In launching war against Iran, Israel has made unmistakably clear that it is operating according to a strategic logic very different from the one that has long guided its statecraft. The United States may be participating in the war, but American officials have offered a baffling series of explanations of their aims and have been consistent only in denying that they have entered a “forever war.” Israel’s leaders have been far less equivocal. They seem to have concluded that they are already in a forever war—and that the task is not to end it, but to manage it on tolerable terms.

Indeed, since October 7, 2023, Israeli leaders have embraced a strategic logic that departs sharply from the way deterrence, domination, and diplomacy have long blended in Israeli statecraft. What some took to be an immediate and traumatized response to October 7 was actually more durable. Deterrence and diplomacy have been eclipsed by something harsher: a preference for domination, degradation, and the prevention of the adversaries’ recovery. That shift is now driving a broad set of military actions that are reshaping the region. 

For its first three decades, Israel had only armistice agreements with neighboring states. The goal of full peaceful relations with those states was prominent, but it was pursued not through concessions but by projecting power that would make military engagement unattractive (and on two prominent occasions not merely projecting military capabilities, but using them decisively to seize territory). In 1979 and 1994, that approach finally produced peace treaties and diplomatic relations, but then only with Egypt and Jordan, and in the former case requiring the return of the Sinai Peninsula.

From the 1960s onward, the more vexatious challenge came from the Palestinian national movement—not in an existential sense, but in its ability to mobilize support in the Arab world, command global attention, and endanger Israeli lives through attacks on civilian targets. Here too, deterrence and diplomacy had their place—deterrence, through the threat that attacks launched from Arab soil would bring harsh and disproportionate Israeli responses; diplomacy, through American and to a lesser extent European support for measures that gradually hardened into a broad campaign against movements designated as terrorist.

That deterrence logic—occasionally  ferociously enforced—worked against some states, especially Egypt and Syria, whose regimes kept their borders largely quiet and barred Palestinians from pursuing what Palestinian movements themselves termed their “revolution” from Egyptian and Syrian territory. In Jordan, it nearly backfired before succeeding, helping produce a brief civil war in which the Jordanian army expelled the Palestinian movements. In Lebanon, by contrast, it collided with a fragile political order and profound internal tensions, helping to turn the country into a prolonged arena of civil war and state decay.

Israel’s response to that failure took a variety of forms, often involving military action, but much of it revolved around finding—or creating—an entity that could be deterred. Most ambitious, perhaps, was then defense minister Ariel Sharon’s assumption in 1982 that invading Lebanon, driving the Palestinian leadership back to Jordan, and allowing Jordan to turn into a Palestinian state would finally produce a Palestinian address to deter—and whose leaders could be kept out of Palestine.

The effort left tens of thousands dead without vindicating Sharon’s prediction that “If we stick to our goals, this might be the last war we shall fight in the area.” Indeed, the aftermath was problematic if not existentially threatening. Israel’s occupation of much of southern Lebanon continued until May 2000; the Palestinian leadership was expelled, but to Tunis rather than Jordan; Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza launched an uprising in December 1987; and Hezbollah eventually emerged as a major challenger across large parts of Lebanon. 

But Oslo restored a bit of the logic, though in more elaborate form. It was not simply a peace process; it was also an effort to create a Palestinian Authority that would govern Palestinians, coordinate security with Israel, and convert a dispersed national movement into an address that could be pressured, bargained with, and contained. Israel’s military campaign of April 1996 in Lebanon likewise sought to use mass displacement and international mediation to induce restraint—not only from Hezbollah, but from the Lebanese state and external actors, notably Syria, in the expectation that it would engineer a more stable outcome through diplomacy.

Even Hamas, after its 2007 takeover of Gaza, was treated for long stretches of time less as a partner for peace than as an address for diplomacy and deterrence: periodic wars, Egyptian-mediated truces, and repeated ceasefires produced a grim modus vivendi.

October 7 shattered confidence in that model. Israel’s response in Gaza did not merely seek to restore deterrence; it quickly aimed for something far more drastic: to ensure that the adversary could not reemerge as a governing or military force. Regional diplomacy for now has no place; peace treaties are to be maintained, but forging new ones is a secondary goal to be resumed on a sunnier day. Only the relationship with the United States needs to be managed.

The same logic now appears in areas other than Gaza. In Syria, Israel has moved beyond keeping the border quiet: it has entered the zone demilitarized in 1974, struck military assets, and intervened in Syria’s internal sectarian politics. The issue is no longer simply deterring a Syrian threat. The operative impulse seems to be to ensure that no Syrian order Israel finds threatening can coherently reemerge to Israel’s northeast.

In Iran and Lebanon as well, the operative goal seems less to shape the behavior of the adversary than to degrade the adversary’s capacity, fragment hostile arenas, and prevent recovery. The mass displacement seen in Lebanon in 1996 is now being replicated on a far more destructive scale—this time with the Lebanese state and diplomacy among the casualties rather than representing part of any solution.

Many analyses of Israeli actions since then focus on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu personally, and both his electoral logic and his longstanding fixation on Iran may indeed matter greatly. But Netanyahu himself was deeply implicated in the older approach, most notably in the long effort to contain rather than destroy Hamas. The abrupt shift is one of policy as much as of personality.

The strategy may yield real successes. Israel has demonstrated extraordinary military reach, impressive intelligence, breathtaking freedom of action, and an ability to impose severe costs on its enemies. But the strategy points toward a region in which war has no obvious terminus, because war is no longer being used to produce a stable political arrangement. It is becoming, instead, the arrangement itself.