Israel has a habit of repeating the worst episodes in its history.
“Israel is a world military power,” insisted my downstairs neighbor, a young academic. Nothing I said could persuade him to downgrade that to “regional” military power, though I was fresh off a career as a journalist in the superpower United States.
That was in summer 1973. Within a few months, Egypt and Syria proved me painfully right, carrying out a surprise invasion after an arrogant Israel underestimated its enemies, ignored intelligence, and failed to prepare for the attack on Yom Kippur 1973.
The same combination of blunders cost Israel 1,200 lives on Oct. 7, 2023, and plunged Israel into a two-and-a-half-year war in Gaza and Lebanon.
“We learn from history that we learn no history,” said my eighth-grade history teacher back in the early 1960s. Sure enough, now Israel has done it again, this time with the unwelcome addition of unrealistic expectations and unfounded braggadocio.
Israel and the United States have been pounding Iran from the air for more than a month, but Iranian missiles kept falling on Israeli population centers until a ceasefire took effect—leaving thousands of Iranian missiles in place. That’s despite bombastic declarations from the leaders of both countries that the Iranian regime was about to fall, and its missile capabilities were decimated.
Undeterred, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu keeps insisting that the Israeli military is the best in the world, while implying that Iran’s regime was significantly weakened (but not overthrown).
A realistic assessment would add “for its size” to the “best in the world” description of the Israeli military. In fact, the long war in Gaza has stretched the Israeli army to the breaking point—even its military chief of staff has said the current situation raises “10 red flags” about the army nearing collapse under the weight of repeated reserve call-ups and refusal of the government to force ultra-Orthodox Jews to serve.
Here are the facts: Israel’s “best army in the world” has fought to a standstill in Gaza, facing a well-armed but relatively small force of Hamas terrorists. Likewise, in Lebanon, despite weeks of heavy bombing as well as occupation of a strip of territory across the Israeli border, the Israeli military admits it can’t disarm the Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon without a full-scale ground invasion. That’s unlikely, partly because of the manpower crisis and erosion that the chief of staff outlined.
So, an army that can’t sweep away terrorists in either Gaza or Lebanon is going to vanquish Iran, forcing regime change in a country with nine times Israel’s population and eight times its land mass? Well, no—despite the exaggerated claims and outlandish predictions from Jerusalem and Washington.
Where does that leave Israel? Firmly in the back pocket of US President Donald Trump, where Netanyahu placed himself and his country with his partisan political activities in Washington.
The future of that shaky alliance is troubling. President Trump acts on whims and bluster. It’s altogether possible that he could leave Israel to face Iran’s missiles alone. That would be a nightmare that could end in several levels of disaster. It’s also a worst-case scenario.
If, instead, Israel still controls some of its own destiny, what can Israel’s government do? There are several constructive possibilities, starting with telling the truth to the Israeli people:
- Israel is not going to eliminate the rocket and missile threats from Iran or Lebanon. Many of Israel’s residents, especially those who live within Hezbollah rocket range in the north, have believed their leaders’ pledges and declarations, and they really expect their two-year nightmare of running to inadequate shelters several times a day to end. It won’t. To help them, and to avoid a mass abandonment of the border region, Israel must dedicate billions of shekels to building safe rooms or shelters for every family in the north, as well as economic incentives like tax breaks and subsidies—even at the expense of transferring those incentives from this government’s pet settlements in the West Bank.
- Military service should apply on equal terms across Israeli society, including not only the roughly 1 million ultra-Orthodox Jews but also the 2 million Arab citizens. Up to now, most have been exempted because of the prospect that they might be called on to kill fellow Arabs in a war. That exemption is a luxury Israel can no longer afford. At a minimum, Arabs could be assigned to vital rear-guard military positions.
- Leaders must set out clear and achievable goals for conflicts, not exaggerated, politically motivated pronouncements. Israel’s war in Gaza dragged on and on because the government refused to define its endgame. The same has happened with the war against Iran. We are in the “Vietnam body count” phase now, recalling how the US government would release numbers of Vietcong killed every day as a way of showing the progress toward a victory that never came. Now we are hearing, daily, how many Hezbollah terrorists have been killed, and what “senior” (they’re always senior) Iranian regime officials have been eliminated, as if those statistics lead to victory. History instructs us to know better.
- The only long-term solution to both conflicts is diplomatic. In Lebanon, the government and most of the people are ready, for the first time, to cooperate with Israel to root out Hezbollah, which is considered a foreign implant. Iran is more difficult. All Israel can do is encourage and support the civilian rebels quietly and covertly, wait for results, and prepare wisely for sporadic Iranian attacks until the extremist Islamist regime is overthrown from within. By now, it’s clear, even to the leaderships of Israel and the US, that airstrikes won’t bring real regime change.
It’s time for Israel’s government—and its people—to scale back their outsized image of themselves as world powers and invincible forces. It’s said that Israel punches above its weight. That may be true, but the longer you punch above your weight, the more you wear yourself out—until you have no strength left to punch at all.
The antidote to that catastrophe—as foreign as it is to politics in general, and Israel’s leadership in particular—is the truth.
