Yonatan Touval writes:

There is a condition that can befall small states kept too long under the protection of great powers.

When the protection is generous enough, they can become both militarily formidable but also strategically undisciplined. They grow fluent in force and illiterate in consequence. They acquire the manners of sovereignty without its restraint, because the costs of that sovereignty are borne elsewhere — in arms shipments, guarantees, Security Council vetoes and the patron’s diplomacy. Over time, strategy atrophies. In its place comes the belief that force can substitute for statecraft.

Israel suffers from such a condition. Its attack on Iran, carried out alongside the United States, was meant to restore Israel’s command of the region. It may instead be remembered for exposing its limits.

Iran has been battered, but not transformed. Its nuclear program was damaged, not dismantled. Its regime endures. Instead of a new Iran, Israel may now face something worse: the old one, bloodied and hardened by survival. The memorandum of understanding signed last week by the United States and Iran seeks to halt hostilities on terms set by those countries, revealing the bounds of Israel’s achievement. Israel could fight a war alongside the United States, but it could not dictate the endgame.

That is the calamity beneath Israel’s operational successes. Israel has shown that it can reach Iran and punish it, but reach is not resolution. What remains is strategic drift, diplomatic sidelining and a dependence on the United States that is deeper than Israel’s leaders can acknowledge, perhaps even to themselves.

For decades, Israel has spoken in the idiom of self-reliance while living inside the architecture of American protection. Its leaders repeated the promise that Israel would always be able to “defend itself, by itself.” Behind the creed stood American weapons, intelligence cooperation and wartime replenishment of arms, and $3.8 billion a year in U.S. military assistance. The deeper the dependence became, the more fiercely Israel insisted it stood alone.

The problem was not the “special relationship” as such. It was the extent to which it had become unconditional. Thus, the occupation could be managed rather than ended. Palestinian national claims could be deferred, diluted and finally recast as an existential threat to be defeated rather than a political demand to be answered. In the West Bank, settlements could spread and settler pogroms could terrorize Palestinian villagers, not merely beyond the state’s reach but increasingly enabled by the state. Gaza could be sealed off, immiserated and left without a political horizon because Washington could help absorb the diplomatic cost, even as that cost rose.

That system could be mistaken for stability until the day it collapsed. On Oct. 7, Israel met atrocity with a war. The scale and character of the devastation that followed made the charge of genocide part of the world’s indictment of Israel. Whatever the final legal judgment, Israel can no longer dismiss the accusation as mere calumny. [Continue reading…]