During the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel achieved stunning military success against what seemed to be formidable adversaries. Yet Israel didn’t translate its military success into active diplomacy; if it had, the region and Israel’s position in it might look very different today. Israel may not have thought it had a choice to make back then: it didn’t believe it had viable Arab partners for peace, and its military dominance was far from assured, as demonstrated just six years later when Egypt launched a surprise attack and started the Yom Kippur War.
The situation is different today. After its 12-day war with Iran in June, Israel is in a far superior military and regional position than it was in 1967. It has neutered its most serious regional threats, and it has been decades since an Arab state fought a war with Israel. It has steadily degraded its nonstate adversaries, scoring surprising military and intelligence wins against Hezbollah in Lebanon last summer and continuing its decapitation of Hamas’s leadership in Gaza. Its attack against Iran achieved undeniable military success in damaging Iran’s nuclear and missile facilities, and it demonstrated deep intelligence penetration through its brazen killing of Iran’s top military leadership and nuclear scientists. U.S. President Donald Trump’s subsequent decision to join the attack boosted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu domestically.
Israel’s wins are not without limits, of course. Experts have questioned the full extent of damage to Iran’s nuclear program, and the strikes may have only strengthened the Iranian leadership and increased its motivation to cross the nuclear threshold. Houthi missile and drone attacks against Israel have also continued, suggesting that the diminishment of Iran’s proxy network is a work in progress. The Israel Defense Forces chief of staff, Lieutenant General Eyal Zamir, acknowledged in remarks in late July that “Iran and its axis remain in our sights; the campaign against Iran isn’t over.” Still, despite these remaining challenges, the overriding Israeli perception is that the regional balance sheet is working in its favor.
This is arguably Israel’s moment to leverage this favorable strategic landscape and convert its military success into diplomatic capital, restarting talks with the Palestinians that could create long-term stability and encourage more of Israel’s Arab neighbors to normalize relations. After the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat used his military achievements to advance a strategic decision to make peace.
But Netanyahu is not steering his country in that direction. His desire for “total victory” has fueled a relentlessly destructive military campaign in Gaza and beyond with little regard for the damage it has wreaked on the country’s regional and global relationships, not to mention the dire human consequences.
To the extent that Netanyahu is thinking ahead, he sees the military successes of the past 18 months as an opportunity for Israel to forge a new regional order while pursuing a maximalist agenda. Netanyahu believes that he can pursue normalization and nonbelligerency agreements with Arab powers such as Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Syria without making serious concessions on the Palestinian issue or unduly limiting Israel’s freedom of military action across its borders. Even if Israel makes some limited headway on such agreements once the Gaza war finally ends, regional deals that do not address the core Israeli-Palestinian conflict will have little or no domestic support within neighboring states and are more likely to lay the ground for renewed conflict.
POSITION OF STRENGTH?
In early July, in remarks during his third White House visit with Trump in less than six months, Netanyahu reflected on how Israeli success might bring new opportunities: “I think that everyone understands that the situation has changed,” he boasted. “Iran was essentially running Syria, directly through Hezbollah. Hezbollah has been brought to its knees. Iran is out of the picture. So I think this presents opportunities for stability, for security, and eventually for peace.”
Many observers hoped that the Israeli-Iranian cease-fire in June would revitalize diplomacy on Gaza after months of stalemate. With Netanyahu’s success against Iran, this logic went, Netanyahu would no longer fear that ending the war would threaten his political survival. Indeed, polling indicates that most Israelis want an end to the fighting in Gaza to facilitate the release of the Israeli hostages that Hamas continues to hold. Talks to establish a cease-fire did in fact resume on July 6 in Doha, but they did not yield an agreement—and the deal under discussion was merely a short-term pause in fighting and a limited hostage and prisoner release, not a full end to the war.
Meanwhile, Israeli leaders continue to press ahead with plans to relocate Gazans into limited “humanitarian” areas in southern Gaza, with the wider objective largely understood to be the eventual removal of Gazans from the strip, measures that Israeli scholars and even Moshe Yaalon, the former Israel Defense Forces chief of staff, say would amount to war crimes. Israeli officials seem to believe that Trump supports their plans to displace Gazans, plans that track with Trump’s earlier proposal to resettle Palestinians outside of Gaza and transform it into a “Riviera of the Middle East.”
Although Israel says it does not want to stay in Gaza, it now controls much of it. When asked about postwar conditions, Israel’s ambassador to the UN told The Guardian, “I think we will make sure in terms of security, we have the ability to act in Gaza, very similar to what’s happening today in Judea and Samaria,” the term some Israelis use to describe the occupied West Bank. In other words, Israel’s military occupation of the territories will likely continue into the foreseeable future, and Israel could escalate by annexing the West Bank and even parts of Gaza.
All of this suggests that Israel’s war with Iran has not altered Netanyahu’s long-standing views of the region. For him, military wins demonstrate that strength pays off, making compromise with the Palestinians unnecessary for his wider regional aims. In this reading, the region will have to accommodate Israeli preferences, and not vice versa. From Netanyahu’s perspective, Arab leaders are eager to benefit from Israel’s technological and military prowess. Although the Arab world galvanized in opposition to Israel’s war in Gaza with summits and statements, none of the parties to the Abraham Accords have pulled out. Egypt and Jordan have not suggested undoing their peace treaties with Israel; Jordan even assisted in Israel’s defense against Iranian attacks last year. Arab states issued statements condemning Israeli strikes against Iran last month, but Netanyahu has long believed that these states are fundamentally aligned with Israeli efforts to clip Iran’s wings, seeing Iran, not Israel, as the region’s most significant strategic threat. But regional realities are unlikely to be as accommodating as Netanyahu may believe, even with Trump’s support.
MISREADINGS AND MISCALCULATIONS
The most sought-after regional deal is between Israel and Saudi Arabia, a regional powerhouse viewed as a key leader of the Arab and Islamic world. The Biden administration exerted considerable effort to broker such a deal, with Netanyahu even announcing at the United Nations in September 2023 that Israel was on the “cusp” of a historic agreement with Saudi Arabia. Although it was never clear a deal was as close as Netanyahu claimed, the Saudis significantly hardened their position in the wake of the Gaza war. Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan al-Saud reflected consistent Saudi positions when he bluntly stated that normalization with Israel is “off the table until we have a resolution to Palestinian statehood.”
Israelis may believe that once the Gaza war is out of the headlines, the Saudis will settle for less; a deal with Israel, after all, would put the Saudis in further good graces with Trump and provide economic, intelligence, and security benefits. But the Saudis are unlikely to share this calculus. Saudi Arabia has found other ways to please Trump without focusing on Israel, including promises of hefty economic investments and arms deals during Trump’s visit to the kingdom in May. The Saudis have also expended so much political capital in linking normalization with Israel to a Palestinian state that they are unlikely to settle with just lip service to the cause—and the current Israeli leadership is not even providing that.
Israel’s war with Iran has not altered Netanyahu’s long-standing views of the region.
Israel’s war with Iran has only further complicated Arab positions. Regional powers such as Saudi Arabia have been normalizing ties with Iran in recent years, in large part to stay out of Iran’s cross hairs. The Saudis and other Gulf Arab states are focused on domestic priorities and economic diversification plans, and wars are not good for business. Although Israel’s neighbors no doubt welcomed the degradation of Iranian military capabilities, they did not celebrate Israel’s attacks, which put the region on the brink of full-scale war. Indeed, Iran’s retaliatory strike on the U.S. base in Qatar, designed to limit casualties and avoid further escalation, nonetheless was a potent reminder that the Israeli-Iranian-U.S. conflict puts Gulf states in harm’s way. The Saudis have continued to engage the Iranians and promote diplomacy over military conflict, as evidenced by Saudi Arabia’s hosting of the Iranian foreign minister in his first visit to a Gulf state since the Iranian attack on Qatar.
Israel’s Arab neighbors may welcome keeping Iran in a box but also worry about a completely unrestrained Israel, which is increasingly seen as a regional destabilizer, not a regional savior. In Syria, for instance, a common perception is that Israel is encouraging divisions and undermining the new government’s attempts to unify the country. In mid-July, after a recent spate of sectarian violence in Syria’s south, Israel launched airstrikes on Syrian government facilities in Damascus. Israeli officials claimed their intent was to protect Syria’s Druze minority “owing to the deep covenant of blood with our Druze citizens in Israel” and to “ensure the demilitarization of the region adjacent to our border with Syria.” But Syrian leader Ahmed al-Shara characterized the Israeli intervention as a plot to divide Syria and destabilize the country. Thomas Barrack, a close ally of Trump who is serving as the U.S. special envoy to Syria and U.S. ambassador to Turkey, said the Israeli strikes were “poorly timed” and complicated efforts to stabilize the region.
Indeed, the Israeli strikes on Damascus underscore how Netanyahu is not only misreading the situation with his Arab neighbors but potentially with Trump. The Trump administration has been focused on getting a deal between Israel and Syria ever since the fall of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad in 2024. The new Syrian leadership was uniquely interested in new security agreements since it wanted economic relief to rebuild the country. To that end, the Trump administration backed lifting sanctions on Syria, and the president demonstrated U.S. political support for the new government through his high-profile meeting with Shara in Riyadh in May. The Trump administration will want to see its political and economic investments in Syria pay off through an Israeli-Syrian deal—ideally even announcing Syria’s joining of the Abraham Accords. But Netanyahu has made such a deal more difficult with Israel’s aggressive military posture inside Syria, a posture some analysts see as overreach that is making unnecessary enemies even as Syria currently has little capacity to harm Israel.
BACK TO THE START
Netanyahu may be correct in surmising that Israel’s neighbors respect its new position of strength, but he is repeatedly misjudging their reactions when that strength lacks a political purpose and ignores their interests. Arab leaders already facing significant domestic challenges will have a hard time achieving extensive normalization deals with Israel when there is hostile sentiment toward Israel among Arab publics. By pursuing his current course toward the Palestinians, Netanyahu may very well end up with a forever war in Gaza, unrest in the West Bank, constant “mowing the lawn” efforts in Iran, and no progress toward normalization with Arab neighbors—all while the country’s international image suffers as never before.
There are other ways forward. Israeli leaders could take Arab proposals seriously, proposals that are seeking to bring humanitarian relief and stabilize and rebuild Gaza without Hamas and without forcing Gazans to leave their homes. The Israeli government has rejected these Arab initiatives, as has the Trump administration.
Israel can make other choices, and it has done so before. Previous Israeli prime ministers understood that Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians is its most serious existential threat. Netanyahu has tried instead to demonstrate that it is possible to marginalize the Palestinians and emasculate their national aspirations without sacrificing Israel’s ultimate acceptance into the region or its own security.
Shimon Peres was ridiculed for talking about a new Middle East based on economic cooperation and regional integration built on a foundation of peace with the Palestinians. But talk of a new peaceful Middle East today, one based on Israeli military dominance with no political horizon for Palestinians, is no less fantastical. And worse, it will be far more dangerous, bringing Israel right back to where it started.
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