What comes next? In Israel, past success is no guarantee of future results
The country has long seen transformational victories followed by new sets of challenges
President Trump was not pleased.
Fresh off putting all the TACO talk to rest (at least for a few news cycles) with the U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, Trump quickly pivoted. By late Monday night the president was promising a “Complete and Total” ceasefire, instead of a forever war, saying the fighting between Israel and Iran would stop immediately and that he did not believe the two countries would “ever be shooting at each other again.”
Just one problem. Actually two: Israel and Iran. The two foes were back at it within hours. Trump fumed: “We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f— they’re doing.”
Big picture, Trump is probably on to something. With the U.S. providing a resounding exclamation point to Israel’s methodical, post-7 October dismantling of Iran’s proxy network, air defences, nuclear progress and missile capabilities, it feels as if this decades-long, escalating war between Jerusalem and Tehran is coming to a close, however haltingly. Iran’s supreme leader continues to issue menacing threats, but with each setback for his country it is hard to shake the image of the defeated-but-ever-defiant Black Knight in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” who taunts his opponent even after losing all of his limbs. (“It’s just a flesh wound… I’ll bite your legs off!”)
Just don’t get too comfortable. Even if Trump gets his ceasefire and the greater Iranian threat appears neutralised, Israel’s winding history can be understood as a series of confrontational epochs, with momentous transformational victories inevitably leading to a new series of challenges and threats (not to mention humbling tragedies born of triumphalist arrogance — see the Yom Kippur War and 7 October).
Israel’s swift and stunning go-it-alone victory in 1967 transformed the Jewish state from a fledgling country to regional superpower. Yet six years later, Israel found itself fighting for survival after Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack of their own. In retrospect, the Yom Kippur War turned out to be a spasm rather than a reversal of the Six-Day War, with Anwar Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem and the Camp David Accords bringing a more formal end a few years later to the hot war waged against Israel by its immediate neighbours.
The gloomy take is that Israel’s triumph over pan-Arab nationalism simply shifted the battlefront — to the more elusive and stubborn multi-decade terror war waged by the PLO and other Palestinian groups. The first phase of this battle with Palestinian nationalism was marked by Munich, Entebbe and the endless cycle of Palestinian terrorist attacks and Israeli targeted assassinations and commando strikes throughout the 1970s, with the fight culminating in the Lebanon War and the first Intifada.
Similarly, the Oslo Accords did not bring peace, but instead marked the transition from the fight against secular Palestinian nationalism to the war with the anti-Zionist Islamic fundamentalist axis of Iran and its devout proxies, most notably Hamas and Hezbollah. This Iranian-led front succeeded in sabotaging a two-state solution, but failed to stop Israel’s march to greater acceptance and integration in the region, which in turn may have lulled Jerusalem into a false sense of security and inspired Hamas to unleash the kind of attack Israel’s political and military leaders considered unthinkable.
Will the cycle continue? For now, Israel and the U.S. have delivered a decisive and perhaps fatal blow to Iran Inc. We’ll know soon enough if Trump’s intervention — with bullish airstrikes and diplomacy — has brought this round of fighting to a close. Whether this is the beginning, middle or end of this stage of Israel history — and what comes next — will take more time to figure out.
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