In a matter of months, Israel has struck at four states, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran, exploiting its present aerial supremacy over the region. In September 2024 it wiped out much of Hezbollah’s command structure, dropped eighty bombs on Nasrallah’s home, blasted Beirut and the Bekaa Valley, then reoccupied southern Lebanon. In October it destroyed Iran’s main air defences, after Khamenei responded to Nasrallah’s death with a token missile shower. In December it greeted the capture of Damascus by al-Nusra insurgents with extensive bombing of Syria’s undefended infrastructure. In March 2025 it ripped up Trump’s Gaza ceasefire to continue the shelling of homes, hospitals, refugee camps and food queues, expanded its torture centres and blocked food aid, imposing widespread starvation. In the West Bank, it has driven thousands from their homes and authorized twenty-two new Jewish settlements. On 13 June 2025 it launched an attack on Iran, supposedly aimed at setting back Tehran’s nuclear programme on grounds of Israel’s ‘right to self-defence’, but actually targeting the regime itself—the military high command, irgc leaders, intelligence chiefs, Basij, energy and broadcasting infrastructure. Finally, it succeeded in drawing Washington into its war on Iran. On 22 June, American B2s dropped their 30,000-pound payloads on Fordow and Natanz, while a us submarine launched 30-plus cruise missiles at the sites.

There have been few such explosive bids for regional dominance since the upsurge of Imperial Japan, annexing Korea, Taiwan and southern Manchuria—or, perhaps, South Africa’s ‘total strategy’ in the 1970s and 80s, targeting Angola, Namibia and Mozambique. Israel’s is different in many key respects. First, though Japan had London and Washington’s backing through to the 1920s, it acted alone. It possessed, a British diplomat noted, ‘both the desire and the capabilities’ to do so.footnote¹ Israel’s desires still outstrip its capabilities. Early Zionist leaders had no doubt about the need for imperial backing. The infant statelet could not have survived the 1938 Arab Revolt without British arms, nor got away with the Nakba if British troops had not stood back to allow it, nor achieved international recognition without Washington to promote it at the un. Israel has fought tenaciously for operational autonomy, building up a $200 billion war chest to cover any blips in America’s annual $3.5 billion assistance, but an irreducible minimum of diplomatic and material dependency remains; it still needs Washington to keep Egypt chained.footnote²

Second, Japan had a long pre-history of relatively peaceful urban development before the arrival of us warships in the 1850s; it entered a world stage already divided between great imperial powers and set out to carve a place among them, if only to avoid becoming a colony itself. Israel was founded as an ethno-confessional settler statelet, mentally and materially surrounded by a ‘wall of bayonets’, in Jabotinsky’s term: ‘Zionism is a colonizing venture and therefore it stands or falls on the question of armed force.’ No native population would willingly accept an alien majority; if a Jewish home in Palestine was the aim, it would have to be imposed.footnote³ Though Labour Zionism liked to claim it had no conflict of interest with Arab workers, only with effendis and landowners, its military practice—the Nakba, 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973—followed the same logic. In the Zionist narrative, Jewish ownership of the land is a realization of God’s promise, in a direct line from the golden age chronicled in the Pentateuch, while the armed forces are the core ideological state apparatus, the social instrument that transformed European—and Arab, African, Soviet—Jewry into Israelis: ‘the nation is the creation of the army, which is in turn the crowning glory of the nation.’footnote⁴

A third difference: Imperial Japan set about a far-reaching programme of industrial and infrastructural development in the lands it conquered, mobilizing forced labour to build ports, railways, plants and mines. In its half-century rule over the West Bank and Gaza, Israel has reduced much of the Palestinian population to mendicancy, while its favoured contractors have become hyper-rich. De-development and ‘regime degradation’ have been its aim in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq. Rather than annexation it aims at the fragmentation of surrounding states, with the iaf as their aerial overseer. Here it is closer to apartheid South Africa’s pattern of pre-emptive strikes, targeted killings and cash for local proxy forces. But South Africa’s goal was political: it was fighting broadly Soviet-aligned liberation movements as a Cold War ally of the us; absent that condition, the whole apartheid structure collapsed. Israel’s goals are ethno-nationalist and its relationship to us foreign policy has been more intimate, if objectively more fraught.

The third front

Comparison serves to underline Israel’s unique character as an ethno-confessional settler state, politically autonomous but existentially dependent upon a distant superpower in which its co-religionists occupy a significant but not dominant position. Zionism has always had to fight on three fronts: crushing native Palestinian resistance, combating Jewish-diaspora scepticism and battling for Great Power support. A century of precarious dependency, with setbacks at London’s hands in 1922 and 1939, then Washington’s in 1956 and, for an agonizing moment, 1973—before the airlift of us tanks to the desert battlefields allowed it to storm into Egypt—has taught Zionist leaders indelible lessons in the unreliability of the big powers. The abyss that gaped in 1973 brought home more dramatically than ever the need for a shaping hand in us Middle East policy. Israel had ample military capacity in tanks, planes and troops for a low-level colonial war against the poorly armed Palestinians; to take on the Arab states in its neighbourhood, it needed the superpower. From the mid-70s onward, with cumulative effect, Jewish leaders mounted an unprecedented political-organizational campaign to re-tool aipac and its sister organizations to solidify support for Israel in Congress, the Executive, the think-tank world and the media, underpinned by the cultural infrastructure for a novel brand of Holocaust Memorialism that equated any criticism of Israel with the onset of a new Judeocide.footnote⁵

Since then, the material wealth of the Jewish-American bourgeoisie has grown in tandem with the expansion of the financial sector and general inflation of asset prices. The marriages of Chelsea Clinton and Ivanka Trump are testimony to the cultural symbiosis of goyish and Jewish inherited new wealth and the pro-Israel stance that informs America’s oligarchic conviviality. Meanwhile America’s high-tech giants have lined the coast near Tel Aviv with massive r&d departments, staffed by the idf officer class, with revolving doors to Israel’s military-intelligence apparatus.footnote⁶ Richer now than in the 1990s, its human capital boosted by a million highly qualified ex-Soviet immigrants, and politically more confident, having seen off—by disdaining even the ostensible restraints of the Oslo accords—the most the West could offer by way of engineering a palatable Palestinian surrender, Netanyahu’s Israel can convincingly present itself as a winner against a backdrop of shattered Arab states.footnote⁷

But if the conditions of Israel’s precarious dependency have evolved, it remains a tiny country imposing itself by force in a hostile region, still reliant for its expansion on Washington’s backing, which cannot always be assured. Though Israel’s grip on us Middle East policy has strengthened, the stakes are getting higher, and American national interests more obviously distinct from those of the Jewish state. To have Egypt subordinate to Washington is a rational us goal; to keep its 120 million people under military and police-state lockdown would be unnecessary, if not for the additional strains imposed by its rulers having to turn a blind eye to the Palestinians’ fate. Saddam’s Iraq was no threat to the us and had requested permission from it before invading Kuwait; Bush’s occupation of Iraq, pressed by the Israel hawks, is now considered a mistake. Preserving Israel’s nuclear monopoly need not in itself be a us concern; Iran would never attack North America and a symmetrical deterrent would be more likely to stabilize the region, as has de facto been the case with India and Pakistan. Since 2012, a semi-official Washington common sense has held that the Middle East takes up too much bandwidth, distracting from larger imperial tasks like China and nato’s eastern border, and bogging the us down in otherwise unnecessary wars.

A house divided

How have these coordinates altered since October 7? First, the Biden Administration granted Israel an extraordinary degree of political latitude to wreak revenge for the deaths and hostage-taking in the Hamas attack. With mild remonstrance and the ritual of ceasefire-seeking diplomacy, Biden allowed Netanyahu to tear up the existing rules of engagement: that Hamas would lob a few missiles or seize hostages as a negotiating tactic, when Gazans were desperate for some reprieve; that Hezbollah would fire rockets when idf forces overstepped the mark; that the us would call a halt to attacks on Gaza after a couple of weeks. The unremitting horror that Israel has inflicted on Gaza stands out not so much for the scale of the deaths, terrible as that is—over 60,000, with many uncounted beneath the rubble—but for the uniquely brazen character of its cruelty, the shamelessness of its ethno-nationalist hatred, broadcast to the world in an age in which shared captioned images are the news.footnote⁸

The response has been a massive international Palestine solidarity campaign targeting the complicity of the Western states, that bears comparison to the movement against the war in Vietnam. In the us, the rift in the American Jewish community that began with young radicals now encompasses such mainstream stalwarts as the New York Times’s Ezra Klein, who asks whether the safety of the Jewish people is not better served by the secular-liberal us republic than by Israeli ethno-nationalism. Open letters from Reform and Orthodox rabbis denouncing the starvation campaign, Israel-critic Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York’s Democratic primary and the support of 34 Congressmen for the Block the Bombs bill are backed by polls showing that 53 per cent of Americans have an unfavourable view of Israel, up from 42 per cent before October 7, and 60 per cent are opposed to what the idf is doing in Gaza.footnote⁹ Many liberal Jewish-American critics—the Times’s Thomas Friedman first among them—argue that the war on Gaza is only being prolonged to hold the governing coalition together and keep Netanyahu out of prison. Opinion polls indicate that he is set to lose the next election, to be held by October 2026, in which the amorphous opposition bloc led by Yair Lapid is predicted to get 65 seats in the 120-seat Knesset, while Netanyahu’s coalition is heading for fifty. Liberal Zionists pin their hopes on the return of a Lapid, Benny Ganz or Naftali Bennett government which might agree to some bantustan-type self-governing arrangements in what is left of Gaza and the West Bank, under a made-over Palestinian Authority, partnered by Arab peacekeepers—allowing the ‘fratricidal’ strife currently ripping apart synagogues and the Democratic Party to heal.footnote¹⁰

But if many Israelis are sick of Netanyahu, the majority have not broken with his treatment of Palestinians. Over 70 per cent of Israeli Jews agree with their government that ‘there are no innocents in Gaza’ and 78 per cent say they are ‘not troubled’ by reports of Palestinian suffering. Israel has found itself militarily over-extended in the past, as in its 1982–2000 occupation of southern Lebanon. As the idf prepares for the next round of butchery and bulldozing in Gaza City, its commander has sounded the alarm about the exhaustion and trauma of the reserve forces, now deployed to Lebanon and Syria as well as the West Bank and Gaza. But so far only a courageous few have been imprisoned for refusing to serve on political rather than personal grounds.footnote¹¹

Popular American opposition to Israel’s exterminist violence in Gaza has not weakened the grip of the us Israel lobby as a political machine, nor loosened the hold of Zionism over Western political leaders. Biden couldn’t directly defend Israeli leaders from the arrest warrants sought for them by the International Criminal Court in May 2024, nor the strictures issued by the International Court of Justice in July 2024 about their conduct of the war. But these did not prevent Netanyahu getting fifty standing ovations from Congress a week after the icj ruling. Israel can rely on a steady stream of us munitions for the destruction of Gaza, backed by spare parts and surveillance flights from Labour Britain. Elite support for Israel extends to Ivy League campuses where pro-Palestine activism has been criminalized, as in Germany, the uk and France.

The integration of Mossad and cia intelligence networks has been critical for the new round of Israeli offensives. Without us assistance, it is unlikely that Mossad could have penetrated Hezbollah’s communications network, allowing it to take out Nasrallah and his top cadres.footnote¹² American satellite intelligence helped guide the iaf bombers that blasted Iranian air defences in October 2024. Israel relied on the us to fracture Syria, coordinating the fissiparous opposition to Assad and funnelling Gulf funds to ethnic militias, clans and Turkish-backed Sunni fundamentalists, even if Tel Aviv was not best pleased with the result. American intelligence was clearly involved in Israeli planning for Operation Rising Lion; the Iranian nuclear negotiators were spun along by the us, the talks’ timetable eventually providing cover for the idf attack on Tehran. The Israeli hold over us Middle East policy remains as strong as ever.

June’s war

European leaders did begin to demur when the idf started shooting starving Gazans in food queues in early June 2025. But once Israel launched its war on Iran—200 fighter jets targeting political centres, oilfields and infrastructure as well as nuclear and military sites, as Mossad tried to provoke military defectionsfootnote¹³—the Europeans leapt to give Trump their backing. At the G7 meeting in Alberta, three days into the war, Macron, Meloni, Merz, Starmer, Carney and Ishiba parroted Israeli talking points: ‘Iran is the principal source of regional instability and terror’—‘Iran can never have a nuclear weapon’—‘We affirm that Israel has a right to defend itself’. The hypocrisy—as Israel attacked Tehran, a thousand miles away, openly trying to overthrow the Iranian government while sowing instability and terror across the Occupied Territories—speaks for itself.footnote¹⁴

How easy was it for Netanyahu and the Israel hawks to pull Trump into joining their war on Iran—the first direct us military attack on the Islamic Republic? Obama had already smoothed the path by drawing up meticulous plans for an attack on Fordow, ordering a replica of the site to be built in the American desert to test out the gbu-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator.footnote¹⁵ On June 13, Trump described Israel’s initial strikes as a ‘unilateral action’ but indicated that he had given the green light. According to a flattering report in the Jerusalem Post, Netanyahu and Ron Dermer, his American-Israeli fixer, spoke to Trump almost every day, impressing him, as Trump told the media, with Israel’s success. This was a line Trump could use with his war-averse maga base: what could be more authentically American than success? On June 17, he began posting excitedly: ‘We know exactly where the so-called “Supreme Leader” is hiding. He is an easy target, but is safe there—We are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now.’ Asked the next day whether the us was going to join Israel in striking Iran’s nuclear facilities, he replied ‘I may do it. I may not do it. Nobody knows what I’m going to do.’ If the Jerusalem Post is right, this was a lie. He had already taken the decision; Netanyahu and Dermer knew, as did all the people they had told, and hundreds of American servicemen. But it was an effective lie, because it played to a sense of unpredictability, the reign of political unreason, and successfully concealed the victory of ethno-confessional interest.footnote¹⁶

The bombs once dropped on Iran, Trump hastened to distance himself from any impression that he’d been played by Israel. He gruffly demanded it respect the ceasefire and agree that the us had ‘completely and totally obliterated’ key nuclear-enrichment facilities—meaning there was no further casus belli. With a subaltern’s sensitivity to White House needs, Netanyahu concurred, and was rewarded by Trump’s support in his ongoing corruption case. For Israel, though, Operation Rising Lion was at best a mixed result. Despite Netanyahu’s achievement in netting a us strike, the Khamenei regime did not fall; assassinated commanders were soon replaced and angry Iranians rallied to the flag. Tehran’s missiles penetrated Israeli defences at a number of points, burning through us stocks. And the job was still to be finished. The day after Trump announced the ceasefire, Netanyahu told Israelis: ‘We must complete the campaign against the Iranian axis’—‘With the destruction of the Iranian axis of evil, we will open a path for peace and prosperity for the nations of the region, and I say to you, even beyond the nations of the region.’footnote¹⁷

Logic of the shatterbelt

What is that path? Since September 2024, an Israeli strategy for the region that has long guided undercover operations has begun to emerge into the open. It was summarized most succinctly forty years ago by an Israeli Foreign Office official, writing in the quarterly journal of the World Zionist Organization. The author, Oded Yinon, a violent anti-communist, saw the Arab world as a weak link in the international order, even if its military power constituted a present threat. Its state system was ‘a temporary house of cards put together by foreigners’, France and Britain in the 1920s, ‘without the wishes and desires of the inhabitants having been taken into account’, arbitrarily dividing the region into nineteen states, ‘all made of combinations of minorities and ethnic groups which are hostile to one another’.footnote¹⁸ In Yinon’s account, Egypt was divided between a Sunni majority and a large Coptic Christian minority in the south. In Syria, the ruling Shi’ite Alawi minority was pitted against the Sunni majority, while in Iraq, the ruling minority was Sunni, the majority Shi’ite, with a large Kurdish minority in the north; both countries only held together by strong military regimes. Lebanon, wracked by civil war, was split between Maronite and other Christians, the Israeli-backed protectorate of Major Haddad and Shi’ite Lebanese (Yinon called them ‘mostly Palestinian’) south of the Litani River. In Saudi Arabia, much of the population was foreign, Yemeni or Egyptian. Jordan was ‘essentially Palestinian’. In Iran, Persians made up a bare majority (actually, 60 per cent). Meanwhile Sudan was torn between the ruling Sunni Arabs and a mix of animist and Christian Africans.

Yet this ‘sad and stormy’ situation offered Israel far-reaching possibilities, Yinon went on. Lebanon’s break-up into five provinces should serve as a precedent for the entire Arab world. Israel’s primary target on the eastern front should be to divide up Iraq and Syria, once their military power was ‘dissolved’. Syria could be cut up into a Shi’ite Alawi statelet along the coast, a Sunni statelet in Aleppo, Druzes in the south, and another Sunni statelet in Damascus, hostile to its Aleppo neighbour. Iraq would fall into three parts, centred around its major cities, Basra, Baghdad and Mosul. The Jordanian monarchy should be overthrown and the country turned over to the Palestinians. Egypt should be cut up, breaking off the Coptic south, with Israel retaking the Sinai.

The degree of fantasy is apparent, and Yinon’s amateur sociology was off on many points. More striking is the extent to which his dreams have come true. Iraq was partitioned by the us no-fly zone over the Kurdish region after 1991; from 2003, Washington and, shamefully, Tehran, mobilized much of the Shi’ite south against the Sunni-led resistance to the us occupation. Washington oversaw the partition of Sudan in 2011. Syria was reduced by 2015 to the statelets Yinon describes, plus a northern Kurdish enclave and us-occupied oil region. From the Israeli standpoint, al-Nusra’s attempt to unite the country after the overthrow of Assad is a step backward; hence the iaf bombing of Ummayad Square in central Damascus on July 16, as a warning to the al-Sharaa government not to try to block Israel’s guardianship of the Druze region in the south. The new Syrian President considered his options and complied.

This fragmentation strategy puts Israel head-to-head with Turkey, creating more headaches for the us; the State Department has already had to broker an arrangement between them, while voices in the Israeli press bang the drum for the full cantonization of Syria as a way to weaken Erdoğan’s grip. The same fate is foreseen for Iran: the Jerusalem Post has called for security guarantees for breakaway Sunni, Kurdish and Baluch regions. As the Twelve-Day War made clear, Israel alone does not have the capacity for that and still depends on the us to get its way. The Trump ‘highway’ along the Armenian-Iranian border represents a huge new American footprint in the region, as well as a link between Turkey and China’s backdoor in Xinjiang. Will Netanyahu manoeuvre the us into ‘finishing the job’ in Iran? Or will Israeli expansionism suffer another frustrating setback, once more restricting it to undercover operations?