Analysis: Israel and the forever war

After a year of comprehensively destroying Gaza, its military using overwhelming force to suppress Hamas fighters, Israel is exhausted and increasingly isolated.

The excessive violence wrought on a civilian Palestinian population, held captive in its own enclave, has weakened support for Israel, despite resolute backing from the United States. Israel’s economy is in tatters, the port of Eilat having filed for bankruptcy. Its agriculture is stagnant and its tourism industry is nonexistent.

Instead of brokering a ceasefire to the Gaza onslaught – the root cause of the violence and rocket and missile barrages both on Israel and international shipping passing through the Red Sea – Israel has embarked on yet another military offensive, this time in southern Lebanon against Hezbollah.

A war too far

The potential quagmire of a war with Hezbollah will drain Israel’s economy and its military. The chimera of the “buffer zone” will only draw Israel into a conflict it can’t win in the long term. The idea that Hezbollah can be somehow removed is naive, yet this idea has been acted on by Israel, the suffering of the Lebanese people and the destruction of large parts of Lebanon being the direct result.

As in 2006, all Hezbollah has to do is survive for the group to claim victory – and while Gaza is ongoing and Israeli troops are in Lebanon, Hezbollah rockets and missiles will continue to fall on Israel.

Israel has bought into the concept of war on multiple fronts, with its armed forces training for such an eventuality. But the nature of this conflict is different.

A Hezbollah paramedic walks among the debris after an Israeli air strike hit an apartment in a multi-storey building in central Beirut, Lebanon, on Thursday, October 3, 2024 [Hussein Malla/AP]

Mistakes learned from past victories

Israel’s view of its history is infused with wars of the “few against the many” and a narrative of how one tiny country fought off multiple aggressors in short, sharp wars that left its enemies defeated and Israel victorious. Victories, however, can be dangerous – especially when hubris rears its ugly head in a militarised society, the army running like a spine through Israeli cultural and political life.

The vast majority of Israeli citizens have served in the armed forces, while most of the country’s leaders have served in the special forces or as generals. The American psychologist Abraham Maslow once wrote: “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you see every problem as a nail.” The mistaken application of military force to what are fundamentally political problems has dragged Israel, step by step, into its present situation.

The country has lurched dramatically to the far right – especially amongst its young, who are increasingly intolerant of Palestinians and who are also of conscript age. A weak political system that leans on coalition governments, usually held hostage by small extreme political parties, is coupled with a leader whose political survival relies on the emergency conditions of war to stay in power. The resultant groupthink will be a calamity for Israel and for its neighbours.

Israel’s enemies know far better than to engage its powerful, well-equipped and well-trained military in a conventional war, and increasingly use asymmetric tactics to offset Israel’s advantage. Raids, rockets, ambushes, tunnel complexes, the slow gradual war on Israel’s economy – all these are slowly draining Israel, with its allies increasingly disenchanted by the wide-scale suffering the country has unleashed in the name of defence.

Yet Israel continues to use conventional arms against its opponents, the lure of decisive victories and neat solutions always just over the horizon.

Increasing isolation

With no sign of a solution to the war on Gaza in sight, Israel’s “normalisation” of relations with regional Arab states has been shelved, perhaps indefinitely. The United States has watched its extensive efforts to bring Israel into the regional diplomatic fold quickly dissolve.

Arab states have been increasingly vocal about the immorality of the war on Gaza, and the dangers to regional stability. This danger has been amplified by Israel’s ground offensive into southern Lebanon.

Warning after clear warning has been issued by leader after regional leader that another war, especially while the first one hasn’t been resolved, is beyond foolhardy, leading to widening economic disruption and the weakening of the international order.

In applying total support for Israel, regardless of any excess it commits, the US is degrading the power and global presence of the United Nations. Increasingly seen as irrelevant, the UN’s resolutions are ignored, and the voices within the UN General Assembly are disregarded.

Doing this decreases the relevance and consensus of the body, steadily heading the way of the League of Nations, where increasingly intolerant and polarising opinions helped lead to World War II, to date the biggest calamity humanity has ever inflicted on itself.

The forever war

Where will it end? How will it end? Will it ever end? It is highly unlikely that Israel’s enemies can be decisively defeated, but there is little prospect for peace. The forever war is set to stretch on, offering up bleakness instead.

An extremist ideology has grown within Israel that has no problem with ethnic cleansing, ideologues within Israel believing that their time has come, that the historic opportunity to be rid of the Palestinians once and for all is now.

Populations are now brutalised and displaced, economies shattered, air strikes, missile strikes, bombs, militias, an Israeli military and population totally desensitised to the suffering they are causing in the name of defence – and in the middle of this, traumatised Palestinians are seeing what little they have left destroyed.

And Israel? It’s not one iota safer.