Israel is in crisis. Since October 2023 it has been in a permanent state of war with numerous internal and external foes, from the Palestinians of Gaza to Iranian state and society.
Many politicians, analysts and commentators have seen this as proof of strength. Building on the Israeli far right’s increased usage of the Hebrew trope of “Greater Israel” (Eretz Yisrael Ha-Shlema), they often talk of a Pax Israelica in the Middle East.
The term is telling in that it merely replicates the more familiar Pax Americana, for which Israel functions regionally as a bridgehead. If there were any period when the notion of Israel as a regional hegemon remotely made sense, it was the few years following the September 2020 Abraham Accords. Until 7 October 2023.
Since then, the Israeli military has veered from one conflict to another in successive failed attempts to crush its foes.
It decimated Gaza but Hamas is still standing. It famously “decapitated” Hezbollah in Lebanon but the group is back as a guerrilla force resisting Israeli occupation. The drone and missile stocks that former defence minister Yoav Gallant – wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for crimes against humanity – claimed were all but destroyed are back in action.
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It tried to take out the leadership of Yemen’s Ansar Allah (also known as the Houthis) after US forces failed to topple the group in its 2025 campaign against north Yemen, but followed US failure with its own failure. And most recently it failed to topple Iran’s Islamic Republic, end its military capacities, or reduce the country to “failed state” status.
Now Israeli leaders are talking about Turkey as their next target, as if they had a glorious run of successes behind them. In March, former prime minister Naftali Bennett said Turkey was the “next Iran”, and current prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Turkey’s President Erdogan on X this month of “accommodating Iran’s terror regime and its proxies” and “massacring his own Kurdish citizens”.
On the one hand, it’s clear that through this constant state of war Netanyahu, also wanted by the ICC on the same charges facing Gallant, averts a personal political crisis of corruption allegations that stand a good chance of seeing him go to jail.
But despite the occasional objection leaked to the media, Israel’s military, intelligence and political establishment have in broad terms consented to the perpetuation of this small country’s state of permanent war on its neighbours. Why?
Demographic stakes
The answer lies partly in the rise of the settler-based far right, which has over the past two decades succeeded in penetrating the lower echelons of the military and elements of the bureaucracy.
Brought into government under Netanyahu in 2022, its leaders openly call for ethnic cleansing of Palestinians under occupation in Gaza and the West Bank, with the power to follow through on far more aggressive policies to that end.
It is no coincidence that this more brutal and messianic version of the Israeli state should come at a critical point in the history of the conflict in Palestine: the realisation of demographic parity between Palestinians and the Israeli Jewish population.
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Israeli and Palestinian Authority statistics show 7.7 million on each side, taking the total number of subjects under Israeli state control to nearly 16 million in total. Classic colonial policies of divide-and-rule significantly dampen the political impact of this fact – some 2.2 million Palestinians are citizens of the Israeli state and have the right to vote.
But around 5.5 million Palestinians come under Palestinian Authority civilian control, and are technically under Israeli occupation, which provides a convenient legal cover for the fact of their disenfranchisement in terms of passport, mobility and representation in the chamber that governs their lives, the Knesset.
The state’s guiding ideology never predicted this outcome. Palestine was terra nullius. The natives were insignificant. Theodor Herzl’s founding text Der Judenstaat avoided all mention of them. By the 1920s, when reality had struck, revisionist Zionism leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky and others were debating whether they could be expelled in their entirety. Had not Turkey and Greece forcibly removed and exchanged populations in 1924?
After the state’s founding in 1948, its first Prime Minister David Ben Gurion was relieved that “the Arabs” formed a just about manageable 20 percent of the population. Then came the Achilles’ heel of victory in 1967, giving the Israeli state control over coveted territories but bringing with them the nuisance of a fully functioning Palestinian society.
Israel now faces what former Australian ambassador to Israel Peter Rodgers referred to in his book Herzl’s Nightmare as “one land, two people”, governed so far via what Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and B’Tselem have called an apartheid system of racial segregation.
Late-stage colonialism
Israel has accordingly engaged in a pattern of repressive escalation that aligns with similar cases of late-stage colonialism.
Think of the 100,000 Libyans herded into desert concentration camps by fascist Italy. Or the massacres, torture and camps France used to separate Algerians from the National Liberation Front (FLN) in the 1950s. Britain’s torture and detention camps in Kenya, or Portugal’s massacres and chemical weapons in Angola and Mozambique.
The list of Israeli brutalities has ramped up to 11 over the past three years: systematic torture and sexual crime against detainees, including the use of dogs; mass and individual starvation; dragging bodies dead and alive by vehicle; mass graves, including of doctors and medics, and children buried with their hands tied behind their backs.
The Palestinians have proven more resilient than the ideology ever imagined, and Israeli politics and society have become increasingly desperate in their efforts to manage them
With US backing, political and military leaders call on Palestinians in Gaza to leave the territory or face death; settlers carry out pogroms against Palestinians in the West Bank; the army has erased dozens of villages in south Lebanon since March; the air force kills hundreds in strikes on apartment blocks targeting a few individuals; and assassinations of foreign leaders have become overt government policy.
Netanyahu brags about these policies as the will to reshape the regional order. But to read them as a manifestation of power is to misread not only power itself, which is about more than merely the ability to kill, but the underlying dynamics of the society that coalesces around this policy of endless war.
Israel has become a chaos agent, capable only of sowing death and destruction without achieving any strategic goal of stability or the much-vaunted hegemony.
Its military force relies almost exclusively on air power. Its army – suited for the world of 1967 and 1973 – has been notably mediocre since Hezb0llah expelled it from Lebanon in 2000. Rights abuses and violations of the norms of warfare help fill the void in abilities.
Further, Israel and its western defenders fail to understand, or respect, its enemy. So, it thinks that failure to fire missiles means missiles are depleted (Hezbollah in 2024) or that failure to rack up a high civilian death list (Iran in 2025 and 2026) reflects military weakness.
Narrative of invincibility
Beyond feeding the narrative of invincibility, what the chaos does achieve is visceral satiation of the desire to stave off Israel’s fundamental crisis, the crisis of Zionism.
Consider that until recently Israel’s primary rejoinder to the discourse of settler coloniality has not been academic argument but rather demographic success: from the river to the sea, the new society’s imported population was for decades numerically superior to the decimated native communities.
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This meant the state could obviate the political fractures that a Palestinian state in the occupied territories would have engendered for the polity. Of course, integrating the Palestinians in their entirety would be even worse for the Israeli body politic.
As the demographic bet collapses, the endless wars serve to export the problem to surrounding countries and stave off the final reckoning with Palestinian numbers.
Yet while the policy of endless war follows this ideological logic, Israeli society is fraying because of it, as the trickle of Israelis emigrating to avoid economic precarity, regional instability and domestic extremism grows.
Former vice prime minister Tzipi Livni said in March that violent apartheid was “dismantling the State of Israel” and Military Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir reportedly warned that the army would “collapse in on itself” without rigorously applied conscription to support its operations that have continued for some 900 consecutive days since October 2023.
Of course, the second Iran war has been framed by Israel, media and analysts around the problem of Iran – will the regime survive, will Iran retain its proxy empire, will Iran forgo nuclear ambitions, can Israel collapse the state?
Yet behind the noise, the real crisis is that of Zionism. The Palestinians have proven more resilient than the ideology ever imagined, and Israeli politics and society have become increasingly desperate in their efforts to manage them.
But Rhodesia-on-the-Med is not a project for survival. It could not be more obvious that new thinking is required.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.