Israel's military aggression across the region: a sign of strength or weakness?

While two-pronged ceasefires have been reached in Gaza and Lebanon, Israel continues to build up its military presence on all fronts. Earlier this week, Israeli warplanes carried out airstrikes around the southern Syrian towns of Izraa and Ain al-Bayda, while Israeli ground forces have pushed deeper into Syrian territory, reaching the administrative borders of the Daraa and Quneitra provinces.

A week ago, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a speech at the graduation ceremony of Israeli officers, announced that Israel would not abandon the territories it captured in Syria following the fall of the Assad regime last December. Netanyahu also stressed that Israel would not deploy the new Syrian army south of Damascus.

In Lebanon, Israel said it would retain control of five positions on the country's southern border. During the funerals of Hezbollah leaders Hassan Nasrallah and Hashim Safieddine, Israeli fighter jets flew low over the ceremony in Beirut in a show of force, while simultaneously bombing several locations in the Bekaa Valley and the south.

Israel has expanded its "Iron Wall" offensive north of the West Bank, reaching new Palestinian refugee camps and towns. Since the offensive began last month, 40,000 people in the northern West Bank have been displaced from their homes. Israeli Defense Minister Yisrael Katz said the displaced Palestinians would not be allowed to return to their homes for at least a year, adding that no time limit had been set for the offensive.

All this is happening at a time when Israel is systematically violating the fragile first phase of its ceasefire agreement with Hamas. At the same time, Israel is delaying the transition to a second phase of the ceasefire, which would include negotiations to end the war, and Israel's hardline Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has continued to threaten an even more brutal assault on Gaza in recent days.

In other words, Israel is showing diplomatic stubbornness and projecting military power on all fronts. It is doing this while weakening its rival Hezbollah to the north and feeling free to do whatever it wants in the West Bank, powerful and unhindered.

However, the truth is that Israel has emerged from a year and a half of an unprecedented war, using unprecedented violence, conducting an unprecedented military mobilization, and prolonging it for 15 months - the longest war in its history. Despite all this, it has not achieved its declared goal of destroying Hamas. Now, having failed to return most of the Israeli prisoners by force, it is negotiating with the Palestinian movement. But it is seeking to extend the first phase of the ceasefire in order to release more prisoners without granting new concessions to Hamas.

Moreover, in the last three months of the war before the ceasefire, Israel failed to achieve its secret goal of displacing the population of northern Gaza; it was forced to accept the return of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to the north in exchange for a prisoner exchange. Although it was able to weaken Hezbollah, it was unable to destroy it or destroy its ability to rebuild its forces - nor was it able to neutralize Ansar Allah (commonly known as the Houthis) in Yemen. They only stopped their attacks on Israel when the ceasefire was declared, and they are threatening to resume hostilities if Israel returns to the war.

More importantly, an internal accountability process for the October 7 security blunder has not yet begun, even though the Israeli military has investigated the errors. Netanyahu is struggling to control the investigation into these errors, which clearly shows his fear of being held personally accountable.

In addition to Netanyahu, his government is also in a dilemma. It is caught between trying to appease peace-loving sections of Israeli society, including the military leadership, on the one hand, and extremist allies who are threatening to leave the government and overthrow it if the war is not continued, on the other.

Given these conflicting facts, it is difficult to determine whether Israel's current escalation of military action is a show of force, overconfidence, or an attempt to prolong the war to avoid the consequences of failure. Israel is either acting with unprecedented strength or trying to hide its unprecedented weakness.

Green light with no results

A year after the events of October 7, 2023, Amos Hochstein, the Biden administration's Middle East envoy who played a key role in brokering a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, denied that the United States authorized Israel to attack Lebanon, adding that it was "irresponsible" to spread such reports. However, Israel has been fighting a year of wars with US weapons against Gaza and Lebanon. According to the Brown University Costs of War Project, the United States has provided at least $17.9 billion in military aid to Israel since October 7. This is the largest amount of aid in a single year since the United States began providing military aid to Israel.

US support for Israel's war was not limited to military aid. From day one, Washington accepted Israel's interpretation of the events of October 7 and the war itself. It vetoed three resolutions in the UN Security Council calling for a ceasefire, against the wishes of a majority of member states.

However, behind this seemingly unlimited support was a clear goal: to create a new political environment for normalizing relations between Israel and Arab states in the region by eliminating Hamas and the Palestinian armed resistance in Gaza. This would allow for new business deals in Gaza (including the recently discovered natural gas fields) to be implemented in a manner that was independent of the Palestinian issue.

But Israel has failed to do so. The Palestinian issue has once again taken center stage, and it can no longer be ignored internationally. Saudi Arabia, which was expected to normalize relations with Israel by October 7, is now making the establishment of diplomatic relations with Israel conditional on the resumption of the political process for the creation of a Palestinian state.

Israel itself is under investigation for genocide, and its prime minister and former defense minister are under international arrest warrants. This marks a major and fundamental shift in international relations on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. For the first time in history, the international system is taking steps to hold Israel accountable.

Last July, the International Court of Justice declared Israel's occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights illegal, ending decades of debate over the legal basis of the occupation.

The power that confronts reality

While the problem is not big enough to cause fundamental change, it is beginning to manifest itself in various ways. One of them is that the Trump administration has effectively forced the Netanyahu government to cease fire, especially when it comes to supporting Israel.

The Middle East agenda for the US and Trump extends beyond Gaza, even beyond Israel and its wars. For Trump, business comes first, and as the experience of his first presidency has shown, business in the region thrives not through war, but through normalization and stability. Israel was given 15 months to set the stage for Trump's vision of a Middle East without Palestine, but it has failed to do so. The ceasefire negotiations are currently being led by Steve Witkow, Trump's envoy to the region. He is limiting Netanyahu's absolute control over the negotiations, amid Israel's attempts to change the terms and evade the commitments it signed.

However, the US and the Trump administration have not abandoned the traditional US position of full support for Israel. On the contrary, they have completely abandoned the traditional pretense of prioritizing Israel's "security" interests and working towards a two-state solution with the Palestinians. In all his statements, Trump has emphasized his support for Israel's decisions, including the resumption of the war on Gaza, and has even endorsed Israel's intention to ethnically cleanse Gaza, adding his own Trumpian style to this by promising to create a "Middle East Riviera."

Despite all this, Trump has made it clear that he has no interest in escalating the war, especially against Iran. Aside from Trump's bombastic statements on Gaza, his Middle East right-hand man, Steve Witkoff, is focused solely on preserving the ceasefire agreement and overcoming the obstacles Netanyahu is putting in his way.

Trump also understands that not everyone will be receptive to US pressure. The collective rejection of Trump’s Gaza withdrawal plan by Arab, European and other governments has shown that some fixed values cannot be easily changed. Donald Trump himself has abandoned the Gaza plan, saying last week that he was “shocked” by the region’s rejection of it, adding that he “will not force it.” The limits of what a US-Israeli alliance based on force can achieve are beginning to be seen.