Israel on the Brink

Israeli friends report an eerie calm: The hospitals are preparing for mass casualties, while citizens go about their more or less normal lives—and in the evening drag into place the steel plates that shut the windows to their safe rooms. For the residents of southern Lebanon, the atmosphere is no doubt considerably more fearful and uncertain, living as they do in a failed state dominated by Hezbollah that may soon feel the full weight of Israeli fury.

At such a time, the temptation, not altogether misplaced, is to focus on personalities: Ayatollah Ali Khameini, the aged follower of the maker of Iran’s revolution; Yahya Sinwar, the diabolical mastermind of the October 7 massacre; Hassan Nasrallah, the charismatic Hezbollah leader infuriated by the recent loss of his chief military aide, Fuad Shukr, to an Israeli strike; and above all Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, untrusted and untrustworthy, politically skilled but no statesman, intelligent but not wise, a former commando who shuns responsibility and is loathed by many, including, according to Israeli newspapers, his own generals.

It is therefore not surprising that some, in Israel and abroad, regard the recent attacks that eliminated Shukr in Beirut and the Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran—in a Revolutionary Guard Corps guesthouse, no less—as one more piece of folly by Netanyahu, who has mortgaged his country’s politics to religious extremists and who, many believe, is animated solely by a desire to survive in power as long as possible.

There may be truth in all this, but only a part of the truth, and probably not the most important truth. A more detached strategic analysis yields a different picture.

Begin with the nature of the larger Middle East war, which has been going on for years now but chiefly in the shadows, or at least without a lot of Western-media attention, which amounts to the same thing. The war is an existential conflict between Israel and a coalition of its enemies, at the center of which is Iran. The various militant groups sponsored by Iran—Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, militias in Syria and Iraq, and the Houthis in Yemen—share the elimination of the Jewish state as their strategic goal. They may agree to truces, but those are pauses, not armistices, much less peace.

This conflict has persisted since the creation of the Islamic Republic of Iran, with pulses of greater and lesser violence. It is the reason Iran has steadily equipped Hezbollah with a large armory of rockets and missiles, and why it is now doing the same for the Houthis; it is why its militias in Syria and Iraq conduct attacks on Israel and on American forces; it is why ships are attacked and sometimes sunk, not only in the Arabian Gulf but also on other seas.

Iran funds and supports this coalition, even if it does not entirely control it. Hamas, an outgrowth of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, is not its creation. Hezbollah has become the brilliant pupil that is now, in some respects, the equal of its teacher in military skill and capacity. The Houthis may not respond to command. But a coalition it is, and with it, Iran has built a ring of fire around Israel.

Israel, too, stands in the midst of a coalition, a rather more powerful one. The United States, of course, is its ally; quietly, some of the key European states, Britain and France above all, lend their measured support. Strikingly, Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and even Saudi Arabia have given Israel the use of their airspace and helped in the remarkable defense of Israel in April against salvos of drones and missiles from Iran.

The October 7 assault triggered this particularly desperate round of fighting—the shock of the massacre and Israeli unpreparedness, the engagement of Hezbollah in a war that has depopulated a significant part of the Galilee, and the consequent destruction of much of Gaza in the Israeli counteroffensive.

For Israeli strategists, the assassinations of Shukr and Haniyeh were part of a campaign aimed at two things: the restoration of Israel’s deterrent reputation, and the rebuilding of battered Israeli morale. The losses inflicted on Hezbollah and Hamas—the Israelis have been systematically attacking the senior ranks of both organizations—undoubtedly make them less effective. But the broader Israeli purpose is also reputational: to make its enemies believe that its intelligence agents are everywhere, that its armed forces are lethally accurate, and that Jerusalem can find them and kill them wherever they are.

These operations are also aimed at the home front, and before one criticizes the Israelis too severely for that, one should recall the Doolittle Raid against Japan in April 1942. The United States threw away 16 scarce B-25 bombers and some of their crews in a one-way mission to retaliate against Japan for Pearl Harbor. The military effects were negligible, although hundreds of Japanese were killed or wounded, including civilians. But it helped restore American morale and shake Tokyo. Nor is the assassination of senior enemy leaders a game only the Israelis play, as the widows of Osama bin Laden and Qassem Soleimani know.

The Israeli attacks, in other words, are best seen not as a ploy by Netanyahu but as a considered Israeli move, supported by its national-security establishment. And if the attacks present the threat of a larger and more lethal war, every senior Israeli figure I know believes that one is coming anyway. For many years, Israel has waged limited wars intended to contain threats; an old term, hachra’ah, or “decision,” has notably come back into use in Israeli military literature.

If the Israelis find themselves facing difficult choices, so do their enemies. Hamas probably expected Hezbollah to join its attacks on October 7. It eventually did, but initially on a modest scale, giving the Israelis time to recover their balance. Hezbollah may not have wanted a larger war that would end with the devastation of its Shi’a base in southern Lebanon but felt that it had to participate at some level. And Iran finds itself in the unenviable position of promising a devastating attack against an Israel that is fully prepared to defend itself and respond to it. Nor have the Iranians lost only the advantage of surprise. Hezbollah has been of use to them as a drain on the Israelis and for the threat of devastation its arsenal of 150,000 rockets and missiles poses. A bigger war, which would lead to an Israeli invasion of Lebanon even more violent and destructive than its incursion into Gaza, would deprive Iran of its chief ally and assistant, and its most potent threat against Israel.

But Iran cannot sit idly by either. Its strategic culture values humiliation, something alien to Western military thought, yet it has been humiliated by the Haniyeh assassination. The delay between the blow received and the blow it will deliver has allowed the United States and Israel’s other friends to prepare to parry it. If it throws another failed punch, as in the April missile barrage, things will be even worse. It too finds itself, in other words, in a strategic trap of its own making.

Carl von Clausewitz famously described war as consisting of a “peculiar trinity” of three elements: raw animosity and hatred, the rational application of military means for political ends, and a creative element involving the design and use of violence. All three elements are present here. The hatred is real, furious, and for the time unassuageable on both sides; the rational purposes are discernible. The real question is how creative each side will be in the war that looms—and also, as Clausewitz would have acknowledged, how lucky.