For Binyamin Netanyahu, the future looks surprisingly bright – certainly much more than six months ago. As Israel faces a general election later this year, polling suggests his party is gaining strength, and there is now an increased chance that he will be able to form a viable coalition with extreme right-wing parties. In the process, the prime minister may be able to further delay his court appearances on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust, all of which he denies.
At the root of Netanyahu’s much-improved prospects is his government’s ability to convince the majority of Israeli Jews that they are once again secure, after the trauma of the Hamas attacks of October 2023. Doing so has involved the Israeli Defence Forces killing more than 70,000 Palestinians in Gaza, with another 10,000 missing under the rubble. Israel last month accepted this death toll as “broadly accurate”, having previously dismissed it as “Hamas propaganda”.
Netanyahu’s ministers have reduced Gazans to the status of “human animals” over the past two years, and polling suggests that most Israeli Jews have now come to believe that the answer to their Gaza problem is removing the entire population, and many would even accept their being killed. The IDF is continuing military operations across the enclave, where hundreds of Palestinians have died since the ‘ceasefire’ started in October last year.
Beyond Gaza, Israel is relentlessly continuing with its land grab of Palestinian properties across the occupied West Bank, its war on Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, its hold on southern Syria and its determination to see Iran’s nuclear and missile ambitions terminated. Israeli airstrikes on both Lebanon and Syria persist, with IDF troops stationed in southern Lebanon and ready to bomb Houthi-controlled areas in Yemen.
In all of this, Israel maintains the support of the US and is reasonably content with Donald Trump’s ‘Board of Peace’ plan as the next step in containing the Palestinians in Gaza, since the power will clearly lie with Trump in all the major decisions. The more extreme members of Netanyahu’s coalition can now look forward to a Gaza populated by Jewish settlers and a West Bank with a Jewish majority. Remaining Palestinians will provide a pool of low-cost labour, while the IDF will be strong enough for Israel to be the Middle East’s sole military superpower.
All of this may be reassuring for many Israelis, but take a modestly different view and a rather less comfortable picture emerges for both Israel and the United States.
Start with Iran, where the Pentagon has stationed the region’s largest US military force in decades. Despite this, General Dan Caine, the chair of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, is reportedly cautious about a confrontation; his main concern relates to the huge cost and limited stocks of the missiles needed to protect US troops from the much cheaper and cruder armed drones and ballistic missiles that Iran has in abundance.
As I pointed out in a recent openDemocracy column, there are uncomfortably large numbers of US military personnel stationed within armed drone range of Iran. Ironically, Americans in Qatar, Bahrain and other West Gulf states are actually more vulnerable to Iranian drones than Israelis, with Israel beyond the range of most of them.
These aspects may not stop Trump from going to war yet again, but he has most recently said he is in favour of further talks with Tehran, so the duration and outcome of any new conflict are far from certain.
Then there is the matter of Hamas. It is easy to forget that the primary aim of Israel’s assault on Gaza after the 7 October 2023 attack was to fully destroy Hamas as a paramilitary force.
The group has instead morphed into a guerrilla force that retains considerable control, not least among the extensive ruins and tent cities of Gaza, and plenty of political support in the occupied West Bank. Over the past two years, the IDF and the Netanyahu government have been forced to recognise that Hamas is far more resilient than expected.
One example of this comes in an analysis published by the US Army’s Centre for Lessons Learnt in September, which details the many problems the IDF encountered due to Hamas’s huge network of underground tunnels in Gaza. The entire complex is far more substantial than originally believed, extending to 350-450 miles of tunnels, with 5,700 shafts.
“Hamas designed the tunnel network with integrated electricity, ventilation, and communication systems, enabling fighters to operate within them for extended periods,” the report finds. Even detecting the tunnels requires Israel and the US to use multiple technologies, including seismic and acoustic sensors, thermal imaging, ground-penetrating radar, satellite and drone reconnaissance, AI and machine learning.
The tunnels have also provided a huge learning experience for new generations of Hamas’s supporters. The movement may have lost many of its young people during the conflict, but the supply of recruits is substantial, especially with the radicalisation of tens of thousands of young Palestinians seeing their relatives and friends killed or maimed.
The issue goes well beyond Israel, as the lessons of tunnel warfare will spread to other conflicts in the years to come. Just as Hamas will have studied the Vietcong tunnels in the Vietnam War and the experience of Russian soldiers in Mariupol during the first year of Russia’s war on Ukraine, so Gaza will take its place in the history of insurgency.
Finally, there is the challenge to Israel’s regional hegemony now starting to be posed by a resurgent Turkey. Just when it seems that Israel’s only strategic rival in the Middle East, Iran, is in retreat, a new challenge emerges. The problem for Israel is not just Turkey, a NATO member with a strong autocratic leader, but the way Turkey is linking up with Qatar, which has huge wealth and a streak of political independence in that it does not always take the same political line as other Arab states in the region on matters such as Hamas and Yemen.
Israel has long feared a Shia Islamic ‘axis of resistance’ led by Iran, but that may be diminished with Iran’s multiple internal problems. Now, Israel’s concerns have shifted to whether Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will build a much more substantial Sunni axis, potentially leading to a more serious challenge to Israel.
In short, the idea of a newly ‘re-secure’ Israel in the wake of the supposed victory in Gaza may be very short-sighted. Think of the intense suffering of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, the possibilities of untoward outcomes from a conflict with Iran and the unexpected changes in regional power with the likes of Turkey. What we see is a future that leaves Israel far from secure, and it will remain so as long as justice for the Palestinians is ignored.
