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Less than a week after the signing of a memorandum of understanding between Tehran and Washington brought the stalemate, which has been a three-month US-Israeli war on Iran to an end – for now – the decision of Washington’s main ally, Israel, was reached.
According to a recent poll, 92 percent of Israelis felt that the US had signed their victory over the decades-old enemy, and almost half of the respondents said that Israel should continue to attack Lebanon and the Iranian-backed group Hezbollah, despite the encouragement of Washington, its main ally and supporter.
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It has been many years since Hamas’s shocking October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, which killed 1,139 people, and continued fighting throughout the region.
It has attacked Gaza, killing more than 1,000 people 73,000 Palestinians and destroy large areas of the sector to the ground. He attacked Iran twice, killed thousands of people in Lebanon while fighting Iran’s ally Hezbollah, launched several attacks in Syria, and launched an insurgency against the Houthis in Yemen, also allied with Tehran.
Within Israel’s dysfunctional parliament, support for the country’s wars provides one of the few points of agreement, even if individual politicians disagree on how to blame.
Going to war against Iran, the former head of Israel and one of the contenders to succeed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Gadi Eisenkot, did not back down. Speaking in an interview in early March, shortly before the US-Israeli strike on Iran, he described the unexpected attack on Tehran as “the most righteous war in recent years against a bitter enemy”.
Opposition leader Yair Lapid also joined the protests, with his enthusiasm for resuming the war against Iran and Hezbollah eclipsed by his anger at Washington’s decision to strike a deal with Tehran. He added that the US decision is “one of the biggest failures in Israel’s foreign and security affairs, and it is on Netanyahu’s account”.
Israeli sociologist Daniel Bar-Tal of Tel Aviv University said that little of what is happening in Israel is surprising. He said, the result of the policy of Israeli politicians, media, and people who connected the attack of Hamas 2023 with the “central anchor” of the Israeli identity: the Holocaust. In this context, the massacre was not created “as a terrible event, but as the latest chapter in the history of Jewish trauma”.
Bar-Tal added that “the justice of national goals, the respect of the Jewish nation, (and) the concept of collective persecution”, as well as the “giving of responsibility to the Palestinian people”, were rooted in the consciousness of many Israelis, thus contributing to the support of Israel’s wars.
Gains and losses
Despite nearly three years of endless and uncontested war, few people in Israel believe that the country is any safer than it was before October 7.
In Gaza, Hamas controls large swathes of territory, while in Iran, the government that Netanyahu reportedly told his US allies would fall within days of the war, remains in place.
“There is no benefit that will end this eternal war,” said Israeli researcher and academic Shaiel Ben-Ephraim.
“There are two big engines behind it,” he said, explaining the cause of the endless pressure of war. One of the engines, he said, was a reflection of Israel’s recent experience, while the other was a reflection of the radical change in Israeli consciousness after the October 7 attacks.
With elections coming up later this year, Netanyahu will enter the campaign still carrying the baggage of the October 7 attack, his ongoing trial. several cases of corruptionand his apparent failure to complete operations in Iran and Hezbollah.
“Netanyahu believes that as long as he fights the war, he can avoid accountability for the corruption and his position on October 7 and his failure to prevent it,” said Ben-Ephraim, in the fall of the political crisis in 2023, without Netanyahu’s opponents in the government offering an alternative to help in several conflicts since the establishment of the Israeli government.
“The Israeli military and all those who want to be prime minister – Netanyahu, (former Prime Minister, Naftali) Bennett, Eisenkot – have a security doctrine that believes in breaking any threat before it happens, and that there can be no deterrence or diplomatic cooperation.
“This is the result of October 7, when, according to Israel’s opinion, all these methods failed. The result is not only to destroy Gaza and the south of Lebanon completely, but also to remove Iran, (Turkey), and any other that can be completely threatening and irreversible,” he said.
Whatever Israel gains in Lebanon, the prospect of a future threat, wherever it may come, makes future war imminent, Ben-Ephraim said.
“No amount of ability or efficiency can stop this,” he concluded. “It’s a disease that comes from injuries and political needs. Only Israel’s economic reforms can change it in the future.”
