One year on from the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on southern Israel, Israeli forces are waging at least two “forever wars”—in Gaza and Lebanon; more, if intensifying settler violence in the occupied Palestinian West Bank is viewed as the next distinct battlefield, and if Israeli military operations against Iranian allies in Yemen, Syria, and Iraq—not to mention against Iran itself—are also included.
What makes these “forever wars” is the absence of clear prospects, let alone definite plans, for a politically viable “day after,” especially in Gaza and Lebanon. For all the triumphal rhetoric from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about “total victory” against Hamas and Hezbollah, and his grandiose visions of regime change in Iran and a new regional order in the Middle East, a more sober reading suggests that, without a day after for Gaza and Lebanon, there can be no day after for Israel either.
Something subtle has taken place. Israel has joined the unenviable club of Arab countries trapped in forever wars of their own: Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Lebanon, Palestine, and Sudan. This is not merely a measure of the level of active conflict—most severe in Sudan, partial in Syria—nor even of unresolvable conflict dynamics that have left de facto truces and negotiated stalemates perpetually fragile and reversible in Yemen, Libya, and Iraq; and, prior to October 7, 2023, in Lebanon and Palestine. It is also a measure of disintegrating links between state and society.
More significant than the immediacy of the permanent threat of violence is that none of these countries, including Israel, is truly the state of all its citizens. In each, the central state may be dominant by some measures, most obviously military and financial, and yet exercises less than full territorial and administrative control within its claimed borders. Mixed control may be the result of formal agreement, as between Israel and the Palestinian Authority or the central government and the autonomous Kurdish government in Iraq, or de facto as in Lebanon between the government and Hezbollah. It may also be de facto and contested, as in Yemen and Libya and in the Palestinian autonomous areas under rival governing authorities, or actively contested as in Sudan. In all these cases boundaries have proved not to be final, remaining susceptible to challenge and change.
Each of the countries in this club moreover coexists with a variety of armed actors within the borders it claims. More to the point, the main instances of contestation arise between armed actors that have full or at least recognized quasi-state status: in Syria, the official army and the “auxiliary” National Defense Forces, along with Iran- and Russia-backed units, apart from jihadi, Kurdish, and other opposition groups; in Iraq, the official army, the Popular Mobilization Forces, and the Kurdish Peshmerga (itself internally divided); in Yemen, forces loyal to the “internationally recognized government,” those loyal to the Southern Transitional Council, and to Ansar Allah (the Houthis); in Libya, the self-designated Libyan National Army in eastern Libya and an array of semi-official militias loyal to the government in Tripoli or to other regional leaderships in the west; in Lebanon, the official armed forces and Hezbollah; in the West Bank and Gaza, respectively, rival Palestinian Authority security forces and their closely-allied Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades or Hamas’ Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades; and in Sudan, the armed forces and Rapid Support Forces, in addition to a plethora of rebel groups recognized in past power-sharing agreements.
Israel is arguably the outlier here, even if its regular army and security services have operated in overlapping spaces with Palestinian Authority security forces in the West Bank since 1994, and in Gaza until 2005. But although the Israeli settler militia in the occupied West Bank officially constitutes so-called regional-defense units made up of Israeli military reservists, it does not exercise effective control over the armed settlers who rampage freely in Palestinians towns and villages. In the view of Israeli advocacy research activist Yehuda Shaul, “[I]t’s not clear any more where the military starts and ends, and where the civilians start and end.”
But events in the West Bank reveal deeper transformations within the Israeli armed forces, which the war in Gaza has highlighted. At one level, the past year’s combat has revealed command and control problems within the army, but more significant is what Israeli political sociologist Yagil Levy has called the institution’s “theocratization.” This he described as “the transition from a purely secular organization toward a theocratic military,” as the presence and influence of “middle-class secular conscripts” and their networks in military affairs declines and as more ultra-Orthodox nationalists have enlisted. According to Shaul, nearly 40 percent of graduating officer cadets in the infantry were nationalist religious in 2015. He, too, perceived a “clash between the old guard and the institutionalists on the one hand, and the rank and file and the nationalist-religious people on the other … [who] want to change the nature and the spirit and the soul of the Army.”
None of these trends points to a systemic crisis of the kind Israel’s enemies may hope for. Israel remains a strong state in terms of what are known as core “capacities”—institutional, legal, regulatory, technological, coercive, and distributional—and until recently it retained an ability to adjust to sociopolitical changes with new, broadly stable domestic compromises. But this is precisely where the most significant commonality between Israel and several Arab countries lies: the degradation or outright collapse of the political settlements that enabled their states to come into being historically.
Social scientists Jonathan Di John and James Putzel, and others, define political settlements as the distribution of power, often negotiated, between contending social groups and classes on which any state is based, enabling intra-elite bargaining and (mostly) nonviolent contention between states and their societies. In some cases, though by no means all, these political settlements are expressed in “social contracts” that are “robust and legitimate.”
It is in this sense that the judicial reforms pursued by Netanyahu and his far-right government partners since late 2022—weakening the judicial system’s oversight over government decisions and legislation—represented the most direct assault to date on the political settlement that enabled Israel’s establishment in 1948. Netanyahu’s elevation of warfare into a driver of Israeli politics since then extends that assault and embeds degenerative trends at the heart of the state. Fears of armed settler secession in the West Bank or civil war in Israel seem exaggerated, for now at least. However, as a growing number of Israeli commentators argue, the bullying tactics of the far-right are accelerating lawlessness, further hollowing out democracy and radically transforming the very meaning of the rule of law, and encouraging different groups, including security forces, to claim the right to engage in violence.
Israel’s new political settlement is still taking shape and may never stabilize under the ascendant new religious ethnonationalist leadership. Similarly, the anguish over the fate of Israeli hostages in Gaza and wartime unity will eventually give way as other political concerns reassert themselves. But the roots of disarray in the so-called secular liberal camp that dominated post-1948 Israel are deeper: beside long-term socioeconomic and demographic trends, these include acceptance of the core of Netanyahu’s strategy of treating the conflict with the Palestinians as a residual problem that can be managed indefinitely. There is no opposition worthy of the name within the secular liberal camp; its disintegration is definitive.
The “hot” phases of the wars in which Israel is currently engaged will wind down eventually. The state will continue to function, but the longstanding political settlement underpinning the country is all but gone. Israel is in a far better position than the Arab countries in being able to generate state power and retain its geopolitical position, but it is beginning to resemble them in having undergone an internal metamorphosis from which a return is unlikely.
