On April 11, as a tenuous cease-fire took hold between the United States and Iran, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu released a video claiming “historic achievements” for his war strategy. But critics at home and abroad saw things differently. Israel’s deadly April 8 strike on central Beirut—labeled “Bloody Wednesday” by horrified Lebanese—came in open defiance of the U.S.-Iranian cease-fire. Israelis across the spectrum express exhaustion and frustration at permanent war that never seems to produce either victory or security and that often seems aimed more at protecting Netanyahu’s political career than the country.

But Israelis’ frustration is about more than just Netanyahu. It represents the failure of an ambitious government strategy of regional transformation through unfettered military intervention after the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023. Israel’s steady expansion of targets and the intensity of airstrikes aimed not simply to manage conflicts but to end them: the total destruction of Hamas, the disarmament of Hezbollah, regime change or state collapse in Iran. In each theater, outright victory has eluded Israel despite unprecedented and extreme violence, the shattering of norms and international law, and the infliction of excessive human suffering. Netanyahu’s claims of success based on degrading the capability of adversaries is in reality an admission of defeat—a return to the very doctrine he hoped to abandon—and a disturbing indicator of where Israeli policy may go in the coming days.

Prior to Oct. 7, Israel largely believed that it could manage its regional conflicts through what it referred to as “mowing the grass”: short, intense episodic military campaigns that degraded the capabilities of adversaries such as Hamas and Hezbollah while reinforcing deterrence. Those attacks were often brutal. Beirut still carries the scars of 2006, and Palestinians in Gaza suffered repeated rounds of Israeli attacks with devastating civilian costs in the decades prior to Oct. 7. But they were inherently self-limiting. They typically sought to do maximum damage in a relatively brief time span while avoiding escalation, relying on the Iron Dome missile defense system to limit the impact of retaliation, avoiding targeting state actors such as Iran or Syria, and ending with a U.S.-imposed cease-fire once Israel decided enough damage had been done.

The Oct. 7 attack, in which Hamas fighters broke through the border fence from Gaza and killed nearly 1,200 people, shattered the strategic consensus in Israel that these conflicts could be managed through deterrence, limited military campaigns, and the willingness of local actors such as the Palestinian Authority to impose restraint out of self-interest. The assumption that even dangerous adversaries such as Hamas and Hezbollah would avoid provocations in order to maintain their own power and organizational survival, which drove policies such as Netanyahu’s encouragement of Qatari funding for Hamas, went from canny pragmatism to scandal overnight.

The new Israeli strategic doctrine would end threats, not only in Gaza but across the region, instead of just managing them. Those ambitions went beyond military dominance. Destroying Iran and its regional allies once and for all would open the door to establishing a new regional order, a Pax Hebraica under unchallenged Israeli dominance. That new order would build on the 2020 Abraham Accords and forge enduring alliances and a robust security architecture, incorporating most if not all of the Arab states on Israeli terms. Palestine would disappear from the agenda forever.

If Oct. 7 convinced Israeli leaders of the need for such a strategic shift, the subsequent war in Gaza taught them that they enjoyed impunity in pursuing their regional war. The unconditional backing by the Biden and Trump administrations during two years of devastating war on Gaza showed that there was literally nothing—not even policies plausibly described as genocide—that would end U.S. military and political support. With no constraint from Washington or international institutions, and little real pushback from powerful Arab states, the only obstacle to Israeli action would be military.

And there, Israel saw few real challenges. The success of the Iron Dome against missile strikes kept the costs of retaliation minimal, while Israel’s technological superiority and access to U.S. support allowed it to strike almost at will. The decapitation of Hezbollah’s leadership in September 2024 served as both proof of concept and a key enabling moment. The technical success of the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah and the maiming of thousands of Hezbollah fighters seemed, at least for the moment, to have removed the primary threat to Israel and Iran’s most potent weapon. A 12-day war against Iran in June 2025, in which Israeli missile defenses largely held and Iran refrained from wider retaliation across the Gulf, reinforced that sense of impunity. So did Israel’s ability to bomb across Syrian territory at will after the fall of the Assad regime in late 2024. With total command of the skies and deep intelligence penetration of its adversaries, Israel came to believe that it could strike decisive blows to its remaining adversaries with little risk or cost.

That vision today lies in ruins. Israel has found itself unable to impose its will on Lebanon, stymied by a resurgent Hezbollah and the predictable costs of a ground invasion. A full-scale air war against Iran this year, even with U.S. participation, failed to topple the Islamic Republic or end its ability to respond and resist. Iran’s retaliatory strikes, backed by a much more robust Hezbollah arsenal than Israelis had expected, have taxed Israel’s missile defenses to their limit and taken an economic and physical toll. As a result, Israel must now return to a strategy of conflict management, mowing the grass at infinitely higher levels of death and destruction without any path to the lasting resolution the new strategy had promised. The costs of repeated military campaigns have grown far higher than before, though, in ways that Israelis doggedly refuse to acknowledge. The horrors of the war on Gaza have turned public opinion against Israel across much of Europe and the United States, while its reckless interventionism has convinced many Arabs that Israel should be seen as a threat rather than a potential security partner.

Israel assumed that demonstrating power would make it a more attractive ally for the Gulf states, without recognizing how that power would make it appear threatening. The Israeli strike on a Hamas meeting in Doha in September 2025 was an underappreciated turning point, showing Gulf leaders that Israel could disregard their countries’ sovereignty as readily as it did with their shared enemies. Those fears were reinforced by Israel’s aggressive targeting in Lebanon and Iran as well as its disruptive moves in Syria.

Israel refused to acknowledge the importance of regional or international legitimacy for any robust security structure. It offered no positive vision or shared purpose to cement an alliance with Arab states, instead moving ever more aggressively to seize territory in the West Bank in ways that made it harder for Arab leaders to justify cooperation. This intersected with regional politics as well. The Saudi rift with the United Arab Emirates in December 2025 was driven at least in part by the perception that the Israeli-Emirati alliance had grown too powerful and too revisionist. In particular, Saudi Arabia objected to what it viewed as the UAE’s promotion of secessionist movements and nonstate actors in Libya, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. Israel’s attacks on state capacity in Iran since Feb. 28 and Lebanon trigger exactly the same fears in Riyadh and across the region—of chaos and state failure that might serve Israel’s short-term security interests while spurring refugee flows and radicalization in other countries.

Iran’s retaliation against the Gulf states has for now both reignited Gulf fury with Iran and exposed the limits of U.S.-Israeli security guarantees. But their return to reliance on the United States and Israel will likely prove short-lived. Gulf leaders had good reason to complain that the United States and Israel had launched a war without consulting them, exposing them to existential threat. U.S. bases became targets rather than shields; U.S. defense systems proved unable to defend critical oil and gas infrastructure; the United States was bizarrely unprepared to keep the Strait of Hormuz open for transit; and today, most of its bases have taken damage. While Iranian missiles and drones have hit all Gulf Arab countries, Tehran has notably concentrated its fire on the UAE and Bahrain—Israel’s Abraham Accords allies. The UAE, in turn, has taken on an ever more aggressive posture, pushing Washington to escalate the war even as Saudi Arabia and Qatar have backed Pakistani mediation efforts.

It is impossible to know, of course, where the next phase of the war could go. But in a fundamental sense, Israel’s post-Oct. 7 strategy has already failed. For all the damage it has inflicted on its enemies, Israel has not succeeded in eliminating any of them—not even Hamas. Its expansionism and extreme violence in Gaza and Lebanon have triggered a generational backlash among the Europeans and Americans who represent its most essential source of external support and have changed Arab perceptions of Israel’s viability as an ally. Netanyahu’s critics at home are right when they argue that he has led the country into endless and increasingly pointless wars while offering no true alternatives to regional quagmire and international isolation.