In the past, Israel has traded land for peace. These days, it’s trading peace for land.
For years, Israel favored cold (or at most lukewarm) wars with unfriendly neighbors: containment, subversion by spies, the occasional assassination or one-off airstrike on a weapons facility or training camp. Not anymore. Since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, aggression and expansionism have come to define Israel’s foreign policy.
Israeli troops have taken over a broad swath of southern Lebanon, driving out more than one million residents and demolishing centuries-old villages. Israeli officials call it a “buffer zone” to protect residents of northern Israel from Hezbollah rockets. But some Israeli officials have threatened to flatten the territory, annex it and fill it with settlers.
In Iran, Israel eagerly tried to induce regime collapse, apparently unconcerned with creating a dangerous power vacuum in a country containing 11 tons of enriched uranium.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has bragged that his government helped cause the downfall of Bashar al-Assad, the former president of Syria. As the Damascus government fell, Israel invaded and occupied an area in Syria’s southwest, adjoining the land later seized in Lebanon. In Gaza, the Israeli army will enlarge its control to 70 percent of the enclave, Mr. Netanyahu said, and the expansion is likely to continue. Defense Minister Israel Katz has suggested the entire Palestinian population of Gaza should eventually be concentrated into a dystopian “humanitarian city,” built on the ruins of Rafah. Nobody would be allowed to leave the zone unless they emigrate, which Mr. Katz has called an open goal of the Israeli government. Meanwhile, a terror-fueled campaign of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank continues to push Palestinians off the land and expand Jewish settlements.
Settlers and other religious Israelis who’ve grown powerful in Mr. Netanyahu’s far-right coalition often speak of a “Greater Israel,” with borders eventually expanding to consume all the land bequeathed by God in the Book of Genesis: Jordan and Lebanon, along with parts of Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. But to Mr. Netanyahu, who’s started referring to Israel as a superpower, the aim is probably more strategic than spiritual — to gain land and weaken or splinter neighbors perceived as hostile.
Emboldened by unstinting U.S. support during its devastation of Gaza, and with American forces by its side in attacking Iran, Israel is moving with disorienting speed on multiple fronts. Mr. Netanyahu attributes his country’s aggression to the bloody lessons of Oct. 7, which he insists was an attack not just by Hamas but “by the Iran axis, to try to annihilate us through a noose of death.”
“I said, ‘We’re going to change the Middle East,’” Mr. Netanyahu told CBS’s “60 Minutes” in an interview last month. “We’re going to change this condition where they’re ganging up on us, thinking they’re going to wipe out the one and only Jewish state.”
This bellicose stance has a whiff of delusion. Fractured, infighting neighbors may look less daunting than the hostile gallery of autocracies that ringed Israel back when Saddam Hussein, Muammar el-Qaddafi and the Assad dynasty still ruled. But failed states nurture terrorists and seed future violence. Gobbling up land deepens resentment.
Most of all, an assumption of impunity and the willingness to use violence as a political tool are turning Israel into a pariah. Flush with U.S. aid, Mr. Netanyahu simply brushes aside the outstanding international arrest warrant accusing him of war crimes in Gaza. But Israeli aggression also threatens to fray the small country’s financial and diplomatic lifeline to the United States.
Between the carnage in Gaza and the widespread (and not unfounded) perception that President Trump started an unpopular war in Iran at Mr. Netanyahu’s prodding, U.S. public opinion has soured radically, and perhaps irrevocably, against Israel. Sixty percent of U.S. adults now have an unfavorable view of Israel; half of U.S. voters believe that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
“That is a huge threat to Israel’s national security,” said Chuck Freilich, a former deputy national security adviser in Israel. “Israel needs the U.S. for everything.”
Mr. Netanyahu has argued that Israel, for years the world’s top recipient of U.S. foreign aid, is now wealthy enough to wean itself off American military aid. He may be right. But cash is just one element of crucial U.S. support. The United States allows Israel access to a sophisticated arsenal that can’t be bought elsewhere (the F-35 stealth fighter jet, for example), overlooking U.S. laws that bar weapon sales to foreign military units committing serious human rights violations. Israel also leans heavily on the United States for intelligence, not to mention the U.S. veto at the United Nations Security Council that has repeatedly saved Israel from censure or sanction.
Without that veto, Mr. Freilich said, “Israel would have been under comprehensive sanctions decades ago.”
Perhaps Mr. Netanyahu is moving so fast because he recognizes the risks of dwindling American backing. But his willingness to create disarray has many of Israel’s neighbors eyeing it warily.
“Creating that kind of chaos can lead to a vacuum, factionalism, terrorist violence, insurgencies,” said Mohamad Elmasry, a media studies professor at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. “But I think Israel is prepared to deal with that, especially if they’re able to expand borders while countries are trying to rebuild.”
In Lebanon, Mr. Katz said, Israel would follow “the model we applied in Gaza’s Rafah and Beit Hanoun.” It was a chilling comparison. Both places were bombed ruthlessly and then razed during Israel’s onslaught on Gaza.
“You drive through a town and there’s not a single house standing, because everything has been destroyed,” Ramzi Kaiss, a Beirut-based researcher with Human Rights Watch, told me.
Israel occupied southern Lebanon for nearly two decades, starting with a 1982 incursion to fight Palestinian militants. That invasion inspired the creation of Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militia whose guerrilla attacks drove Israel to withdraw in 2000. There is a sense of repetition here, of fruitless cycles of occupation and insurgency.
But what comes next? Israel has now ordered the evacuation of about one-fifth of Lebanon — an area much larger than originally suggested, stretching far beyond any buffer zone. Right-wing Israelis fantasize aloud about settling southern Lebanon, and Israeli officials have warned displaced residents that they won’t be back anytime soon. At the same time, Israel and the United States have been pressuring the Lebanese government to strip Hezbollah of its weapons — an improbable demand given the Lebanese military’s relative weakness and the sectarian volatility of such a move.
Israel may view southern Lebanon as a bargaining chip to wield in negotiations, a prize to claim or a way to pile unbearable pressure on the Lebanese state. Whatever game Israel is trying to play, pushing this demand for disarmament on a weak central government risks setting off a civil war among Lebanon’s finely balanced sectarian communities.
“They don’t seem to be interested in, ‘How do we enable the growth of a stable state on our northern border?’” said Paul Salem, a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Syria remains frail and fragmented, with various armed groups controlling parts of the country, Turkish troops in the north and Israeli occupation in the south. In his efforts to pull Syria together, President Ahmed al-Sharaa remains badly hamstrung by a crushing Israeli bombing campaign that all but wiped out Syria’s military capabilities as the former regime collapsed.
In April, the Israeli government agreed to spend $334 million to move thousands of Israeli civilians into the Golan Heights, a Syrian plateau Israel seized in 1967 and later annexed, although international law forbids transferring civilians to an occupied territory. The move illustrates that today’s temporary security needs can become tomorrow’s border expansion. The Golan Heights was, until recently, Israel’s buffer zone against Syria. But now Israel has carved deeper into Syria and is moving to populate the old buffer zone with people who will be protected by the new buffer zone.
There’s no question that Israel is finding new opportunities in weakened states. As preparations to bomb Iran got underway this past winter, Israel secretly set up two covert bases in the remote desert of Iraq — apparently unbeknown to the government in Baghdad. When Iraqi troops approached one of the bases to investigate reports of suspicious military activity, Israel repelled them with airstrikes, killing one soldier and wounding two more.
Israel is even reportedly planning to set up a base in Somaliland (a breakaway state that Israel is alone among United Nations member states in recognizing) in order to fight the Houthis in Yemen and monitor the strategically important Bab al-Mandab Strait, which runs between Yemen and the Horn of Africa.
Oddly, the spate of expansionist gambits comes together with an Israeli push to normalize diplomatic relations with Arab states. The governments of both Israel and the United States are keen to expand the Abraham Accords, the Trump-mediated agreements that normalized Israeli ties with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan. Both Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Trump consider the Abraham Accords a roaring success. But to Palestinians who felt that Arab neighbors ignored their plight to make deals with Israel, the accords suggested the futility of politics. It’s worth remembering that the Oct. 7 attack was launched just as Saudi Arabia, the kingpin of Arab states, was on the brink of normalizing ties with Israel.
It’s hard not to wonder whether the subtext is: Throw the Palestinians under the bus and make peace with us, or you risk becoming the next target.
The region’s power brokers aren’t talking much about the Palestinians these days. Israel continues to restrict aid and keep up a patter of violence in a bomb-chewed and immiserated Gaza Strip, and Palestinians in the West Bank are still suffering daily repression at the hands of settlers and soldiers. But make no mistake: The unanswered demand for Palestinian sovereignty sits at the heart of all the regional upheaval, unacknowledged though it may be.
Mr. Netanyahu and his cabinet are in no mood to take the boot off Palestinians’ necks, however, and the Trump administration — despite growing public disgust — shows little interest in pressuring Mr. Netanyahu on behalf of the Palestinians.
Through money, protection and diplomatic overindulgence, the United States helped to create the aggressive Israel we see today. So what will we do now? Sometimes I recall the conversations, before Oct. 7 changed everything, when U.S. foreign policy experts talked about disengaging from the Middle East. The United States must pivot to China, they’d say. And yet here we are, ensnared in the one big war we didn’t particularly want, and can’t seem to figure out how to end.
Meanwhile, in Washington, legislation now moving through Congress would merge virtually all aspects of U.S. and Israeli defense technology — from research to manufacturing, drones to A.I. to biotechnology — to “promote the long-term integration of joint capabilities.”
Perhaps we are drifting toward a new status quo in which Israel, ever more integrated into the military-industrial complex, manages the region with the United States at its back. Maybe, if you want to empower a new manager, you give them the reins, and stop saying no.
And so we are watching, encouraging and excusing as our closest regional ally keeps slipping deeper into a mess that will, one way or another, belong to us, too.
