In the one year separating the attacks by Hamas inside Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the killing of the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut on Sept. 27, 2024, Israel has acted audaciously in pursuit of what its decision-makers—led by the inveterate political survivor Benjamin Netanyahu—define as its core interests. 

In its actions over the past year, the Jewish state has acted as any post-1914 nation-state is likely to act: with little moral restraint, with scant regard for the strictures of international law, and with the treatment of its allies as instruments in a strategic design based on national interest.

Israel has no real “allies.” The only one that comes close—but what an ally!—is the United States. The relationship between the two countries is anomalous and historically unprecedented. The weaker Israel, with some 3 percent of its protector’s population and an equivalent amount of the U.S.’s annually produced wealth, has endeavored—with stunning success—to call the shots over the past six decades. 

The result is an unhealthy liaison. The demystification of its foundations is long overdue. Policymakers in Washington should accept that Israel can look after itself and that it has often acted accordingly, with scant regard for the signals and outright pleas from Washington. Furthermore, Washington should recognize that Israel has interests potentially or actually different from those of the United States. Such an honest reckoning would help both parties define their interests and long-term strategies in an uncertain world. It would help America become more akin to a normal nation-state.

The ability of Israel to look after itself is beyond doubt. In the Arab world, it has no serious enemies, occasional rhetorical bombast notwithstanding. Iran, an ancient non-Arab nation practicing Shi’ite Islam, is the only overtly hostile state actor. Until recently, Iran has been able to use its local proxies—Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and, to some extent, Hamas in Gaza—to hassle Israel while avoiding direct confrontation. None of these forces is viable, however, without coordinated pressure that would force Israel to fight on several fronts at once. 

Israel duly decided to up the ante and defeat its enemies in detail: not containing, but reducing—even annihilating—all of them one by one, while preventing Iran from coming to their aid. Netanyahu’s decision to shift the focus of Israeli pressure from Gaza, with its badly mauled but as yet undefeated Hamas, to Lebanon and the more formidable Hezbollah was a bold and stunningly successful ploy. It has reduced the Shi’ite militia in Lebanon from the most formidable nongovernmental military force in the world to a shadow of its former self. At home, it has restored Netanyahu’s credibility, which was badly shaken after Oct. 7 of last year.

Tehran is effectively cornered. It is trying to present Iran as a regional power seeking to restore balance, but its largely symbolic missile retaliation is a sign of weakness rather than strength. It is reduced to face-saving gestures, while Israel is ready to embark upon an open-ended escalation. Iran is aware of the collapse in the military capabilities of the anti-Israel coalition it has nurtured for decades, and it is loathe to oblige Netanyahu by entering a war it cannot win.

The attack by Hamas on Oct. 7 of last year was a game-changing event. Israel launched a massive operation in Gaza to eradicate Hamas, impervious to the rising foreign chorus condemning its methods. As it has turned out, Hezbollah was the main target all along. Unlike in the Lebanon War of 2006, this time Israel was fully prepared, deploying a disruptive tactic of exploding pagers and walkie-talkies. The Palestinian issue, once again, has become a distinctly secondary matter of concern.

Israel has broken the Hezbollah chain of command from top to bottom, hampering its ability to stage complex operations of any kind. The successful attack on Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on Sept. 27, coupled with the assassination of the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Teheran two months earlier, has demonstrated the extent of Israeli penetration into both Hezbollah and the Iranian state apparatus. The effect is multiplied by the ongoing paranoia that now plagues the ranks of both. The regime in Teheran does not know the extent of Mossad’s penetration into its own ranks, and it has reason to fear a new blow from within at any time.

More importantly, the new Israeli strategy goes beyond the simple quest for security, which was its guiding principle until Oct. 7. The current government has never wanted a two-state solution and now sees the formula for making it permanently defunct. The powers-that-be in Jerusalem want to remove the Palestinians from the equation. They’ll disappear into exile or become generic Arabs like the others, abandoning all national pretensions.

The Oslo Accords of 1993 had established the Palestinians as a nation, thus implicitly separating them from the rest of the Arab world. They have now lost on both counts: the two-state formula is unattainable for decades to come, and there is no support for the “Palestinian cause” in any Arab country of consequence. The Gulf monarchies, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Egypt, have quietly continued their policy of rapprochement with Israel. They all indirectly blame Hamas for having sought the crisis, and all of them are happy to see Iran expelled from the Middle East. Turkish President Erdoğan’s indignant speeches have not interrupted Turkey’s arms sales to Israel.

Netanyahu’s foes inside Israel will make no difference to the new regional reality. They hate “Bibi” and want to see him in jail for discrete domestic reasons, but they quietly agree with him on the Palestinian issue. For the Israeli protesters who criticize him for not doing enough to save the lives of the hostages, the deaths of five hundred Palestinian civilians for one saved hostage is not a problem. On the whole, the Israeli “left” does not have a strategic alternative to the course pursued by Netanyahu’s coalition. It has not stopped the settlers in the West Bank. It cannot and will not do anything to stop the pushing of Palestinians into disjointed enclaves and prompting them to emigrate. The Israeli right admits that much explicitly; the left remains silent and lets it happen. This tacit arrangement has enabled Israel, over the past eight decades, to steadily expand its sovereign territory and the areas it occupies or controls. 

There will be no coalition against Israel for decades to come, neither pan-Arab nor that of the “global South.” In the “collective West,” the impact of the conflict will be limited to what it is today: a touchy-feely protest confined to campuses and irrelevant to Israel’s strategic calculus. The intifada of the French suburbs is an irrelevant mirage: it is an ongoing cultural and security headache, but it means nothing in the context of Middle Eastern rights and wrongs.

Israel is safe on its own. As we enter the second quarter of this century, it is therefore in the American interest to articulate and legitimize a new, realist model of America’s relationship with the Jewish state. Such a reassessment should recognize that while Israel is a small foreign country, it is also a regional power of the first order, armed by nuclear weapons to boot, not thanks to the United States but to its own devices. It is America’s friend, just as Great Britain, Japan, and Brazil are our friends, but are by no means essential to the survival and well-being of the United States; nor is the United States essential to Israel’s survival. It is not of existential import to America, now or ever, whose flag flies over the Temple Mount; it is just as irrelevant as which flag flies over Taipei or Kiev. 

It is in the American interest that a solid, enduring peace comes to Israel-Palestine and the wider region. But if it is not attainable, as unfortunately seems to be the case, it is not the end of the world. By any realist reckoning, the destiny of the Middle East is irrelevant to the grand strategy of the United States. America can and should adopt a new approach to the region, aware that whatever happens there does not matter a great deal to its security and well-being. That is a plain fact, which both Arabs and Israelis have been trying to obscure for decades.

If the emerging condition of the Israeli-dominated frozen instability endures—as seems likely for years to come—it will be necessary for the U.S. to adopt the position of a benevolent, neutral outside facilitator. America should consider reentering the Middle Eastern diplomatic fray only if and when it is asked to do so by all interested parties. That role must be based on meticulously impartial treatment of the contending sides’ demands and expectations. The assumption by all outside parties—Israelis, Arabs, Europeans, et al.—that America is a priori pro-Israeli should be proven wrong by actions, not words.

Treating the modern state of Israel simply as a friend rather than a metaphysical entity would entail discarding the rhetoric of passionate attachment. Such rhetoric is common, absurdly enough, to both the neoconservative cynics and the excitable Protestant end-timers. In the long term, consigning such passionate attachment to the rubbish heap of history would be beneficial to the American interest and would also make Israel more secure. America is not a reliable ally to anyone, as the Shah of Iran, Diệm of Vietnam, Noriega of Panama, and many others would testify, were they still living. Since Oct. 7, 2023, the Jewish state has proven that it can stand alone, in perfect disregard of Washington. It has done so in commendable defense of what its leaders see as that state’s existential interests. 

Israel came of age in 1967, the year of the Six-Day War and the hushed-up unpleasantness on the USS Liberty. It is time, almost six decades later, to let Israel diversify its foreign policy options as it deems fit. It is time, above all, for the United States to limit Israel’s excessive reliance on its open-ended ability to influence America’s strategic calculus in the Middle East. That calculus has been dominated for too long by the neoconservative cabal of iffy characters with uncertain core loyalties and catastrophic policy recommendations—Iraq and Afghanistan included. They must not be allowed to drag America into another quagmire in Iran, which is yet another unwinnable Middle Eastern war devoid of strategic sense for the United States.

Demystifying the relationship between America and Israel, redefining it in terms of mutual interest between two friendly, far-away countries, will help the Jewish state mature and develop a fully independent long-term strategy for survival and power projection in an altogether hostile environment. 

Far more important, it would help America itself become a “normal” nation-state, in the time of its all-pervasive morbidity and decrepitude.  ◆