and there is very little fuel for generators and pumping stations. All of this means that, if we’re lucky, we’ll get running water for a few precious hours every 10 days or two weeks at my still-standing, though badly damaged, house in central Gaza. When the water finally does come, it’s brackish and unpurified. We store it in barrels and ration every drop.

Hygiene has become non-existent. There is not enough water for bathing or washing clothes. Without water, it is impossible to use soap or shampoo, so allergies, rashes and skin diseases have become widespread.

I feel listless, dehydrated, and my voice is cracked and dry when I speak. We have no way to make the heat more bearable. Fans, air conditioning and refrigerators are useless, because there is usually no electricity — and this is especially tough for children and the elderly.

Many Gazans blame Hamas for our ongoing ordeal, not just Israel and the US. When food aid trucks have managed to enter Gaza, members of Hamas have taken the food and distributed it only to their own people, leaving everyone else to go hungry. They believe Hamas could have agreed to a new ceasefire weeks ago, and that they are blocking it for no good reason, imposing unnecessary conditions for the further release of hostages that they know Israel will not accept.

Support for Hamas in Gaza has collapsed, in my estimation, to 25% or less — a core vote consisting of fighters, their families, and those who work for government ministries. Hamas has made it seem that they do not care about human suffering, and this has eroded their popularity.

Despite the killing of some who protested in public against Hamas earlier this year, many Gazans now feel they have nothing to lose by openly speaking out against them. It will be when the war ends, many fear, that Hamas will exact its revenge, if they’re still in power.

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Gaza's children have no future

By Hasan Jber

But it’s difficult to envision the future. Even if, thanks to the international pressure, we are at last inching towards another ceasefire of a few weeks, it is not nearly enough. Welcome as a ceasefire would be, we need a much longer truce designed to produce a lasting peace. But I don’t believe the plans advanced by President Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have any chance of success, because they rely on the expulsion or voluntary departure of most or all of Gaza’s population via Egypt.

When the war does end, some of us will want to leave Gaza permanently for a new life outside, especially the young. Yet most do not want to abandon this land, but rebuild it. In any case, Egypt will not accept large numbers of Palestinian refugees. Like European countries, they fear a huge influx of migrants would cause internal problems. As for us Palestinians, we fear forced displacement more than anything else, and any plan that involves it will prolong, not end the violence.

Netanyahu’s plan to move hundreds of thousands of people into a small supposedly humanitarian enclave near Rafah, a scheme which even the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert has described as a concentration camp, would also only lead to more killing and destruction. Besides, though Israel may be talking about this, I do not believe they will take this step, because the international pressure and the scheme’s opponents in Israel would simply be too strong.

Somehow, we have to work towards the creation of a professional, non-extremist government in Gaza, and a better future here and in the West Bank. I am certain this is what the majority of Gazans want: Palestinians and Israelis to co-exist and cooperate, away from the extremists on both sides who benefit from the war. Unfortunately, there is as yet no sign as to how this might be achieved.

Meanwhile, through this terrible summer, the people of Gaza wait — and make sure to sit away from the walls. In the past few weeks, my house has been hit by live rounds five times: all of the windows are gone. We spend our days calculating how much soup we can eat for breakfast, and how much water we can afford to drink.

Yet despite ongoing conflict and instability, the Arab state system has made a hard-earned comeback in recent years. Iraq has crafted the foundations of a functional state. In fits and starts, the monarchies in the Persian Gulf region have fashioned modern bureaucracies and a measure of mutual security cooperation. Autocrats spurned popular demands for democracy and good governance. But the same Arab regimes succeeded at rebuilding state capacity — a necessary if insufficient ingredient of regional stability.

Now, however, that glimmer of possibility has come under threat from Israel’s spiraling, maximalist regional war. With a mostly blank check from Washington, the Jewish state has challenged the viability of states across the region, threatening to undermine the Middle East’s only recently rebounding, fragile state order. The Trump administration gets the importance of stable states, but its response is limited to off-the-record or background seething. “Bibi acted like a madman,” a White House official told Axios this week. “He bombs everything all the time. This could undermine what Trump is trying to do.”

Those remarks concerned Israel’s intervention in Syria, ostensibly carried out to protect the country’s Druze minority. The U.S. government has its own concerns about whether Syria’s new leader can control their security forces or want to protect minorities — but Washington does not support Israel’s approach, of bombing government targets, occupying Syrian territory, and arming proxies, supposedly under the guise of a humanitarian aid mission.

These gripes summon memories of Biden advisers leaking that Biden called Netanyahu an “asshole” while doing nothing to limit the Israeli premier’s recklessness. Under Trump, however, Israel’s adventurism has grown more extreme and destabilizing, and Trump has at times directly contradicted leaders in Jerusalem and expressed irritation. On occasion Trump has even reined in Israel. That’s understandable; the present-day tableau is alarming. Israel is causing famine in Gaza, igniting sectarian tensions and attacking the government in Syria (in direct contravention of US interests and policy in that country), and keeping up a steady patter of threats and strikes against Iran, Yemen, and Lebanon.

In a war without limits or clear goals, Israel has directly targeted Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and now Iran, while also undermining the popular credibility of those Arab monarchs in the Gulf who have quietly sided with the Jewish state. These open-ended conflicts could wreak the same kind of generational ruin that America inflicted on Iraq — the kind of unraveling that leaves a trail of hard-to-govern spaces undermined by broken states, institutions, and societies.

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Israel has opened Pandora’s box

By Philip Cunliffe

Conspiracy theorists in the Middle East have long bemoaned the Israeli and American plots to weaken their governments and fragment their political communities — a Machiavellian divide-and-rule strategy to keep a strategically critical oil-rich region off balance and easier to manipulate. Often, these fevered Arab visions were just that: scaremongering used by Arab elites to fend off domestic challenges to their misrule. But these days, the notion that Western powers, especially Israel, seek chaos for its own sake is hard to dismiss as a conspiracy.

Historians and policymakers often treat the Arab state system as a unit of analysis, because of the shared language and grouping within the Arab League. Today, in assessing the damage to states caused by Israel’s wars since Oct. 7, it’s probably more useful to look at the entire geography of the Middle East and distinguish states by their longevity, unity, and capacity, rather than their language group.

A small cadre of states have operated in their current form for centuries, with political communities that have remained cohesive across multiple eras and regime types. That group includes Iran, Turkey, and Egypt. A second category includes an array of post-colonial states, most of them monarchies, that have acquired some ability to project regional power. These include Gulf Cooperation Council powers like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. The final group includes the rest of the Middle Eastern states, some of them republics and some monarchies, but all vulnerable to destabilizing conflict and general precarity.

To be sure, states in the region, especially the Arab states, have often exemplified brittle personalistic or securitized rule (what Daniel Brumberg calls the “pillared state,” more concerned with regime survival than with good governance). But the answer isn’t to shatter state capacity in such places, but rather to direct that state capacity to serve the interests of the nation rather than the regime.

Some policymakers in the United States have belatedly come to understand that without functional states, the Middle East will never stabilize. Constant conflict, displacement, and human suffering, along with failed governance, have driven decades of perpetual emergency: wars, refugees, and failure to respond to climate change are just a few of the burning crises.

Over the last decade, successive US administrations have, with one hand, encouraged a necessary state revival. They helped mend the rift between the GCC states. They provided economic lifelines to Jordan and Egypt, and helped pay salaries to the Lebanese army when the state went bankrupt. They’ve made critical decisions to support Syria’s transition from Bashar Assad, recognizing the new government and lifting some sanctions. They’ve invested in the problematic, sectarian, but burgeoning Iraqi state, and they’ve negotiated with Iran over Tehran’s nuclear program.

The problem is the other hand, which sometimes undoes the work of the first. In his first administration, Trump pulled out of the Iran nuclear agreement and gave space to regime-change enthusiasts. Biden gave Israel a free hand to destroy Gaza and consolidate Israeli steps to annex the West Bank. And in his second term, Trump directly joined Israel’s wars in Iran and Yemen, and backed the Israeli military campaigns that threaten state survival in Syria and Lebanon (even as administration officials grumble about Bibi’s adventurism to the press).

Israel has clearly stated its strategic aim — to keep rival states so weak that they can’t strategically threaten Israel. Recent history makes clear what fool’s errand this approach is. Power vacuums and weak states generate far greater security threats — for everyone involved, including their own populations, Israel, the United States, and the international community. Groups like Islamic State and Al Qaeda thrive in ungoverned hinterlands.

But the Israelis, emboldened by what they see as an unbroken string of military triumphs after the Oct 7 Hamas terror assault, have embraced a strategy that seeks to expand the zones of chaos in the Middle East. Confident that they have coopted or irreversibly weakened their Arab neighbors, they are now cultivating enduring disorder in a wider ring: Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and, most consequentially, Iran. Some of Israel’s leaders, along with a few like-minded American officials, dream of a regime-change war against the Islamic Republic. But they’ve publicly expressed that they’d be equally satisfied to simply hobble the Iranian state, making its people suffer and its government struggle. Publicly Netanyahu has mused about regime change but emphasized that Israeli wanted to make sure Iran would lose its nuclear capacities. “They may be more comfortable with destroying the country than we are,” an American official told Axios, speaking about the Israelis.

So what can or should Washington do in response? The United States is conflicted about how much it wants to get involved in the Middle East. In some instances, American leaders appear determined to stay out of regional disputes and avoid new wars. At the same time, US troops are still deployed in numerous declared and undeclared wars, and Washington continually enables Israel’s regional bombing bonanza.

When the United States intervenes, as Trump did by bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities, it resolutely wants to stay at arm’s length — simultaneously in and out. There is no regional hegemon or collective order effective enough to calm the roiling waters. The most powerful states in the region are Israel, Iran, the Gulf monarchies, and Turkey. Egypt is too weak to play much of a stabilizing role. Against this backdrop, America’s paramount interest lies in ensuring stability and balance in this system.

A Middle East at war and chaos is good for nobody, even if leaders in Jerusalem mistakenly believe that such disorder will benefit Israeli security. Another era of regional conflict certainly harms US interests. America’s leaders increasingly tilt populist and isolationist, but as a global superpower, the US government finds time and time again that it cannot ignore global conflicts, especially in the Middle East, which has proven of enduring strategic interest. A succession of US presidents has hopefully insisted that they’re pivoting away from the Middle East, before inevitably turning the lion’s share of their policy bandwidth to the region.

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The brutal flaw in Israel’s starvation plan

By Alex de Waal

Only functional states can deliver basic governance, uphold rights, and protect their populations — the minimum ingredients of stability. The Middle East needs states with basic competence: functional institutions, some authority over militias, an economic plan, and access to international support. Even bad or ambiguous states with some capabilities are better than chaos and power vacuums.

There are a few hopeful signs. Gulf powers have avoided new fissures, despite their considerable differences over how to deal with Israel, Yemen, and Iran. Notwithstanding internal pressures from militias and external pressure from Israel, Iran, and others, Iraq has maintained its hybrid authoritarian system, built some effective institutions, and cultivated stable relations with Middle Eastern regional powers from whom Baghdad was historically estranged. Lebanon’s new government wants to place Hezbollah’s militia under state control. The Assad dictatorship is gone, and Syria has at least a theoretical prospect of enjoying legitimate national governance.

All those gains are tentative, however. Without enumerating all the many caveats, major risks overshadow every small prospect for good in the region, from the ongoing proxy wars in Yemen and Libya, to the spoiler activities of Iran and its Axis of Resistance network, to the authoritarianism and sectarianism of the region’s leaders.

The biggest threat of all to the region right now, however, comes from Israel’s unfettered and ever-expanding war. Israel’s bombings near and far have no strategic logic beyond sowing disorder and weakening authority. Strikes on Syria might upend the transition there, but can’t possibly engender security or good governance for Syrians. The war on Iran won’t engender a peaceful democracy there, but it already has sabotaged diplomacy — which was working — and appears near certain to accelerate fragmentation and disorder. Terrorism, proxy war, and many of the Middle East’s worst ills are weapons of the weak, spawned by ideologues and accelerated in weak or failing states.

Israel’s gains from the gyre of war are likely to prove illusory or, at best, brief. But the campaign to erode states and the region’s state system will cause enduring harm to the Middle East — and to US interests. The most damning lesson of America’s failed interventions after 9/11 is that it’s far easier to break a state than to build one. And without functioning states, the United States faces another generation of neglecting its own prosperity and security while it manages conflict in the Middle East.

In bombing Iran’s nuclear sites, Trump fulfilled a decades-long Netanyahu aspiration. But he also rescued Netanyahu, at least temporarily, from a short-term problem of his own making. Israel’s leader had launched a war with no clearly-defined end state, against a distant, larger and more populous power, whose terrain renders it safe from ground invasion. Through a combination of impressive intelligence fieldcraft and long-range aerial strikes, Israel has achieved concrete successes in decapitating Iran’s military leadership and degrading its ability to launch ballistic missile barrages at Israel, yet without eroding its capacity entirely. Indeed, the overnight Iranian ballistic missile strike against Israel was its most effective yet, as Israel burns through its stock of interceptors. What was until last year an almost unimaginable occurrence — Iran striking Israel directly, at its most sensitive and protected sites — now happens multiple times daily. Israel’s wars of choice have always been short, pre-emptive blows aiming to quickly triumph over enemies a longer war of attrition would favor. The current war is no exception. The pleas from Israel’s leadership for direct American involvement, initially rebuffed by Trump, were a recognition of the fact that Netanyahu had started a conflict which Israel could not finish alone. In this, Israel’s course of action, as the International Relations scholar Emma Ashford observed, was “about as clear a case of attempted alliance entrapment as you’ll ever find outside an IR theory book”.

Yet the need to bring in American firepower is a rational one for Israel. As the eminent scholar of air power Richard Pape notes, Israel is attempting to do something that has never successfully been done: topple a regime through air power alone. While there is a first time for everything, the more likely result, as Pape notes, of Israel’s overconfidence “in what its technologically advanced weapons can do is likely to harden Iran’s resolve and produce the opposite of its intended results: a more dangerous Iran, now armed with nuclear weapons”. Whether or not it decides to respond directly against the United States, risking an all-out war it can ill-afford to wage, Iran is almost certain to now withdraw from any external monitoring of its nuclear program, and from meaningful diplomatic outreach to the erratic and provably untrustworthy superpower. As Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, hurrying to Moscow for support, remarked: “Last week, we were in negotiations with the US when Israel decided to blow up that diplomacy. This week, we held talks with the E3/EU when the US decided to blow up that diplomacy. What conclusion would you draw?”

Iran’s cautious and elderly Supreme Leader Khamenei, who has long resisted acquiring nuclear weapons, is now surely as threatened from within his own regime by younger and more radical elements as he is by Israeli targeting. Diplomacy has been proved not only fruitless but directly harmful, while caution in acquiring nuclear weapons capabilities has been shown to be a strategic disaster. In the short term, a direct response to the American strikes may be outside Iran’s capabilities, as it struggles to fend off Israel’s multi-faceted assault. But whether or not, as Iranian regime sources claim, the United States provided advance warning of the strikes, and whether or not Iran managed to remove nuclear materials from the attack sites beforehand, in the longer term the logic of events will push Iran, as well as regional rivals of Israel such as Turkey, to acquire nuclear weapons capabilities as quickly and covertly as possible, outside international oversight.

But if the Iranian regime struggles with unpalatable choices, so does its American counterpart, now urging a return to the nuclear negotiations abruptly ended by Israeli bombing. Vice President JD Vance’s claim today that “We’re not at war with Iran, we’re at war with Iran’s nuclear program,” can be read as a de-escalatory attempt by a long-standing critic of American interventionism in the Middle East to keep an Iranian response within symbolic bounds, and return to the negotiating track. Indeed, Vance was quoted by Reuters just days ago as “saying the United States shouldn’t be directly involved and suggesting that the Israelis were going to drag the country into war.” He was correct on both counts. As the anti-interventionist IR scholar Stephen Wertheim observes, Israel “acted less to preempt an Iranian bomb than to preempt American diplomacy,” and in this it was entirely successful.

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The regime change maniacs are back

By Sohrab Ahmari

In pursuing a course of action likely to accelerate Iran’s nuclear weapons program, while removing international oversight, the Trump administration has crossed a Rubicon previous administrations had worked hard to sidestep. Advocates of regime change will now conjure proofs that the one-off strikes were less effective than hoped, and new and allegedly urgent targets will soon be proffered for bombing. America will now be locked into recurrent military intervention to “mow the grass” of Iran’s nuclear program on the basis of intelligence which will necessarily be unclear, speculative and politically contentious, not least among America’s increasingly conspiratorial and anti-interventionist populist Right. As Vance, a connoisseur and product of the dissident Right, surely understands, a dangerous backlash for American Jews in general as well as for Israel is brewing on the populist Right, far more so than on the pro-Palestine Left that has until now absorbed their attention. But for Israel and its friendly lobbyists in Washington, that is a problem for another time: for now the restrainers and America Firsters are humbled, and the neoconservatives and Never-Trumpers exultant.

And they have every reason to be: in embroiling the anti-interventionist Trump administration into long-term military confrontation against Iran, against its own repeatedly-expressed will, Netanyahu’s inveterate high-stakes gambling has once again won out. Threatened by corruption charges at home, and a war crimes warrant abroad, the Israeli strongman has nevertheless shown himself to be the most influential actor in US foreign policy, far more so than America’s mere Vice President. Netanyahu may not be able to install a pliable new regime in Tehran, but bending Washington to his will has proved a far easier task. Yet as with Iran, the longer term effects, as the week’s events work their way through America’s political tumult, may be far less palatable for Tel Aviv and its Washington advocates than the short-term gains. In playing its Trump card so flagrantly for short-term ends, Israel has been left with a weaker hand in years to come.

His predecessors, and especially Mohamed El Baradei, in charge 1997-2009 when it first became clear that Iran’s nuclear efforts were aimed at weapons and not energy, were extremely polite international diplomats, who presented the IAEA’s reports on Iran in very restrained language — as if they were describing purely academic research.

Grossi’s reports were entirely different. He was a diplomat until he arrived at IAEA, but from the start of his career in the Argentine foreign service, he had immersed himself in technological questions, acquiring a great deal of engineering expertise over the years.

From the start, Grossi’s investigations in Iran focused on the country’s vast effort to “enrich” uranium, to increase the proportion of radioactive U-235. Some energy reactors can operate with zero enrichment by using heavy water moderators, while others work very well with 3-4% enrichment, or a maximum of 5% of U-235.

Because the infrastructure needed to enrich uranium is extremely expensive, only a handful of the 31 countries that operate nuclear reactors have ever tried it themselves. Most simply buy it from the cheapest source, often Russia as well as France, the US and Kazakhstan.

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Israel is still winning the political war

By Edward Luttwak

But Iran was adding more and more centrifuges in increasingly vast facilities at enormous expense, which made no sense at all if the aim was to generate energy. The IAEA has inspectors who dutifully investigate nuclear installations — or rather those voluntarily shown to them. But they can only ask to visit nuclear installations that show up in freely available satellite photography. There was one in Iran that Grossi wanted to visit starting very early in his tenure: Parchin, some 15 miles south-east of Tehran. But his requests were persistently refused. Previous IAEA chiefs would have moved on to other things, but for Grossi it was the turning point: he had found the place where Iran was preparing to shape uranium and assemble its nuclear weapons.

From then on, his reports made it increasingly clear that Iran’s enormous expenditures, on some of the largest nuclear installations in the world, meant that it was after nuclear weapons as soon as possible. The main Natanz building has an area of 2.7 square kilometers, enough for no less than 50,000 centrifuges. It is clearly meant for the mass production of nuclear weapons, in parallel with the production of hundreds of ballistic missiles. Neither India, nor Pakistan or Israel, all of which have nuclear weapons, have ever attempted anything remotely on that scale.

What happened next was that Grossi started warning everyone that Iran would soon become a nuclear power, one ruled by religious fanatics pursuing the Shi’a vendetta against the world’s Sunnis for killing the last descendant of Muhammad at Karbala back in 680 AD, and for whom the destruction of Israel is key to supremacy over the entire Middle East.

When the Israelis realized that European leaders — but also Russia and China, and indeed the Biden administration — ignored Grossi’s increasingly alarmed warnings that a nuclear Iran was only months away, they waited for Trump to intervene. In this, they were immediately reassured when the US sent B2 bombers to its Diego Garcia base, each capable of destroying even Natanz.

But then Trump met resistance from the isolationists in his own administration, while he himself evidently did not want to begin his tenure with a war. Instead, he appointed a New York lawyer with no Iran or nuclear expertise to negotiate with the Islamic Republic. Unfortunately, Steve Witkoff was so poorly informed that he immediately accepted the enrichment level that Obama had negotiated, and which Trump had vehemently attacked as much too dangerous.

That is when the Israeli government — not just Netanyahu, but the entire defense ministry leadership alongside Mossad — understood that their country would very soon be faced with a nuclear Iran. It might be hoped that Israel’s own nuclear weapons could deter an Iranian nuclear attack against its own territory. But a nuclear Iran would dominate the entire Middle East, including Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, with which Israel has full diplomatic relations, as well as Saudi Arabia with which Israel hopes to have full relations in the near future.

Operationally, the seemingly impossible challenge was to bomb large nuclear installations a long way from Israel without a single strategic bomber. Aside from the immense Natanz installation, other essential targets included large buildings in the Parchin base not far from Tehran, where the bomb would have been assembled. There were other vital targets too, including the uranium hexafluoride plant near Isfahan. On top of all that, the Israelis would also have to attack the hundreds of Iranian long-range missiles aimed at Israel.

To reach all these targets, Israel had to deal with the range-payload problem that its air force first overcame in 1967, when it destroyed the air forces of three Arab states in a single day — with 60 Mirage fighters and little else. Copying Formula One racing crews, to quickly refuel and re-arm the same few aircraft to attack again and again, Israel’s highly trained ground crews multiplied its air power, while its pilots made the most of their few bombs with extreme precision.

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Why Putin isn’t scared of Nato

By Edward Luttwak

This time, too, impossible solutions were found for the range problem, including the use of 65-year-old airliners converted into tankers (Boeing is years later in delivering its own). To be able to use its short-range F-16s, Israel developed the “Rampage” air-launched missile, which flies upward on a ballistic trajectory, gaining range by gliding down to the target. That should make accuracy impossible — but once again, Israeli developers overcame the odds.

And, of course, there are also Israelis on the ground, including the ones who killed Iran’s two top military leaders. Yesterday, Al Arabiya had two successive reports on Hossein Salami, commander of the Revolutionary Guards. The first was Salami’s warning that Iran’s retaliation for any attack would be “unprecedented”. The second, a few hours later, relayed Iranian state TV’s confirmation that Salami had been killed. He, too, was surprised, as well as all the experts who explained that Israel could never do it alone, without US heavy bombers.

More importantly, the agreement has made a huge difference to people’s lives, above all to Gazans. Those still living — at least 48,000 have been killed, even as The Lancet suggests that figure could be much higher — have been stalked daily by death, seen their homeland reduced to 42 million tons of rubble, and been deprived of life’s most basic necessities. That fear has been lifted, and hundreds of trucks laden with humanitarian aid have begun to enter the Strip. As for the family and friends of the hostages snatched by Hamas on October 7, they have waited in agony for the return of their loved ones, even as some know that all they can expect is their loved one’s corpse. Of the 33 hostages who are to be freed by the end of Phase 1 of the agreement, only seven have come home so far. The joy of the families, and of Israelis more generally, has been palpable. If everything goes according to plan, the remaining 61 hostages will be freed in Phase 2 of the agreement.

There’s more. Under the terms of Phase 1, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) will redeploy to a narrow buffer-zone within Gaza’s border, before withdrawing completely by the end of Phase 2. Hamas is happy about this provision, but so are Gazans generally — it decreases the odds of the war’s resumption. Phase 3 calls for a detailed plan to rebuild Gaza, with satellite imagery showing 60% of buildings damaged or destroyed. Reconstruction, it goes without saying, is crucial if Gazans are to anything resembling normal lives.

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The No-State Solution

By Rajan Menon

Now that we’ve got the “in fairness” bit out of the way, let’s turn to the ways that the agreement could collapse, even before the 42 days of Phase 1 elapse, but more likely at the end of Phase 2 — an additional 42-day period when Hamas is required to release the remaining 65 hostages.

Could Hamas violate the deal? Of course. Recall that immediately after the ceasefire began, thousands of Hamas fighters and police appeared on the streets. Having endured punishing blows from one of the world’s most powerful armies and survived, and apparently recruiting enough fighters to replace those killed, Hamas has claimed victory. Such hubris could ultimately convince its leaders that Israel can be humiliated even further, via a renewed bout of fighting. Or, by reneging on its promise to release the hostages, Hamas may try to wring more concessions from Israel. It could, for instance, demand the freeing of even more Palestinian prisoners. That includes Marwan Barghouti of Fatah, the most famous (and popular) of all Palestinian prisoners. Since 2002, he’s been locked in an Israeli prison, serving five life sentences for murder. If Hamas ever demanded his release, or made additional demands, Israel would almost certainly say no — and the war would resume.

Yet, it’s hard to see why Hamas would wreck the agreement. The January 15 deal gives it just about everything it has long sought (and received, in a May 2024 accord, which Israel rejected). One important gain here is the IDF’s redeployment away from Gaza’s major population centers, as a prelude to a complete withdrawal. Another is Israel’s release of nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners, based on an overwhelmingly favorable hostage-for-prisoner ratio, and that’s before you recall the comprehensive plan for rebuilding Gaza.

Why would Hamas abandon these gains — especially when there’s not much more it can realistically squeeze from Israel, and when reigniting the war would inflict far more pain on Hamas than the IDF? The point here is not that Hamas is fastidious about honoring the terms of deals it signs, merely that, like other states and groups jousting in the pitiless arena of international politics, it’s a self-interested actor.

Israel, on the other hand, does have reasons — again based on self-interest — to breach the terms of the peace. Netanyahu vowed that he would continue the war until Hamas was destroyed: not just diminished but totally wiped out. He has failed to achieve that goal, something the IDF has itself acknowledged. Worse, Hamas has replenished its ranks and rebuilt much of the labyrinthine tunnel network, the very same infrastructure that made freeing the hostages so challenging for Israeli troops.

Netanyahu, in short, has unfinished business, and has openly stated he reserves the right to restart the war. No less striking, the prime minister is under pressure from his own coalition. One of his hardline cabinet members, Itamar Ben-Gvir, national security minister and head of the Otzma Yehudit party, resigned in protest after Netanyahu agreed to sign the ceasefire deal. Ben-Gvir urged Bezalel Smotrich, another hardliner, to follow suit. Netanyahu persuaded Smotrich to stay by promising (among other things) that the ceasefire wouldn’t mean a permanent end to the war. Smotrich, for his part, has publicly highlighted this assurance.

For good measure, the finance minister added that there would be “a gradual takeover of the entire Gaza Strip” to ensure that “humanitarian aid will not reach Gaza as it has until now.” To summarize, then, Netanyahu has consistently sought to ensure that he has the support of the far-Right religious parties. But if he delivers on his deal with Smotrich, defenestrates the ceasefire, and restricts aid flows once more, the whole arrangement will collapse.

And what of Donald Trump? He paraded the ceasefire, which he clearly wanted signed before Inauguration Day, as something he alone made happen. Wouldn’t its implosion make his boast seem hollow, and make his coveted Nobel Peace Prize even less likely? None of this is likely to be as big a problem as it might seem. Trump makes lots of promises — remember his vow to end the Ukraine war within 24 hours of being sworn in? — and takes credit for all manner of things. But his base expects this, so he won’t pay any political price if the Gaza war restarts. If the bloodshed resumes, he’ll blame Hamas, or Netanyahu, or perhaps even Biden.

The American domestic context matters here too. Trump has long relied on the support of groups and individuals, both Jewish and Evangelical, unconditionally supportive of Israel. The President, who always fancies himself a maverick, could break faith with these supporters. Yet nothing he has done with respect to Israel suggests he’s so inclined. During his first presidential term, after all, he moved the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Accepting Israel’s claim that the unified city is its eternal capital, that’s something only five other countries have done.

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Trump also recognized the Golan Heights — Syrian sovereign territory that Israel occupied after the Six-Day War in 1967 — as legally part of Israel. In 2023, meanwhile, he declared that Israel has “no better friend or ally” than him. No sooner did his current term start than he lifted the sanctions Joe Biden had imposed on far-Right settlers building illegal settlements in the West Bank. Soon after that, he nixed Biden’s ban on supplying 2,000-pound bombs to Israel. Plus, Trump has apparently assured Netanyahu that Israel would enjoy his full backing to restart the fight if Hamas violates the deal. In fact, the prime minister has already accused the militants of doing just that, and responded by temporarily blocking displaced Gazans from returning to the territory’s north.

None of this means that Israel, confident of US backing, is sure to breach the ceasefire. Nor is it necessarily planning to, especially since the hostages won’t all be released until the end of Phase 2. Though he’ll have more flexibility thereafter, Netanyahu may yet decide to stick with the agreement. For one thing, he may be deterred by the surprisingly high casualty rates among the IDF, with nearly 900 battle deaths in Gaza alongside 38 suicides. For another, Netanyahu may be unsure whether Hamas can truly be destroyed. Still, of the two parties that have signed the deal, Israel has stronger motives to breach it than Hamas — something to bear in mind if violence really does return.

At no point did Israel ever try to assassinate an Arab political leader, nor did any Arab state seek to kill an Israeli leader. Several Arab leaders were killed by fellow Arabs, and Israel lost one prime minister to a Jewish fanatic and a minister to a lone-wolf Palestinian assassin — but the prohibition of state assassinations was strictly observed.

Prisoners were also protected. In the 1948 war, both the Egyptian army and Jordan’s British-officered Arab Legion captured Jewish fighters of both sexes. These captives received Geneva convention treatment. They weren’t tortured, murdered, violated, or held as hostages to extract political concessions — as Hamas is currently doing and Hezbollah did in the past.

Similar restraint was practised by the Israeli army on a much larger scale in 1967 with its many thousands of Egyptian and Jordanian prisoners. Then, in 1973, when the Egyptian army captured Israeli prisoners along the Suez Canal, they were treated humanely. Afterwards, prisoners were swiftly exchanged with neither side seeking political concessions. The Syrian army, itself in perpetual and murderous internal strife, killed some of the few Israelis it captured in the 1973 war, abused more of them, and would not return them without extracting concessions. But this was very much the exception to Arab state norms.

All this changed when Iran’s Shia and Persian theocracy arrived on the scene in the early Eighties, very deliberately outdoing all Arab states in hostility to Israel — with total destruction its declared aim. Though refraining from directly targeting Israel, the regime funded and armed all its enemies from Lebanon to Yemen on an ever larger scale. Hezbollah received billions of dollars in armaments and salaries; as did Yemen’s Houthis, who have spent the past year attacking shipping in the Red Sea and launching ballistic missiles at Israel. In Iraq, the Shia Kataeb militia is also armed and directed by Iran.

The October 7 attacks changed the rules. And in April, Iran attacked Israel directly for the first time, by launching cruise missiles, armed drones and ballistic missiles, each the size of a tanker truck. With that first ever direct attack, Ayatollah Khamenei had crossed a major red line — but Israel’s unique ballistic missile defences intercepted almost all the ballistic missiles that might have caused any real damage. Israel’s retaliation was limited, sending a single attack drone that did destroy its target, an anti-aircraft missile launcher near a nuclear site. Was Israel’s restraint misunderstood as weakness? Iran doubled down on October 1 this year with a much larger missile barrage after the assassination of Hamas commander Ismaile Haniyeh in Tehran.

Israel waited before responding. Only an attack on Iran itself would be an adequate counter move. The aim would be to rattle an already insecure regime; the recent presidential elections having proved that over 70% of the Iranian population is squarely opposed to the regime. Runaway inflation (it now takes 63,550 rials to buy a dollar) means that those who live on salaries go hungry by the middle of the month. A classic pre-revolutionary mood prevails.

And so, Israel targeted military sites in Tehran, Khuzestan and Ilam provinces. With no long-range bombers, it could still attack Revolutionary Guard headquarters in important cities, the larger Mashad headquarters and of course the Thar Allah (“revenge of Allah”) general headquarters in Tehran. The aim was to humiliate the Guards, who exist to impose Ayatollah rule on an increasingly anti-clerical, even anti-religious population. It could even spark unrest in Tehran and those places where there are vast anti-regime majorities. But most targets were substantive and not just psychological, notably missile-production plants.

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Biden’s officials vehemently opposed the most productive target, Iran’s oil export terminal on Khark island, a lucrative source of the funding for Shia militias. According to Benjamin Netanyahu’s office, however,these new targets were chosen in accordance with Israel’s “national interests, and not according to American dictates”. With red lines crossed, though, another target would be Ayatollah Ali Khamenei himself, the Supreme Leader of Iran. Various Israeli military officials have already pointed to him as a key objective.

Whatever precautions were taken to protect the Ayatollah before will have been redoubled after Mossad managed to kill the official leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, within the Revolutionary Guard’s VIP guest house in Tehran. Especially since that feat was followed by the Israel air force killing of Hezbollah’s founder, Hassan Nasrallah, hidden in a supposedly secret “bombproof ” command bunker, deep beneath a Beirut apartment house.

Khamenei, though, has a protection more secure than any deep bunker, because the White House officials who decide matters for Biden used both generous promises and harsh threats to dissuade any Israel attempt to eliminate the architect of this war. And so, as Iran’s humiliation is heightened, the world waits to see what the toxic regime’s next move will be. And the Middle East keeps on burning.

Yet amid that nightmare was something miraculous. I saw friends spontaneously arrange accommodation for refugees from the south, people they’d never met. I saw a drama school, converted into a charity centre, filled with clothing, toys, books and nappies. I saw volunteers establishing makeshift schools, babysitting, offering free counselling. 

I saw solidarity: passionate, tenacious, resourceful; solidarity in a free society. Liberality in its oldest King James meaning, of unasked-for generosity, given in freedom. Today’s liberal societies encourage any number of virtues. But truth be told, solidarity is not among them. 

Quite apart from the academic evidence — James Davison Hunter is just one of the scholars to persuasively detail just how depleted American democratic solidarity has become — how could it be otherwise? Isn’t liberalism about individual freedom, even as solidarity involves committing to the other? Doesn’t liberalism take shape around carefully defined rights, while solidarity grows out of deeply subjective feelings? 

Not really. As the Hebrew University political theorist Charles Lesch has explained, liberal societies cannot survive without solidarity. Solidarity helps me see beyond ideology and self-interest. It fosters the empathy and fairness that make me want to ensure others find justice. It saves me from potential tyrannies of family and community by seeing us all as connected. And solidarity helps me develop my own moral self: it isn’t always about me.

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Why, then, do liberal societies have such a hard time grounding their solidarity? Hunter calls for new religiously grounded ideas of hope. To Lesch’s mind, the problem runs even deeper than that: foundational liberal thinkers, from Rousseau to Kant to Habermas, committed to emancipation from traditional religious authority and its many injustices, based themselves on metaphysical ideas of morality that they can’t justify on their own philosophical terms. Abstract ideas like the “general will” or “social contract” or “public reason”— none can spark the lasting social solidarity that pushes us beyond ourselves to the point of sacrifice. None can quite fill the hole left by the pre-modern rootedness of solidarity in the shared humanity of God’s creation and moral laws. 

There is though no easy return to premodern certainties. Lesch’s solution is to draw on the modern Jewish humanist tradition. One lodestar is Emmanuel Levinas. He said that caring for other people, as unknowable as God, is the only way out of an endless, hopeless struggle for power. Martin Buber makes a similar point. Our political and social institutions are shallow human artefacts, working to reflect, but never truly enacting, God’s own standards of justice. Only by relating to others as living, breathing people can we truly live together in the world. It’s by caring for others, in short, that we come to understand our own strengths, and our vulnerabilities too. Solidarity, then, is not just blind loyalty or homogeneity. Rather, it’s a way of life, lived under moral ideals. 

All this was put to the test on October 7. That day, the Israeli state and its institutions failed its people miserably. Yet society pulled together, displaying solidarity at its most profound. How? Two new books offer some insight here, not only into what happened, but what made it possible. 

One Day in October gathers 40 stories of heroism, resourcefulness and self-sacrifice. The editors, Oriya Mevorach and Yair Agmon, took care not to homogenise their examples: we hear the different cadences of troops and civilians, religious and secularists, Arabs and Jews, all featuring in one belief-beggaring, heartbreaking story after another. Taken together it is an unforgettable tapestry of goodness in the very teeth of shocking suffering. Some are first-person tales, others told by those who survive them.  

The ex-Orthodox anarchist who caught and then tossed back seven Hamas grenades before being killed by the eighth; the young father who ran out bare-handed to fight the attackers; the medic who refused to be evacuated so she could stay with the wounded; the eight-year-old girl who refused to be freed if her friend wasn’t saved alongside her; the Bedouin who drove his minivan back and forth under fire to rescue people from harm’s way; the grandfather who, after putting his family in a safe room, sat in his lounge and convinced the terrorists that he was alone, and that only he needed to die — Mevorach and Agmon tell story after story of parents sacrificing themselves for their children, raw conscripts fighting to the death, of civilians rushing into slaughter, never to return. 

Yet not even this epic heroism withstands an overwhelming sense of loss. One member of Zaka, a volunteer ambulance and remains-retrieval organisation composed entirely of Ultraorthodox Haredim, describes the silent dialogues he and his colleagues held with burned, mangled, maimed corpses, promising to keep their dignity even in death, and hearing the dead say “your eyes will be our mouths” in return. 

The heroism here, then, is not triumphal. It’s wrenched from the absurd. A father of two soldiers reflects on how both fought at the same base that day, independent of one another, one dying and saving his brother without even knowing he was there. “So if you want to ask questions,” the father says, “ask, but ask all the questions.” 

Amir Tibon takes a different approach. In The Gates of Gaza: A Story of Betrayal  Survival, and Hope in Israel’s Borderlands, he tells a story at once more sweeping and finely scaled. A Haaretz writer and editor, he powerfully tells the heart-stopping story of one family on one kibbutz — his own — interweaving it with the larger history that brought them to that morning in October.

That kibbutz, Nahal Oz, on the border with Gaza, was founded in the earliest days of the Israeli state. It grew, with time, into a strangely Israeli Eden: a close-knit community with echoes of democratic socialism, set in beautiful surroundings with a rich cultural life, regularly at the receiving end of mortar attacks and rocket-propelled grenades. The latter became a regular fact of life after Israel’s clumsy withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, aided and abetted by American misjudgments and the Palestinian Authority’s fecklessness, that ultimately led to Hamas’ seizure of power two years later. 

A crucial point of Tibon’s account, and one too often lost in standard press accounts, is the extent to which the communities abutting Gaza were filled with Left-leaning Israelis, who, when seeking affordable housing, chose to live in the country’s far but unquestionably sovereign periphery — rather than the occupied West Bank. They saw themselves as, and often actually were, the descendants of the Left-Labour idealists of Ben-Gurion’s age. Many moved near Gaza precisely to foster Israeli-Palestinian coexistence, and help local Palestinians as best they could, all as committed Zionists fulfilling their democratic principles. 

Tibon very much exemplifies that ethos of Left-Zionist solidarity, which he learned from his father, a retired major general. Like so many others, the elder Tibon grabbed his pistol on October 7 and literally fought his way south, standing alongside soldiers decades younger than himself. Unlike many others, he succeeded in his mission, rescuing his son, his daughter-in-law and his grandchildren from their dark and suffocating shelter.  

The betrayal of Tibon’s title is that of the Israeli government, and in particular of Benjamin Netanyahu, and Tibon’s criticisms of Netanyahu are as deep as the commitment to the Jewish and democratic ethos on which he has staked his life. Netanyahu has built his career on a mix of hardline nationalism delivered in eloquent cadences, and brilliant, if infuriating, tactical manoeuvres. Both are aimed at the same goal: ensuring Israel’s immediate physical and economic security while kicking strategic decisions down the road forever. One such manoeuvre involved facilitating the bounteous flow of Qatari cash to Hamas, so that it’d never need to cede control over Gaza to its internationally recognised rivals in the Palestinian Authority.

Not, of course, that Netanyahu was alone here. Many Israelis convinced themselves that Gaza could be contained. As we now see, the price of confrontation was just too frightful to contemplate. 

And, in fact, even if the Hamas attacks had never happened, 2023 would still have gone down in Israeli history for the massive anti-Netanyahu protests that rocked the country last year in response to his programme to roll back Israel’s judiciary. Those rallies galvanised Israeli civil society in ways not seen for decades. And it was, in part, those very same protest movements that pivoted and turned to the other in those awful post-October 7 days. 

The week before the attack, we held dialogue sessions around the country, making an effort to reach across Israel’s bitter political divide. One thing that clearly emerged in those conversations was tremendous solidarity at the grassroots, thinning out the further we got from on-the-ground problems, and the faster we approached the broader ideological chasms dividing society. No wonder the philosopher Hanoch Ben-Pazi has claimed there now exists a “truly incomprehensible” gap between Israelis and their leaders.

As the war grinds on, much of the intense solidarity of its early days has ebbed. A very real flash point is whether the ultimate war aim is crushing the terrorists or returning the captive hostages and displaced communities to their homes. Another, perhaps inevitably, is what you think of Netanyahu. Much of the Israeli public wishes him gone. Yet his hardline coalition partners know that they have nowhere else to go, and his partisan supporters attack his critics verbally and sometimes physically. The miracle of Israeli solidarity, then, is being put to the test anew.

While neither One Day nor The Gates is about solidarity as such, the idea infuses the pages of both. What, then, makes it happen, and keeps it going? The basic structures of daily life are surely important here: public schools; state-funded nurseries and other family-friendly policies; national health and social insurance; and, of course, mandatory military service with reserve duty later. While Israel is a far more privatised society than before, in short, much of the strong collectivist ethos of its first decades endures. 

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Yet more than the socio-economics, Israel is a state with thick webbings of culture, attachment to place and family, and the Hebrew language, whose renewal as a living, spoken language is itself a kind of miracle. 

Judaism, of course, isn’t the only faith here. Nor is Jewishness the only ethnicity. Yet one striking feature of the civilian response to October 7 was the engagement of Israel’s Arab citizens, Christians and Muslims both. Their own entwinements with the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank torque their complicated lives all the more. As Rima Farah, a scholar of Israeli Christian history has pointed out, those particular dilemmas offer the most acute test of whether Israeliness, as opposed to Jewishness, can really be a national identity. 

Here as elsewhere, and for all its uniqueness, Israel is also a testing ground for key problems of democracy. Israel is not the apartheid state of caricature — yet the fear that occupation of the West Bank will make it one is much of what drives Tibon and other liberal activists. Resolution of that occupation now seems more distant than ever, and lazy talk of “two states” is wishful thinking. Yet some meaningful path away from the endless grind of military oppression and settler expropriation is key to a decent future. And as October 7 hinted, for just a moment, that future is partly built on solidarity, on people rushing to help their fellow humans without stopping to think of which party they voted for or which language they use at home. More than that, it allows us to honestly ask both ourselves and each other: where did we go wrong?

Once religion ceases to be party political, it can become a way to ground our ties and moral responsibilities to the past, to the future, and to each other. Fortunately, for many Israelis, their faith isn’t merely a matter of spiritual dispensation — but rather a way of anchoring one’s own particular identity in something larger, something which endures once we’re gone. In that way, it is not unlike the caressing solidarities of family. At the same time, and as Levinas and Buber clearly understood, religion hangs an eternal question mark over all our certainties, and all our worldly ambitions, cautioning us against overweening pride, and undercutting the grounds of our cruelty. It makes us at once deeply particular and deeply universal, utterly encased in our particular circumstances and yet entwined with all human beings everywhere, sharing as we do the distinctly human mix of ringing potency and utter vulnerability. It makes possible a kind of solidarity in which we can offer help to others beyond ourselves, without losing ourselves in the process. 

That balance is always there, but it withers and contorts without a welcoming echo. Solidarity is not all sweetness and light. There are solidarities of hatred, enmity, fanaticism and violence, as the last year has terribly shown. But that cautionary knowledge can also guard us from ourselves, guiding us from the seductive lies of “leadership” and towards the tangible, life-giving work of responsibility. 

One year on, Netanyahu is determined to continue his war in Gaza at all costs — not just to Gazans, of whom more than 40,000 have been killed and another 1.9 million (90% of the population) displaced, but to the Israeli hostages as well. His future and the outcome of the war are now inseparable.

Even before October 7, Netanyahu was highly polarising. Liberal Israelis turned up in vast numbers to protest his policies, denouncing him as a threat to democracy and the rule of law, while those on the Right saw him as a peerless leader, even a saviour. Attitudes towards him have only hardened. The families of the remaining hostages believe that only a ceasefire will bring their loved ones home and that Netanyahu refuses to agree to one because he is obsessed with destroying Hamas entirely. Other Israelis are convinced that Netanyahu is bent on prolonging the Gaza war to remain in power so as to avoid facing the pending corruption charges against him. More still see him as a threat to rule of law in Israel. Many Israelis hold all three of these opinions. In a late July interview, the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert went to far as to warn that the country could descend into civil war — a view shared by nearly half the respondents in an August poll.

Yet despite this, Netanyahu’s vow to destroy Hamas has proven chimerical. And his refusal to abandon it has created a rift between him and the most hawkish members of his cabinet — National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who lead far-Right religious parties — and senior Israeli military officers and intelligence officials who insist that Hamas cannot be vanquished.

But what does it actually mean in practice, to destroy Hamas? The IDF’s overwhelming superiority in soldiers, military technology and firepower may well demolish its fighting force, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, and eliminate its senior commanders. (The Brigades’ leader, Mohammed Deif, has most likely already been killed.) And even if the Brigades don’t disappear, they will have been battered badly. But destroying Hamas entirely is all but impossible. It is a political movement with a distinctive ideology, which includes ending Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and control of Gaza through a draconian blockade. So long as both continue it will have a cause to which it can rally support. Thousands of vengeful young men whose mothers, fathers and siblings have been killed by Israel’s war machine will continue to join up, the suffocating Israeli blockade fuelling their resentment.

Regardless of Hamas’s future, when the war eventually ends, Israel will have to arrange for Gaza’s governance. But none of the available choices is workable. Netanyahu has ruled out a coalition government containing the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas or even one run solely by the PA. As for a government staffed by Gaza’s notables, that would be almost impossible. Anyone who steps forward will be condemned as a Quisling: the more acceptable they are to Israel, the less they will be trusted by Gazans. Alternatively, Israel could run Gaza through a military occupation but that, sooner or later, would restart the familiar cycle of repression and resistance.

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To complicate matters, Israel is waging a war of sorts on a second front, the West Bank, where tension and violence are increasing. State-sanctioned seizures of land there have accelerated, with the largest single authorisation in three decades taking place in July. The number of housing units has nearly doubled over the past five years, according to the European Union which doesn’t include the nearly 200 “outposts”, many of which eventually gain legal status despite being illegal under Israeli law. Meanwhile, settlers’ attacks on Palestinians have surged along with their destruction of Palestinians’ olive groves, gardens and orchards; the killing and stealing of sheep and cattle; the demolition and defacement of schools; and the takeover of water sources, sometimes assisted by the IDF.

Worse, as +972 Magazine reports, the security forces and settlers have killed nearly 700 West Bank Palestinians since October 7. Israel’s far-Right parties have praised these attacks, denouncing foreign criticism as smears. Ben Gvir has even relaxed gun ownership laws for the settlers: within the first two months of Hamas’s attack, 250,000 firearm applications were filed, more than in the past 25 years. In fact, the Government’s relentless, accelerated approval of West Bank settlements has all but destroyed the already-dim prospects of a two-state solution.

Unsurprisingly, support for armed resistance among Palestinians has increased. Islamic Jihad and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, and to a lesser extent Hamas have sunk deep roots in the territory. Overall violence in the region — by the IDF, settlers, and militant Palestinian groups — had increased by 50% even in the 12 months preceding the Gaza war. Current trends suggest the very real possibility of a third Intifada. David Shulman, a scholar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, warned recently in the New York Review of Books that, if left unchecked, the actions of Israeli settlers “will lead to Hamas and Islamic Jihad taking control of the West Bank”.

Further inflaming the situation, Israel has now launched a ground invasion in southern Lebanon, opening a third front against the Lebanese Shiite political party and paramilitary force, Hezbollah. It’s the culmination of almost a year of hostilities: since October 7, Hezbollah has been aiming missiles and drones at northern Israel, while Israel has been retaliating with air strikes on Hezbollah redoubts in southern Lebanon. While Hezbollah has vowed to continue its attacks so long as the Gaza war persists, Netanyahu is bent on enabling the return of people displaced from their homes, and it appears he will take great risks to do so.

But by invading Lebanon, Netanyahu is taking on a foe far more formidable than Hamas. As retired Maj. Gen. Yitzhak Brik wrote in Haaretz: “The IDF, which failed to destroy Hamas, certainly won’t be able to destroy Hezbollah, which is hundreds of times more powerful than Hamas.” Israel’s ground forces have been cut by 66% in the past 20 years, Brik explains, which means that Israel “doesn’t have enough troops to remain for a long period of time in any territory it conquers, nor does it have troops to relieve those who are fighting”.

Then there’s the question of how Israel will respond to Iran’s barrage of missiles fired yesterday evening. And whether the United States will limit itself to helping Israel shoot down Iran’s missiles, as it did in April, or decide to strike Iran directly. In response, Iran could go so far as to close the Straits of Hormuz, a step whose ripple effects could course through the networks of the global economy.

One year on from October 7, the combination of increasing violence in the West Bank, an Israeli war in Gaza and ground invasion of southern Lebanon, and an Iran that feels pressure to shore up its credibility given Israel’s attacks against its allies — Hamas and Hezbollah but also the Houthis of Yemen — amounts to a tinderbox. The consequences of an explosion are impossible to predict with precision. But this much is clear: we will only see more death, destruction and suffering. Wars are easy to start but hard to end — and quickly spiral out of the control of those who initiate them.

History is not some dry mathematical exercise, events mere beads on an abacus. It is built on human imagination: on the myths and ideas that define us. After all, most history today is told as national history — and what is a nation but a group of people who decide they are one? What, for that matter, is an ummah, a diaspora, race or religion? None of these things are facts, but make-believe constructs that are no less real for being so.

And so we return to Israel. On the one hand, we have the brute facts of the past fortnight — the abacus of despair. On 7 October, a coordinated attack by Hamas saw hundreds of Palestinian men break into Israel with the aim of murdering and kidnapping as many Jews as possible. The result was the worst loss of Jewish life in a single day since the Holocaust; the worst terrorist attack in Israeli history; more than 1,400 dead and 199 captured. Then came the inevitable response: the air assault on Gaza which has killed at least 3,000 Palestinians. And now the fog of war.

Today, a simple recounting of events is all but impossible, each story revealing far more about its narrator than the battle between Israel and Hamas. For some on the Left, for example, it is now “racist” to say the mass slaughter of Israelis was in any way antisemitic. Apparently, to do so is to project European values onto the Palestinians — who do not care about ethnicity, only occupation. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a take come so close to genuine insight, only to fall into the mud at the last. Can there be anything more obsessively Western than such an insistence on framing everything through the lens of colonialism and racism?

However absurd the argument might be, it is now the dominant framing through which history is seen in the West. This racist-coloniser logic runs through the Yale professor Zareena Grewal’s claim, for instance, that “settlers are not civilians” (and so, presumably, legitimate military targets for Hamas). And it is there in the now-common refrain that “Zionism is racism” or even “white supremacy”. In this view, Jews are just white Europeans, a bleakly dark irony of its own.

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At the heart of all these claims lies the same grim conclusion: that Israel itself is illegitimate, a settler state which should be wiped off the map as if it were some kind of Levantine Rhodesia. This is the logic behind signs reading “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” — not a benign call for national liberation, but a demand for the conquest of Israel itself and, at least according to Hamas, death for the Jews who live there. The founding charter of Hamas is unequivocal on this point.

Yet instead of taking Hamas at its word, there seems to be an effort in the West to reinterpret its language into something more palatable to our own understanding of the world, filled as it is with ideas of endless progress and liberation. For many of us, national liberation is an axiomatic good, part of the progress of humanity towards an ever more perfect union — the opposite of colonialism.

What Hamas’s recent attack exposed, however, is the absurdity of believing that it shares this vision. Hamas is itself a colonial enterprise committed to the idea that there are Muslim lands which, once conquered, are forever Muslim and must expand to cover the whole world. “During the times of (Islamic) conquests, the Moslems consecrated these lands to Moslem generations till the Day of Judgement,” the Hamas Covenant asserts. “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad.” Even if Hamas were merely a national liberation movement, an Arab IRA rather than a Palestinian Islamic State, such an idea of universal nationalism is surely utopian — as if all nations somehow naturally exist on land that is theirs by divine right.

We did not always assume this was self-evident. “It had been discovered and brought to people’s attention in the course of the 19th century that, in order to possess individuality as a citizen, every person must belong to a definite nationality or race,” spat Joseph Roth with evident dismissiveness in The Emperor’s Tomb, his great novella about the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. “I hate nationalism and nation states,” declares his bitter old Prince. “My old home, the [Habsburg] Monarchy, alone, was a great mansion with many doors and many chambers, for every condition of men. This mansion has been divided, split up, splintered. I have nothing more to seek for, there. I am used to living in a home, not in cabins.”

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Ireland will always be divided

By Tom McTague

The truth, of course, is that Roth’s grand European mansions hardly offered “every condition of men” the same home comforts, which is largely why the nations within them began to yearn for states of their own — including the Jews. The result was that the 20th century was a century of cabin conversions, which often left minorities on the wrong side of new walls thrown up overnight.

Israel is not unique in this regard. Poland only emerged in its modern form after the ethnic cleansing of East Prussian Germans who once lived there. Irish independence left a million or so Protestants in the North so enraged that they launched an armed insurrection to win a separate statelet of their own — which in course left a whole new minority homeless. In every case, how nations obtain their land is always murky, violent and colonial, granted legitimacy only through the slow process of time, power and hypocrisy.

Occasionally, we glimpse the double standards involved in this process — when an American congressman complains about “planters” in Ulster, for example, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he himself is a planter living in the last great European empire. I wonder how many of the American professors blithely declaring that Israelis are “settlers not civilians” would be happy for themselves to be treated as legitimate targets for slaughter by the Navajo or Apache? The very idea of an independent Palestinian state is the product, ironically, of the same belief in nationalism that led the early Zionists to demand a state of their own too.

Of course, the assault that Israel is about to unleash on Gaza is not just an event that will one day become a war of history — but one that is already the product of how Israelis understand their own history. And at the heart of it is a troubling question: is there a “solution” to the Israel-Palestine conflict, or does the search for solutions ignore the lessons of history itself?

“The history in my regular schooling was all about progress,” the fictional historian Ruben Blum recalls in Joshua Cohen’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Netanyahus: “A world that would continue to improve illimitably, so long as every country kept trying to be more like America and America kept trying to be more like itself.” This sentiment seems to be buried somewhere deep within the Western soul: the idea that, as Cohen writes, “the past was merely the process by which the present was attained”. In this understanding of history, an independent Palestinian state will eventually emerge, sovereign and democratic, at peace with its neighbour, just as Ireland and Ukraine will do the same.

And yet, as Cohen writes, there is another way of thinking about history: a Jewish understanding. “My Hebrew school history was closed,” says Blum in comparison. “It was no history; there was no past, no present, no future. Rather, there was time, as round and perfect as the earth, which from the moment it emerged from God’s spoken light had been marked by a constant repetition, not of seasons, or harvests, or astral phenomena and the holidays they governed, but of oppression, violence, and death.”

In Cohen’s novel, this rabbinical understanding of history is shared by Benzion Netanyahu, the real-life father of today’s Israeli prime minister. Benzion was one of the great historians of the Spanish Inquisition and argued that Iberian antisemitism was not the result of religious differences, but of pure Jew-hatred. As the real-life Benzion observed: “Jewish history is in large measure a history of holocausts, carried out by antisemitic leaders and factions that managed to take over whole countries or regions in times of anarchy, civil war, or rebellion. In the areas that fell under their control, all Jewish communities were wiped out.”

Apart from the sudden exposure of Hamas’s genocidal intent, for me, the most disturbing realisation of the past fortnight is that perhaps Benzion was right. Intellectually, I knew antisemitism existed, though I had never witnessed it first-hand. But now I have. After the slaughter in Israel it was Palestinian flags that were being waved in the streets where I live, with Jewish kids told by their schools to pretend not to be Jewish.

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By Ben Judah

In Benzion’s understanding of history, the only way to survive this circular slaughter of history is to be armed and ready to fight. There is no solution — only vigilance. It is a pessimistic understanding, yet perhaps this is Israel’s fate, its history. This was the lesson of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the great hero of revisionist Zionism who warned the Jews of Palestine that the only way they could survive would be to build an iron wall with their neighbours. And it was also the message of Moshe Dayan, Israel’s Chief of Staff, in his celebrated eulogy to Ro’i Rotberg, a kibbutz security officer killed on the Gazan border in 1956. “Yesterday with daybreak, Ro’i was murdered,” Dayan began:

“The quiet of a spring morning blinded him, and he did not see the stalkers of his soul on the furrow. Let us not hurl blame at the murderers. Why should we complain of their hatred for us? Eight years have they sat in the refugee camps of Gaza, and seen, with their own eyes, how we have made a homeland of the soil and the villages where they and their forebears once dwelt.”

But this was no call for withdrawal, guilt or even compromise. Dayan continued:

“Not from the Arabs of Gaza must we demand the blood of Roi, but from ourselves. How our eyes are closed to the reality of our fate, unwilling to see the destiny of our generation in its full cruelty… Beyond the furrow that marks the border, lies a surging sea of hatred and vengeance, yearning for the day that the tranquillity blunts our alertness, for the day that we heed the ambassadors of conspiring hypocrisy, who call for us to lay down our arms.”

This, ultimately, is Prime Minister Netanyahu’s understanding of Israel’s predicament and, indeed, of Jewish history itself: fated to fight for survival and to be hated. And today, it feels harder than ever to argue that it is wrong. How could you, after a 90-year-old Holocaust survivor was dragged from her shelter and shot in the head not far from where Dayan spoke? The tragedy here is stark: that the more people in the West choose a history which sees the very existence of Israel as illegitimate, the more Israelis will conclude that Jabotinsky, Dayan and Benzion were right all along — that Jews are never safe, that carnage is always lurking in the dark furrows of history.

“Kahanism Won” was the shocking headline of yesterday’s editorial in the liberal Haaretz newspaper. If that is the case, Israel is in more trouble than I ever thought possible. Born in the US, Meir Kahane was a radical orthodox rabbi and founder of the Israeli Kach party. He was convicted in America for manufacturing explosives. In Israel, he was convicted for the attempt to blow up the Libyan Embassy in Brussels, and arrested dozens of times for inciting violence against Palestinians. He saw himself as a modern-day Maccabee, railing against the assimilation of Israeli Jews into Western secular culture. His followers re-formed the first-century assassin group, the Sicarii, and targeted Left-wing Israeli politicians.

Kahane was elected to the Knesset in 1984. When he would get up to speak, other Jewish members would walk out en masse. In the 1988 elections, Kahane was barred from standing on the grounds of his “incitement to racism”. Two years later, Kahane was himself assassinated in New York, but his poisonous legacy lived on. Yigal Amir, the man who assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin 27 years ago, as he was making peace with Palestinians, is considered one of Kahane’s disciples.

So for Haaretz to claim “Kahanism won” is a warning from history: something far more dangerous than Bibi has emerged from these elections. Kahane’s party is no longer. But its grandchild, Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Strength) has clearly done well, as have Right-wing religious parties such as Shas — both of which Bibi will have to rely on if he is to become Prime Minister. All this at a time when Israeli society is more divided than ever before. And not just between Jews and Arabs, but between Israeli Jews themselves. Tel Aviv is a modern European city, with a strong Barcelona vibe. This is the land of the Toyota Prius. Most of the restaurants are not Kosher. You can buy bacon in the market. The nightlife and fashion are sexy and relaxed.

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But in most places outside Tel Aviv, the feel is very different. In the religious areas, in the poor parts of the country (especially in the South), in the settlements — this is where the Right and the far-Right have their base. From the perspective of Tel Aviv, the ultra-orthodox feel like an 18th-century throwback. “Penguinim” is the commonly-whispered secular pejorative for their black clothing. The ultra-orthodox do not fight in the army and often have no regular paid employment. They are exempted in order to study Torah. And they have many children, which, of course, is shifting the electoral demographic. So there is resentment from those whose children are sent to Gaza to fight (and die) and who pay taxes to support a religious lifestyle they do not understand.

I spoke to friends and family in Tel Aviv yesterday morning. They are in despair: the place they once knew and loved — the place their grandparents built — is disappearing before their eyes. “What sort of a country are we leaving to our children?” one said to me, holding back the tears. Many want to leave, as my wife indeed has left, but don’t know where to go.

Yet from the perspective of the ultra-orthodox, the Jews of Tel Aviv are not really Jews. Or rather, they are Jews officially (because they have Jewish mothers), but they do not behave as Jews should. Mostly, the ultra-orthodox do not have much of a view about the secular parts of Tel Aviv because they have not been there, despite the fact that a Heredi community like Bnei Brak (the fifth-most densely populated city in the world) is just a couple of kilometres away.

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One Israeli friend recently told me that he met a young boy in a park in Bnei Brak who had never heard of the Holocaust. I found this almost impossible to believe. But what is absolutely true is how little different parts of Israeli society talk to, still less understand, each other. They don’t even speak the same language — both literally and figuratively. When my wife and I watched Shtisel together on the telly, I was astonished to find that I, having a smattering of German, understood more of the Yiddish than she did.

But it’s not just the secular and the religious that don’t mix. This is a country that has also been butchered by Bibi’s extreme version of free-market capitalism. Caesarea, on the coast, where Bibi has a house, has the only golf club in Israel and extraordinary gated mansions set in large, well-policed and leafy streets. The vineyards of the Galilee find many takers — myself included, I confess — for wines the price of which would make the farmers of Burgundy blush with embarrassment.

Elsewhere, the poverty is crippling. In the South, where the rich won’t live because it is too close to the rockets from Gaza, there is little work and conditions are often crowded and unsanitary. Around the old bus station in Tel Aviv, immigrants from Africa live in dirt and squalor, with elderly ladies selling their bodies out of street-side booths for a few shekels. They don’t pass by these places when they take Christians on a tour of the Holy Land.

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By Giles Fraser

You don’t need to mention the occupation to describe Israel as a divided society. The Shas party has a point when they defend the Sephardic (Arabic Jewish) community against the inherent sense of cultural superiority of the Ashkenazi former Europeans. Religious and secular, rich and poor, with Jews from all over the world: this is one of the most diverse, if not to say divided, societies on Earth. That is what makes it such an exciting place to be, but also one of the most fragile.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Kahanist leader of Jewish Strength, openly advocates violence against Palestinians. And he is only 46, with growing popularity and potentially a long future in politics. I am not a citizen of Israel, though my wife and children are. I look at the country with the gaze of an outsider, albeit an adopted one. But I love the place. And yet today, I fear for its future more than ever.

Yehuda is too young to vote — the voting age here is 18 — but he was deeply invested in the outcome of this week’s election, which Netanyahu went on to win. Handing out the mock ballot slips was more than a stunt, it was an act of devotion to the prime minister who has been in power for more than half of his life.

“There’s no one like Bibi,” he said, using Netanyahu’s nickname. “The Likud is like family and friends.”

Yehuda’s enthusiasm isn’t unusual. It’s part of a significant trend in Israel: young people love Netanyahu. And they most probably played a significant role in his reelection. Though we don’t yet know the breakdown of election results by age, a pre-election poll revealed Netanyahu’s popularity with young and first-time voters.

The survey, by the Israel Democracy Institute, showed that 65% of Israelis between the ages of 18-24 preferred Netanyahu while just 17% wanted his rival Benny Gantz. Among Israelis over 65, Gantz was much more popular — 53% preferred him, while 35% wanted Netanyahu.

Broadly speaking, Jewish Israeli youth like Netanyahu because they tend to be Right wing, the dominant ideology in Israel. Here, as opposed to Europe, the Right-Left divide is not related to social issues and economics but to security, defense, and the peace process.

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More than half of the population, according to Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute, would identify itself as being on the Right. Among religious Jews, a growing sector of the population given the high birth rates in the orthodox communities, that tendency is even more prevalent.

“Keeping in mind that first-time voters are greatly influenced by their family and home environment,” said Plesner, “and given the disproportionate demographic growth of the ultra-Orthodox population, the logical conclusion is that the current rightward trends are expected to continue.”

But religious demographics are only part of the explanation. These young voters are a generation of sceptics when it comes to the idea of peace between Israelis and Palestinians. They support Netanyahu because they believe his message that Israel must live by the sword. “The hope or yearning for peace is foreign to them,” said Plesner.

They were born in the late 1990s or very early 2000s, in the wake of the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at the hands of a Jewish extremist who opposed territorial compromise with the Palestinians. They were raised in the shadow of the bloody Second Intifada, and were just starting school when Israel evacuated Jewish settlements from the Gaza Strip in 2005. They have lived through three wars between Israel and Hamas in Gaza — in 2008-2009, in 2012, and in 2014. And now most of them are in the Israeli army, with many enforcing a 52-year-long military occupation.

On Election Day in Har Homa, a Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem, a 20-year-old named Roni was sitting at a table inside a polling station in an elementary school. She is a soldier in the Israeli military’s home front command and had spent the day helping with the ballot. She had already cast her first ever vote. Her pick? Netanyahu.

Roni said she didn’t care that Netanyahu was facing corruption charges in several cases, pending a hearing. She was impressed by his diplomacy, and especially his close relationship with Donald Trump. Like many Israelis, she was also voting on security. “The security we have had in the past decade is the best we have ever had,” she said.

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Roni lives in Maale Adumim, another settlement in the West Bank. A few days before the poll, Netanyahu promised that he would annex these settlements if he were reelected. It was an idea that resonated with her, even though she conceded it would be “problematic” – since most countries reject Israel’s occupation. Netanyahu is “the only one that would be able to do it,” she said.

In her view, peace between Israelis and Palestinians is impossible. “I don’t think there is ever going to be peace,” she said. “We both want the same thing. We want Jerusalem, they want Jerusalem. They want to have a country but they want it on our land. It is like two babies wanting the same candy. One will get it one, one won’t. We got it.” Sharing the land is not an option. “I think that would be a disgrace for the soldiers that died protecting the country,” she said, “the soldiers’ blood that was shed all over Jerusalem, all over the West Bank, all over the country.”

Nor does she believe that the Palestinians will give up their fight even if a compromise is reached.

Israel’s youth weren’t always so Right wing. Roby Nathanson is the director of the Macro Center for Political Economics in Israel, which polls the attitudes of Israeli youth every six years. When the survey began, in 1998, its respondents were the “generation of peace”, he said. But attitudes shifted to the Right over the years as the peace process floundered.

A critical point was the Israeli evacuation of settlements from Gaza in 2005, which was followed by repeated wars between Israel and Hamas. There are many reasons for this turn of events — Israel’s siege, Hamas’s militancy, and other regional developments — but many bought a simple story, believing that Israel gave up land and got rockets in return.

In the 2010 survey, the first one following the Gaza withdrawal, Nathanson said he noticed more extreme attitudes from the youth than ever before.  “We identified racist opinions among the youngsters,” he said. “We were very astonished about these positions.”

Today, these opinions are no longer surprising. In the 2016 survey, the most recent one, 40% of Jewish teenagers (15-18) and 44% of Jewish young people (21-24) said they “think that Arab citizens of Israel should be prohibited from being elected to the Knesset”.

According to Nathanson, Netanyahu is particularly appealing to first-time voters because his party invests in their development. Bibi may be notorious for elbowing out competitors within his own party, but in the lower ranks of Likud, young people feel encouraged to take on leadership positions. The populist party “gives many young leaders opportunities to grow into politics and be leaders of the future”.

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Nathanson contrasts this with Likud’s historic alternative, Labor, which is more calcified when it comes to growing the next generation of leaders. Labor are set for a historically low six seats in this election, compared to Likud’s projected 35. One of Labor’s few young stars, Stav Shaffir, did not come from within the party but was courted by it after leading a social justice protest movement in 2011.

It all marks a radical shift away from the Left’s vision of Israel – one that upholds human rights, the justice system, and works toward a negotiated solution with the Palestinians. “If you look at it statistically, the perspective for the secular, liberal, open-minded democratic society is not very rosy,” Nathanson says.

Instead, the future looks bright for the Right’s ideal: an Israel which prioritises the Jewish identity of the country over its democratic one, to the detriment, according to critics, of religious pluralism, the welfare of Israel’s Arab Palestinian minority, and the two-state solution. With demographics on his side, Netanyahu will be steering the country down this path for some time to come.

It’s a scene of late winter Mediterranean idyll, but to hear Lifshitz tell it, darkness looms on the horizon. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is running for a fifth term in office, defiantly continuing his campaign in the face of pending indictments in several corruption cases. Should Netanyahu win, it will spell in Lifshitz’s view a “catastrophe for Israeli democracy.”

That’s why Lifshitz is voting for Benny Gantz. The former chief of the Israel Defence Forces, Gantz burst onto the political scene in late December. He has no political experience. But that hasn’t stopped Netanyahu-weary Israelis like Lifshitz from investing their hopes in him.

“The necessary thing is to replace Bibi,” Lifshitz says, using Netanyahu’s nickname. “I would say no matter who, but the one who can do it is Gantz.”

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Up and down Rothschild Boulevard, the heart of Israel’s most liberal city, Gantz supporters are easy to find. And most have the same reason for backing him.

“He has a chance of replacing Bibi,” says Noam Ahituv, a 43-year-old web programmer who was smoking a cigarette on the street.

“He’s just not Bibi,” echoes Lihi Ben Arie, a 36-year-old product manager sitting on a bench with two friends, one of whom piped up with another reason to vote for the tall, blue-eyed candidate: “He’s hot!”

For the past decade, Netanyahu has had a virtual lock on power. After first serving as prime minister from 1996 to 1999, he was again elected in 2009 and has maintained the position ever since. Today, there’s no figure more divisive in Israeli politics than Netanyahu.

To his supporters, he is Israel’s peerless statesman and protector, defending the country from, on any given day, journalists, Leftists, Israel’s Arab citizens, and the attorney general who seeks his indictment. To his detractors, he is a crook leading the country into a moral abyss, in which maintaining the status quo comes at the expense of Israel’s democratic institutions, its standing in the free world, and the country’s ability to make peace with the Palestinians.

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And yet up until recently, Netanyahu’s continued rule seemed like a foregone conclusion to most in Israel. With no credible alternative on the horizon, Netanyahu banked on an easy win when, in December, he called for early elections.

Back then, Israel’s attorney general had not yet announced his plan to indict Netanyahu in several corruption cases. By winning yet another election, Netanyahu reasoned, he would thwart the potential charges by renewing the lease on his leadership.

But then along came Gantz.

Israelis recognise Gantz from his tenure as IDF chief between 2011 to 2015, in particular his leadership during Israel’s 2014 military operation in Gaza, Operation Protective Edge. In January, Gantz kicked off his campaign with a speech that took aim at Netanyahu, comparing his administration to a “French royal house” and promising to return the Israeli government to the people.

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Next Gantz merged his party, Israel Resilience, with two other parties to form the Blue and White alliance, a centrist mega party named for the colours of Israel’s flag. If elected, Gantz plans to serve two and a half years as prime minister before switching with Yair Lapid, his Blue and White co-head.

Blue and White made a strong showing in polls after Israel’s attorney general announced his intention on February 28 to indict Netanyahu in three different corruption cases, pending a hearing. But now the race is narrowing. Blue and White still outpaces Netanyahu’s Likud in the April 9 election, but by a slim margin. In Israel’s electoral system, the head of the party that wins the most seats is given the first chance to assemble a coalition out of a majority of parliament seats. As of now, it remains unclear whether Blue and White will be able to convince enough smaller parties to form a government.

In an election that is ultimately a referendum on Netanyahu’s fitness to rule, the most attractive thing about Gantz, as Lifshitz and his fellow citizens soaking up the sun on Rothschild Boulevard show, is that he’s not Netanyahu. The second most attractive thing is his military background.

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In a country where service is mandatory for the majority of citizens, Gantz’s army pedigree projects an image of strength to the security-obsessed public. It’s an image that he has heavily campaigned on. In early video advertisements, he bragged about killing terrorists and showed footage of the vast destruction of the Gaza Strip during the 2014 Israel-Gaza war. (In fact, Gantz is facing legal action for his conduct during that war; a Dutch-Palestinian is suing Gantz and another ex-general for the bombing of his family home in Gaza, which killed six relatives. A Dutch court is deciding whether to hear the case.)

For Michael Freedman, a 39-year-old British immigrant to Israel, Gantz’s security credentials are one part of the reason he is “90%” sure that he will vote for Blue and White. “I know Gantz only from the media and from his performance as chief of staff, but he seems to be a genuinely safe pair of hands,” he says, standing in the lobby of a Tel Aviv hall after an event featuring Gantz’s Blue and White co-leader Lapid.

Gantz “ran Israel’s largest and most prestigious institution, I would argue,” Freedman continues. “Does that qualify him to be prime minister? I don’t know but you have to take the candidates you have. Bibi’s current behaviour absolutely disqualifies him from any public offices. [Gantz] is the alternative we have, let’s hope he’s as good a prime minister as he was chief of staff.”

To Freedman, this election is as high stakes as it gets. “This is really a battle for the soul of what Israel is supposed to be,” in terms of the country’s approach to rule of law, democracy, and the validity of the courts. Netanyahu, he says, is undermining them all.

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Predictably, Netanyahu’s line against Gantz is that his former military chief is a Leftist. He even claimed that Gantz attended a ceremony honouring Hamas militants killed in the 2014 war. Israel’s liberal newspaper Haaretz fact-checked the assertion and found that the event in question was actually an Israeli peace event near the Gaza border, calling for reconciliation between the two sides.

Gantz is hardly Left. Along with Lapid, he is campaigning with two other military men, former defence minister Moshe Yaalon and former IDF chief of staff Gabi Ashkenazi. Yaalon is an outspoken supporter of the settlement movement. The Blue and White party’s platform is an ideological medley, with nods to security, religious pluralism, and equality, but with a diplomatic program that no Palestinian government would accept. (For one, it claims Jerusalem, where Palestinians hope to build a capital, for Israel alone.)

“It is a kind of supermarket party,” says Ofer Kenig, a researcher with the Israel Democracy Institute.

According to Dr. Dahlia Scheindlin, a political pollster, part of Gantz’s test will be whether he can reach Israelis disillusioned with Netanyahu on the moderate Right.

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In Jerusalem, Amir Elfassy is taking such an ideological leap, although he started from a more extreme position than many would-be Gantz voters. The 34-year-old owner of the Butke bar, Elfassy previously voted for the ultra-nationalist Jewish Home party, which calls for Israel to annex parts of the territory Palestinians claim for a state.

Now he’s with Gantz’s Blue and White.

“It is the first time I’m not voting Right,” he says, standing inside the bar, a small brown box of a building in Jerusalem’s First Station, a commercial strip in a converted Ottoman-era train station.

Elfassy’s political shift is idiosyncratic. He used to align himself with the hardline rhetoric of the Right. As a former soldier, his first encounter with Arabs was on the other side of his gun. But since moving to Jerusalem and opening a bar, he has made friends with Arabs. He even has Arab employees, like “my little brother Muhammad,” he says, gesturing to a skinny young man with a pony tail, Muhammad Zaghal, who is rolling a spliff on the bar top.

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Now Elfassy has a “live and let live” attitude — albeit one that has its limits. It’s not like he’d approve of his daughter dating an Arab, he says. He knows Gantz agrees with that approach. “Benny Gantz has these ideas at the top of his mind, and security.”

And what about Zaghal? Unlike most Jerusalem Palestinians, he has Israeli citizenship, which means he has the right to vote in national elections. At 21 years old, this will be his first.

Packing leaves into a cigarette paper, he says he’s not sure yet if he will vote. “I don’t really like politics.”

But among many Israelis, politics is addictive these days. With about a month to go until the election, Israelis are glued to their smart phones, following every minute development ahead of April 9, when their country might face its biggest political upheaval in years.

It all depends on whether a centrist general turned politician can convince the country to take a chance and buck the status quo.