Israel’s war obsession and the urgency of Palestinian leverage

by Dr Ramzy Baroud

A woman cries in the rubble of the building after heavy machines belonging to the Israeli army demolished a two-story Palestinian building under the pretext that it was constructed without a permit in the Hebron, West Bank, Palestine on April 20, 2026, [Wisam Hashlamoun – Anadolu Agency]

It is tempting to argue that Israel’s new military doctrine is predicated on perpetual war—but the reality is more complex.

Not that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would object to such an arrangement. On the contrary, his relentless drive for military escalation suggests precisely that. After all, his openly declared quest for a “greater Israel” would require exactly this kind of permanent militarism—endless expansion and sustained regional destruction.

However, Israel cannot sustain an open-ended fight on multiple fronts indefinitely.

Israeli officials boast about fighting on “seven fronts,” but many of these are, in military terms, largely imaginary rather than sustained battlefields.

The real wars, however, are entirely of Israel’s making: from the genocide in Gaza to its unprovoked regional wars.

Still, that fact should not blind us to another reality: in the lead-up to the war on Iran, and in the escalation against Lebanon, there was near-total consensus among Jewish Israelis. An Israel Democracy Institute survey conducted on March 2–3 found that 93% of Jewish Israelis supported the joint US-Israeli attack on Iran. Support cut across all political camps.

The same enthusiasm for war accompanied the Gaza genocide and the various wars and escalations in Lebanon.

Even Yair Lapid—so often and so falsely marketed abroad as a “dove”—fully backed these wars, admitting after the Iran ceasefire that Israel had entered them with “rare consensus” and that he supported them “from the very first moment.”

His repeated criticisms, like those of other Israeli politicians, are not of the war but of Netanyahu’s failure to deliver a strategic outcome.

And this is the crucial distinction. Israelis mostly support the wars, but many no longer trust Netanyahu to translate destruction into strategic victory. By mid-April, 92% of Jewish Israelis gave the army high marks for its management of the Iran war, but only 38% gave high ratings to the government.

In other words, the public still believes in war but increasingly doubts the leadership waging it.

That distinction may not matter much to us, since the outcome remains mass death, devastation, and colonial violence. But in Israel’s own military and strategic calculations, it matters enormously. Its wars have historically followed a familiar model: crush resistance, impose military and political domination, and translate battlefield violence into colonial expansion.

Netanyahu delivered none of that.

This is why the uproar in Israel over the April 16 Lebanon ceasefire has been so fierce, and why the fears surrounding a possible stalemate with Iran run even deeper.

The Lebanon ceasefire clearly did not secure one of Israel’s central declared aims: the disarmament of Hezbollah. Israel kept troops in southern Lebanon, but the agreement halted offensive operations and fell far short of the promised “total victory.”

For many in Israel, any outcome that falls short of total victory is immediately read as defeat. One northern Israeli regional leader, Eyal Shtern, captured that mood with brutal clarity when he reacted to the Lebanon ceasefire by asking how Israel had gone “from absolute victory to total surrender,” in remarks reported by CNN.

That is the real crisis now confronting Israel: not that it has discovered the limits of permanent war, but that it has once again discovered that exterminatory violence does not automatically produce political victory.

While Iran possesses political leverage that could allow for a long-term, or even permanent, truce, Lebanon and Syria remain in a far more vulnerable position. However, no one is in a more precarious condition than the Palestinians, particularly those in Gaza.

Unlike others who retain some political margin and space to maneuver, Palestinians live under Israeli occupation, apartheid, and siege. Gaza, in particular, has been reduced to a sealed enclave of devastation.

Its hermetic siege has produced one of the most horrific humanitarian catastrophes in modern history: an entire population surviving on polluted water, with infrastructure destroyed, food critically scarce, and thousands still buried beneath the rubble.

Aside from their legendary steadfastness—sumud—Palestinians operate under severe constraints in their ability to impose conditions on Israel, particularly as it continues to receive unconditional support from the United States and its Western allies. Yet their resilience, collective action, and enduring presence remain powerful forms of leverage that cannot be easily contained.

Netanyahu—and those who will come after him—will always find in Palestine a space in which war can be waged continuously and at relatively low cost to Israel itself.

Unlike other battlefields, where war becomes politically, militarily, and economically unsustainable, Israel has turned its occupation of Palestine into a permanent battlefield.

Even if Netanyahu, now politically diminished and aging, exits the political scene, the underlying paradigm will remain intact. Future Israeli leaders will continue to wage war on Palestine, not despite its costs, but because of its perceived benefits: it is financially subsidized, colonially advantageous, and politically sustainable within Israel’s current structure.

To break this paradigm, Palestinians must generate leverage—real leverage. This cannot come from futile negotiations or appeals to long-ignored international law. It can only emerge from sustained collective resistance to colonialism, reinforced by meaningful support from Arab and Muslim states and genuine international allies, and amplified by global solidarity capable of exerting real pressure on Israel and, crucially, on its principal benefactors.

For now, Netanyahu continues his wars because he has no answer to his own strategic failures. Here, escalation is not a strength; it is the last refuge of a leadership that cannot deliver victory.

This, however, also reveals something else: Israel is entering a moment of unprecedented vulnerability.

That vulnerability must be exposed—clearly, consistently, and urgently—by all those who seek an end to these senseless wars, an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and a path toward justice that has been denied for far too long.

The normalisation of brutality: When will we reclaim our humanity?

by Adnan Hmidan

Displaced Palestinians try to carry on their daily lives under harsh conditions in Khan Younis, Palestine on April 02, 2026. [Abed Rahim Khatib – Anadolu Agency]

What we are witnessing today across occupied Palestine is not a glitch in the system of international order, nor is it a sudden detour from the established behaviour of the Israeli occupation. The greatest mistake observers can make is to treat the current escalation of atrocities as a momentary lapse in self-restraint or a chaotic exception that can be managed through diplomatic statements of concern.

In reality, what is unfolding before our eyes is the natural state of a colonial project. When we understand the structural foundations of the occupation, we realise that brutality is not a political choice, rather a functional necessity for its survival.

The infrastructure of cruelty

In the logic of the occupier, it is entirely normal for a Palestinian prisoner and hostage to be tortured, humiliated, and stripped of his or her basic humanity. It is entirely normal for the halls of the Knesset to echo with calls for the summary execution of detainees, turning state institutions into platforms for legislated revenge. This is not a breakdown of democracy; it is the unfiltered expression of a regime that views the indigenous population as a security threat to be eliminated rather than a people with rights.

In occupied Jerusalem, the normal state of affairs is the systematic barring of worshippers from Al-Aqsa Mosque, while the sanctuary is open for radical settlers to perform provocative rituals under military protection. This is a calculated strategy of habituation. The goal is to repeat the violation so frequently that it loses its shock value, transforming the desecration of one of Islam’s holiest sites into a mere routine in the daily news cycle.

Gaza and the West Bank: A laboratory of erasure

The genocide unfolding in Gaza is the ultimate manifestation of this normality. The flattening of entire residential blocks, the systematic starvation of two million people, and the erasure of entire family lineages from the civil registry are carried out with a terrifying sense of entitlement.

This is facilitated by a global diplomatic umbrella that perversely redefines the victim as the aggressor and the executioner as the victim.

Simultaneously, the West Bank undergoes a silent genocide. Through a suffocating network of checkpoints, nightly raids that shatter the peace of families, and the relentless expansion of illegal settlements that devour the land like a cancer, the occupation seeks to make Palestinian life impossible. Such is the behaviour of a thief who can never be at peace nor can rest, as long as the rightful owner of the house remains present.

The true abnormality: Our adaptation

The real crisis, however, does not lie in the occupier’s violence, for that is its inherent nature. The crisis lies in the demand for the rest of us to become abnormal.

It is inherently abnormal to be asked to adapt to this reality. It is abnormal to be told to understand the security concerns of the oppressor while our children are being pulled from the rubble. It is abnormal for normalization to be marketed as a rational choice, or for coexistence with a system of apartheid to be framed as a civil virtue.

We must ask the hard questions: What kind of peace is built upon the ruins of demolished homes? What kind of realism demands that we accept the slow death of a nation as an unchangeable fact? The attempt to redefine the Palestinian struggle as a conflict that can be managed, rather than a crime that must be ended, is a profound moral distortion.

The trap of de-sensitisation

The most dangerous weapon in the occupation’s arsenal is not the missile or the tank; it is our own habituation. The occupation bets on time. It bets that the world will eventually grow tired of the images of bloodied children, that the social media posts will decrease, and that the outrage will be replaced by a weary silence.

When we stop being shocked by the sight of mass graves, and when we begin to view the ethnic cleansing of a people as an unfortunate geopolitical reality, we have lost our moral compass. To “get used to” oppression is to become a silent partner therewith. The natural state for any free human being is to remain in a state of constant, active rejection of injustice.

Redefining realism

For too long, we have been told that realism means accepting the crumbs of sovereignty under the shadow of a sniper’s tower. But true realism is to call things by their real names:

 * Settlement is not urban expansion; it is theft.

 * Resistance is not terrorism; it is a universal right and a sacred duty.

 * Neutrality in the face of genocide is not objectivity; it is complicity.

Our role as intellectuals, activists, and supporters of justice is to shatter this manufactured normalcy. We must remain abnormal in the eyes of a distorted international system. We must refuse to be courteous victims who accept their fate with quiet dignity.

Reclaiming the human spirit

The occupation is a historical anomaly, a remnant of a colonial era that the rest of the world has supposedly moved past. It survives by pretending to be a normal state. But a state that lives on the blood of the innocent and the theft of a land can never be normal; it is a moral deformity.

We will reclaim our normality only when we stop trying to fit into the world’s unjust expectations. We are normal when we refuse to forget. We are normal when we teach our children that the map of Palestine is indivisible. We are normal when our anger remains as fresh as it was on the first day of the Nakba.

The greatest danger is not that the oppressor practices his oppression; it is that we grow accustomed to it. Let us vow never to be normal in the face of the abnormal. Let us remain the voice that screams against the silence, until the natural state of Palestine; free and one, is finally restored.

Can the United States be trusted? History says no!

by Dr. George Katsiaficas

A United States flag waves in front of the United States Capitol building in Washington D.C., United States, on September 24, 2025. [Yasin Öztürk – Anadolu Agency]

No matter how much Teflon Trump seeks to let nothing stick, it is now quite clear that the United States has suffered an ignoble defeat in Iran. His promise of an “unconditional surrender” is more empty that his campaign promises “not to start a war” and to be a “peace president.” Thrashing around for a way to claim victory, Trump simply declares the US the winner. So desperate is he for global acquiescence to his mendacity, he has opened attacks on world leaders who do not support his madness (including some of his own MAGA faithful). After threatening to entirely decimate Iranian civilization, he has attacked Pope Leo as “a loser,” and cast himself as a reincarnation of Jesus. Is there no end to Delusional Donald’s dastardly deeds?

Worse still, his sycophantic underlings enable his lust for power and mimic his dictatorial style. After 21 hours of discussions with top Iranian officials in Pakistan, vice president JD Vance denounced Iran’s “failure” to agree with US demands.

Speaking as if he was striking a real estate deal, Vance insisted he had made his “best and final offer.” He did not go to Islamabad to negotiate; he went to impose terms of surrender. Genuine negotiations are out of the question for Trump and Vance. They seek an instant peace agreement on Israel’s terms. 

Iran has announced that the US side has not won its trust, and rightfully so. Twice during talks to negotiate peaceful settlements of differences, the US and Israel have launched surprise attacks between scheduled negotiation sessions, assassinated the country’s leadership and massively destroyed hospitals, schools and civilian apartment buildings. For good reasons, Iranians are rightfully wary of US dishonesty. In 2015, it took hundreds of hours during the Obama administration to hammer out the nuclear agreement between the United States and Iran (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action). During Trump’s first term, he unilaterally tore it up without consulting Congress and reimposed sanctions on Iran (which Iran now wants lifted). In 2023, president Biden agreed to release billions of Iranian dollars. The US continues to hold those assets.

The current crisis can be traced directly to Trump’s autocratic behavior.

Now, after a mere 21 hours of talks, without consulting anyone outside his tight circle of yes men, he has ordered the blockade of the Hormuz straight, normally considered an act of war.

The unrealistic, indeed immature, character of Vance’s posturing in Islamabad is illuminated by comparison with US negotiator Henry Kissinger and Vietnamese Le Duc Tho, who took four years and eight months to forge the Paris Peace Accord of 1973. After less than one day, Vance left Pakistan and warned Iran not to “play us,” as if the devastation inflicted by the US war of choice was a video game. 

Sadly, the history of nations that defeated the US provides Iran’s current misgivings with even more reasons not to trust anything Washington might promise. Soon after signing peace agreements with both North Korea and Vietnam, the United States of America immediately violated them. In short, the US cannot be considered trustworthy, no matter whom is president. Whether Democrat or Republican, presidents come and go, but US dishonesty and deception remain steady. 

One of the Iranian side’s chief demands today is that the United States pay reparations for its destruction of the country. Relevant to this issue is a letter sent on February 1, 1973 from president Richard Nixon to Vietnamese premier Pham Van Dong, in which Nixon stated that the US would fulfill its signed agreement (on January 27, 1973) for American “participation in the postwar reconstruction of North Vietnam.” Reparations, Nixon estimated, “…will fall in the range of $3.25 billion of grant aid over five years.” Vietnamese officials trusted the word given by Nixon and actually budgeted those billions of dollars into their post-war planning. Not a cent was ever paid to a country that was ravaged by Agent Orange, B-52’s, and the depredations of half a million American troops. It should also be remembered that the Geneva agreement of 1954 promised Vietnam direct presidential elections within two years. As that deadline approached, US president Eisenhower publicly acknowledged that Ho Chi Minh would have been likely to win 80% or more of the vote. The United States never allowed the country to have free elections.

Of the more than 500 treaties that the United States government signed with Native American nations, it is difficult to find any that have been honored. Historians have named this abysmal record the “Trail of Broken Treaties.”

One evening in 2003, when I mentioned this history in Pyongyang over drinks with North Koreans, they gasped in shock. “You mean the United States has no honor?” Sadly, I nodded my head, as I watched their hopes vanish for a peace treaty to end the Korean War, not simply an armistice as had been signed exactly 50 years earlier. I should add here that the US continues to violate Article 15 of the Armistice Agreement, which explicitly states that both sides shall “not engage in blockade of any kind of Korea.” The US maintains an ongoing blockade of North Korea that heavily impacts its financial sector by obstructing international credit and new investments as well as trade and travel. Similar to Trump’s new blockade of Iran, the US severely sanctions transportation companies, ships and individuals helping North Korea to export coal and minerals.

The United States violates international law simply by turning its back on its international obligations and treaties or by never bringing them to a vote in the Senate. One prominent example is how it ignores findings of the International Court of Justice, from which the United States exempts itself (and Israel). Another is simply withdrawing from the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, something our grandchildren may sadly consider the greatest was crime of all. For obvious reasons, the US has never signed onto the International Criminal Court.

Whether or not sanity will now prevail may be an open question. Not only do Diabolical Donald and Satanyahu cast a dark shadow over humanity, but the historical track record of the United States indicates rough times ahead. It seems far more likely today that the United States and Israel will again murder Iranians and destroy the country than that those monsters will agree to a peace deal and end a conflict that Iran never wanted. 

In Israel’s colonial ethnic cleansing, the world fails stand for decolonisation

by Ramona Wadi

Demonstrators gather outside the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) office to protest an Israeli law proposing the death penalty for Palestinian prisoners in Hebron, West Bank, Palestine on April 2, 2026. [Wisam Hashlamoun – Anadolu Agency )

From genocide in Gaza to the death penalty in the occupied West Bank, Israel seeks the annihilation of Palestinian resistance and, on a slower pace, further ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.

The latest statistics, which have been considered conservative estimates but continue to be shared as the officially recognised kill toll by the Palestinian health ministry, show that Israel killed 72,312 people and injured 172,134. By the end of 2025, Israel had killed 21,283 Palestinian children.

On Monday, the Israeli Knesset approved a bill that imposes the death penalty upon Palestinians convicted of killing Israelis. Jewish Israelis who kill Palestinians, however, will not share the same fate. In colonial logic, twisted as it is, the differentiation makes sense, for how would Israel have even been created had Zionism not allowed and planned for the killing of Palestinians? What Zionism achieved through its paramilitary terror, Israel now implements in legislation. 

Many confessions are obtained under torture. Israel has exposed its torture to the world through footage from Gaza. There is no longer any pretence of not knowing. In both Gaza and the occupied West Bank, Israel is contributing the same tactics to endorse killing Palestinians.

The only difference is the final blow – bombs for Gaza and execution by hanging in the occupied West Bank. Both constitute a spectacle for diplomacy to play its rhetorical games. Both increase a kill toll the world closed its eyes to since the 1948 Nakba. 

Israeli rights group B’Tselem issued a statement, noting, “The death penalty law will institutionalise a state mechanism for executing Palestinians. The law is worded to apply to Palestinians only, and is set to normalise their execution as a common punitive tool through several measures.” 

Israeli leaders incited for genocide through their rhetoric. Several Israeli lawmakers wore noose-shaped pins to express their support of executing Palestinians by hanging. In both cases, the international response was predictably weak – preaching to international law what international law states. 

Israel knows it is violating international law. World leaders know and allow Israel impunity for these violations. In the space between condemnations and inaction, the international community created normalisation for Israel and its actions. It normalised genocide for Israel; execution by hanging will strike less of an impact within the international community.

Ultimately, colonialism, genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and the apartheid system that allows for this form of execution legislation are all part of the fabric that the international community endorses.  

The international community cannot choose to legitimise, protect and support Israel without extending the same to Israel’s actions. No matter how much colonialism is obliterated from the equation, the fact remains that the international community is supporting the entire structure of Israel’s colonial framework, which includes genocide and executions, among the rest of its violations. With Israel, world leaders cannot operate in fragments. Supporting Israel and not its genocide makes no sense – Israel was founded upon ethnic cleansing in 1948. That is why the international community remains silent except for its perfunctory statements. Israeli colonialism makes it clear that there is separation from the colonial enterprise and its actions, and no world leader is ready to take the first step in decolonisation by accepting nothing of Israel and its actions.

Lebanon after the ceasefire – Power recalibrated, law further eroded

by Ranjan Solomon

A view of heavy traffic as displaced people return to their homes following the implementation of a 10-day temporary ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon, announced by U.S. President Donald Trump, in the southern city of Sidon, Lebanon on April 17, 2026. [Houssam Shbaro – Anadolu Agency]

“Pity the nation that is divided into fragments, each fragment deeming itself a nation.”

The ceasefire in Lebanon is not a diplomatic success. It is a political admission. What has unfolded in recent months has forced a reckoning long deferred: the limits of American power, the vulnerability of Israeli military doctrine, and the emergence of a new regional balance in which resistance—long dismissed as marginal—has asserted itself with unexpected force.

For decades, the United States positioned itself as the ultimate guarantor of order in West Asia. Its alliances, particularly with Israel and the Gulf states, rested on a simple premise: that American power could deter escalation, absorb shocks, and ultimately dictate outcomes. That premise now stands shaken.

The ceasefire is not the restoration of order. It is the recognition that the old order no longer holds.

A war that altered perception

Wars are not only fought on battlefields; they are fought in perception. And in this war, perception has shifted in ways that cannot easily be reversed.

Israel’s military campaign, while devastating in scale, did not secure uncontested dominance. Instead, it encountered a resistance framework – anchored in Hezbollah and backed by Iran—that proved capable not only of survival, but of retaliation. The imagery emerging from within Israel itself—disruption, damage, and civilian vulnerability in cities like Tel Aviv and Haifa—has punctured the long-cultivated image of invulnerability.

This matters because power, in international politics, is as much about perception as it is about capability. Once the perception cracks, the architecture built upon it begins to strain.

The United States: From arbiter to afterthought

The role of the United States in this conflict marks a profound shift. Rather than shaping events, it has been compelled to respond to them.

Calls within American policy circles – and even sections of mainstream discourse – for de-escalation at terms previously unthinkable reflect a deeper unease. The language of “restraint,” once directed outward, has begun to turn inward. The expectation that Washington could unilaterally manage escalation has given way to a more constrained reality: it can influence, but it cannot dictate.

In progressive political thought, and increasingly within broader analytical spaces, this moment is being read as a retreat – not necessarily of raw power, but of political authority. The ability to enforce outcomes, to guarantee security to allies, and to operate without credible challenge has been visibly eroded.

For the Gulf states, this carries significant implications. Their strategic alignment with the United States has long been underwritten by assurances of protection—of territory, infrastructure, and regime stability. The perception that these guarantees may no longer be absolute opens the door to recalibration. The geopolitical alignments of the region are not fixed; they are responsive to shifts in credibility.

And credibility, once lost, is difficult to restore.

Iran and the Reconfiguration of Power

Iran’s role in this transformation is central. Through its network of alliances, particularly with Hezbollah, it has demonstrated that power in the region is no longer monopolised.

This is not a simple story of dominance replacing dominance. It is more complex—and more consequential. Iran has shown that it can shape outcomes indirectly yet decisively, that it can impose costs without direct confrontation, and that it can sustain a form of strategic pressure that alters the calculations of its adversaries.

In doing so, it has moved from the margins of regional power to its centre—not uncontested, but undeniable.

Ceasefire as compulsion

The ceasefire must be read in this context. It is not a voluntary step toward peace, but a compelled pause.

The intensity of the conflict, the inability to secure decisive outcomes, and the risks of broader regional escalation created conditions in which continuation became untenable. The ceasefire, therefore, reflects not resolution, but limitation.

This is what distinguishes the present moment from previous cycles of conflict. Ceasefires in the past often followed clear demonstrations of dominance. This ceasefire follows a confrontation in which dominance itself has been questioned.

Lebanon: The cost of being the battleground

Amid these shifts, Lebanon remains the site of immense suffering.

Entire regions in the south have been devastated. Civilian infrastructure has been systematically damaged, and large sections of the population displaced. The human cost—lives lost, families fractured, futures uncertain—continues to unfold beyond the formal cessation of hostilities.

Lebanon’s tragedy is that it exists at the intersection of forces far larger than itself. Its sovereignty is repeatedly compromised, its territory used as a theatre for external contestation. And yet, within that tragedy, it also becomes the site where broader transformations are revealed.

International Law: Present, Yet Powerless

Throughout the conflict, the language of international law has remained visible—invoked in statements, cited in justifications, and debated in forums.

But its capacity to restrain has appeared increasingly limited. The principles of proportionality and distinction, central to the regulation of armed conflict, have struggled to assert themselves in practice. Civilian harm on a large scale has not produced decisive accountability. Legal norms persist, but their enforcement remains uneven, contingent on political alignment rather than universal application.

This is not the disappearance of law. It is its weakening.

A Region in Transition

The implications of this moment extend beyond Lebanon.

If the United States is no longer perceived as an unchallenged guarantor, and if Israel’s military superiority is no longer seen as absolute, then the strategic calculations of the region will inevitably shift. The Gulf states, long anchored to a particular security framework, may begin to diversify their alignments. New configurations – political, economic, and military – may emerge.

This is how regional orders change: not through declarations, but through accumulated shifts in perception and practice.

Conclusion: The end of certainties

The ceasefire in Lebanon does not bring closure. It brings clarity. It reveals a region in which old certainties are dissolving: where power is contested, where alliances are reconsidered, and where the ability to dictate outcomes is no longer concentrated in a single actor.

 For the United States, this moment raises difficult questions about the limits of its influence. For Israel, it challenges assumptions of invulnerability. For the wider region, it opens a space—uncertain, unstable, but real—for reconfiguration. And for Lebanon, it leaves behind the familiar paradox: a country devastated by forces beyond its control, yet central to understanding the transformations those forces are undergoing.

If the past was defined by dominance, the present is defined by its erosion. What comes next will not be shaped by power alone, but by how that erosion is contested, negotiated, and, perhaps, resisted.

What the ceasefire conceals is more important than what it reveals. It is not peace that has emerged, but a recognition – quiet, reluctant, and incomplete – that power can no longer move without consequence. The United States may still command resources, alliances, and reach, but authority is no longer secured by possession alone. It must be believed, and belief has begun to fracture.

In that fracture lies the significance of this moment. Not the end of conflict, but the end of certainty. Not the arrival of a new order, but the unmistakable decline of an old one that can no longer impose itself unquestioned.

Lebanon, as ever, pays the price. But it also tells the truth: that when power loses its aura of inevitability, the world does not become peaceful – it becomes contested. And in that contest, what was once called dominance must now negotiate its survival.

The collapse is real – Lebanon ceasefire marks a historic strategic defeat

by Dr Ramzy Baroud

People are seen in the streets of Dahieh region after the commencement of a 10-day temporary ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon on April 17, 2026 in Beirut, Lebanon. [Elif Öztürk – Anadolu Agency]

A ceasefire in Lebanon was announced on Thursday by US President Donald Trump, but its reality tells a very different story. The ceasefire was not the product of American diplomacy, nor Israeli strategic calculation. It was imposed—largely as a result of sustained Iranian pressure.

Washington, Tel Aviv, and their allies—including some within Lebanon itself—will continue to deny this reality. Acknowledging Iran’s role would mean admitting that a historic precedent has been set: for the first time, forces opposing the United States and Israel have succeeded in imposing conditions on both.

This is not a minor development. It is a strategic rupture. But it is not the only fundamental shift now underway: Israel’s very approach to war and diplomacy is itself changing.

After failing to secure victory through overwhelming violence, Israel is increasingly relying on coercive diplomacy to impose political outcomes.

Over the past two to three decades, this Israeli strategy has become unmistakably clear: achieving through diplomacy what it has failed to impose on the battlefield.

‘Diplomacy’ as War

Israeli ‘diplomacy’ does not conform to the conventional meaning of the term. It is not negotiation between equals, nor a genuine pursuit of peace. Rather, it is diplomacy fused with violence: assassinations, sieges, blockades, political coercion, and the systematic manipulation of internal divisions within opposing societies. It is diplomacy as an extension of war by other means.

Likewise, Israel’s conception of the ‘battlefield’ is fundamentally different. The deliberate targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure is not incidental, nor merely ‘collateral damage’; it is central to the strategy itself.

Nowhere is this clearer than in Gaza. Following the ongoing genocide, vast swathes of Gaza have been reduced to rubble, with estimates indicating that around 90 percent of the whole of Gaza has been destroyed. According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, women and children consistently account for roughly 70 percent of all of Gaza’s casualties.

This is not collateral damage. It is the deliberate destruction of a civilian population, an act of genocide that is designed to force mass displacement and remake the political and demographic reality in Israel’s favor.

The same logic extends beyond Gaza. It shapes Israel’s wars in Lebanon against Hezbollah and its broader confrontation with Iran.

The United States, Israel’s principal ally, has historically operated within a similar paradigm. From Vietnam to Iraq, civilian populations, infrastructure, and even the environment itself have borne the brunt of American warfare.

A Faltering Model 

It is often argued that Israel turned to ‘diplomacy’ following its forced withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000 under resistance pressure. While this moment was pivotal, it was not the beginning.

Earlier precedents exist. The First Intifada (1987–1993) demonstrated that a sustained popular uprising could not be crushed through brute force alone. Despite Israel’s extensive repression, the revolt endured.

It was in this context that the Oslo Accords emerged—not as a genuine peace process, but as a strategic lifeline. Through Oslo, Israel achieved politically what it could not impose militarily: the pacification of the uprising, the institutionalization of Palestinian political fragmentation, and the transformation of the Palestinian Authority into a mechanism for internal control.

Meanwhile, settlement expansion accelerated, and Israel reaped the global legitimacy of appearing as a ‘peace-seeking’ state.

Yet the last two decades have exposed the limits of this model.

From Lebanon in 2006 to repeated wars on Gaza (2008–09, 2012, 2014, 2021, and the ongoing genocide since 2023), Israel has failed to secure decisive strategic victories. Its ongoing confrontations with Hezbollah and Iran further underscore this failure

Not only has Israel been unable to achieve its stated military objectives, but it has also failed to translate overwhelming firepower—even genocide—into lasting political gains.

Some interpret this as a shift toward perpetual war under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But this reading is incomplete.

Perpetual War? 

Netanyahu understands that these wars cannot be sustained indefinitely. Yet ending them without victory would carry even greater consequences: the collapse of Israel’s deterrence doctrine and, potentially, the unraveling of its broader project of regional dominance.

This dilemma strikes at the heart of Zionist ideology, particularly Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s concept of the ‘Iron Wall’—the belief that overwhelming, unrelenting force would eventually compel indigenous resistance to surrender.

Today, that premise is being tested—and found wanting.

Netanyahu has repeatedly framed current wars as existential, comparable in significance to 1948—the war that resulted in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians during the Nakba and the establishment of Israel.

Indeed, the parallels are unmistakable: mass displacement, civilian terror, systematic destruction, and unwavering Western backing—once from Britain, now from the United States.

But there is a critical difference: The 1948 war led to the creation of Israel; the current wars are about its survival as an exclusivist settler colonial project.

And herein lies the paradox: the longer these wars continue, the more they expose Israel’s inability to secure decisive outcomes. Yet ending them without victory risks a historic defeat—not only for Netanyahu, but for the ideological foundations of the Israeli state itself.

Israeli society appears to recognize the stakes. Polls throughout 2024 and 2025 have shown overwhelming support among Israeli Jews for continued military campaigns in Gaza and confrontations with Iran and Lebanon.

Public discourse frames this support in terms of ‘security’ and ‘deterrence’. But the underlying reality is deeper: a collective recognition that the long-standing project of military supremacy is faltering.

Having failed to subdue Gaza despite the genocide, Israel is now attempting to achieve through diplomatic maneuvering what it could not secure through war. Proposals for international oversight, stabilization forces, and externally imposed governance structures are all variations of this approach

But these efforts are unlikely to succeed.

Gaza is no longer isolated. The regional dimension of the conflict has expanded, linking Lebanon, Iran, and other actors into a broader, interconnected front.

Balance is Shifting 

In Lebanon, Israel has been repeatedly forced toward ceasefire arrangements not out of choice, but because it failed to defeat Hezbollah or break the will of the Lebanese people.

This dynamic extends to Iran. Following the joint aggression on Iran starting February 28, both the United States and Israel were compelled to accept de-escalation frameworks after failing to achieve rapid or decisive outcomes.

The expectation that Iran could be quickly destabilized—replicating the models of Iraq or Libya—proved illusory. Instead, the confrontation revealed the limits of military escalation and forced a return to negotiations.

This is the essence of Israel’s current predicament.

Diplomacy, in this model, is not an alternative to war—it is a pause within it. A temporary tool used to regroup before the next phase of confrontation.

But in Israel’s case, this aggressive ‘diplomacy’ is increasingly becoming the only available tool, precisely because its military strategy has failed to deliver victory.

Lebanon was meant to be the exception—a theater where Israel could isolate and defeat Hezbollah. Instead, it became further evidence of strategic failure.

Efforts to separate the fronts—Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, Iran—have collapsed. Iran has explicitly linked its diplomatic engagement to developments on other fronts, forcing Israel into a broader strategic entanglement it cannot control.

This marks a profound shift.

The foundational pillars of Israeli strategy—overwhelming force, fragmentation of adversaries, narrative control, and political engineering—are no longer functioning as they once did

Yet Netanyahu continues to project victory, declaring success at regular intervals, invoking deterrence, and framing ongoing wars as strategic achievements.

But these narratives ring hollow.

The reality, increasingly evident to observers across the region and beyond, is that the balance is finally shifting.

For the first time in decades, the trajectory of history is no longer bending in Israel’s favor.