Israel is taking its old Gaza model abroad

During an Oval Office meeting on Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that he had nominated President Donald Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize and praised him for “forging peace, as we speak, in one country, in one region after the other.” Both US and Israeli officials have been quite open about their hopes that we are now looking at a transformed Middle East. Netanyahu has suggested that the US-Israeli strikes against Iran last month “opens an opportunity for a dramatic expansion of the peace agreements” that Israel has signed with other Arab countries over the years.

But in fact, the weeks since the “12-Day War” ended have been marked by even more war. On Wednesday, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) announced it had conducted its first ground incursion in months into Lebanon. Israel had already been conducting nearly daily airstrikes targeting Hezbollah in recent weeks, despite a 2024 truce that Israel claims the Iranian-backed proxy group has been violating by keeping armed fighters in southern Lebanon. The IDF has also carried out airstrikes against Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen, responding to the group’s ongoing missile and drone attacks against Israel. IDF troops remain in southern Syria and in recent days have carried out raids targeting Iran-backed groups there.

Nor is the Israel-Iran conflict necessarily over. Defense Minister Israel Katz has put forward a plan involving “maintaining Israel’s air superiority, preventing nuclear advancement and missile production, and responding to Iran for supporting terrorist activities against the State of Israel.” In other words, if Israel says there are malign and dangerous activities happening in Iran, there may be more airstrikes.

Then, of course, there’s the ongoing devastation of the war in Gaza, where the death toll has now exceeded 56,000 according to local authorities, and where locals as well as the UN accuse the IDF of killing hundreds of Palestinian civilians trying to reach food distribution centers in recent weeks. Five IDF troops were killed by roadside bombs planted by militants earlier this week.

While there had been hopes that Israel’s military success against Iran, a major backer of Hamas, could make a ceasefire more likely, the chances of an immediate deal with the militant group appear to be waning, despite pressure from Trump to ink one. Even if there were a ceasefire now, Israel appears very unlikely to withdraw its troops from Gaza entirely.

The “new Middle East” that Netanyahu praised Trump for helping to bring about seems to be one in which Israel is continually fighting on multiple fronts simultaneously.

Following Israel’s six-week war in Gaza in 2014, known as “Operation Protective Edge,” the defense analysts Efraim Inbar and Eitan Shamir wrote an influential article describing how Israel could handle Hamas going forward. The IDF need not get embroiled in an Iraq War-style counterinsurgency campaign to eliminate the group entirely, or simply accommodate it. Instead, they wrote, “Against an implacable, well-entrenched, non-state enemy like the Hamas, Israel simply needs to ‘mow the grass’ once in a while in order to degrade enemy capabilities.”

They continued: “A war of attrition against Hamas is probably Israel’s fate for the long term. Keeping the enemy off balance and reducing its capabilities requires Israeli military readiness and a willingness to use force intermittingly.”

The fatalistic phrase “mowing the grass” caught on, and in the years that followed, Israel fought a number of limited engagements against Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza. But limits of the strategy were made horrifically evident in the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, after which Israel shifted to a still-unfulfilled goal of eradicating Hamas outright.

Now, however, Israel appears to be taking the “mowing the grass” approach region-wide, using periodic military action to degrade and disrupt its foes, including Iran itself.

“There’s been a major change in the level of risk that Israel is willing to take,” said Mairav Zonszein, an Israel-based analyst at the International Crisis Group. She described this new approach as “We don’t trust the intentions of our adversaries, only our own capabilities.” And they’re now much more willing to use those capabilities.

Is this possibly sustainable? Can Israel really fight low-grade, episodic military conflicts in perpetuity, in as many as four different countries, even as the war on its borders continues? “A country of just 10m is not big enough to act as a permanent hegemon in the Middle East,” the Economist suggested, skeptically.

But it’s also not hard to see why Israeli leaders think they can. Iran spent years building up a network of regional proxies and a missile program that could supposedly rain down destruction on Israel if it were ever attacked. Today, Hezbollah is a shell of its former self, Hamas is on the back foot, and Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime has fallen. Of the more than 500 missiles Iran fired at Israel during the 12-day war, only around 40 got through, killing 28 people — not an insignificant number, but far fewer than many feared before the war began.

Israel has shown it can infiltrate its enemies’ defenses and decimate their ranks, all with only manageable military backlash.

It’s also clear that Israel’s regional conflicts are different from the war in Gaza. Polls show Israelis are fatigued by that conflict, favor a deal to end the fighting and bring hostages home, and believe Netanyahu is continuing the conflict largely for the sake of his own political survival. The humanitarian toll inflicted on Gazan civilians has deepened Israel’s international isolation. It’s also put strain on the country’s conscript military: the IDF is short on manpower, and the large number of reservists being called up is hindering the nation’s economy while exacerbating long-running political tensions over whether ultra-Orthodox Israelis should be exempt from military service. Military commanders have warned that the ongoing operation may not be sustainable at current troop levels.

By contrast, the strikes on Iran were wildly popular, and supported by Israel’s opposition parties. They were relatively popular internationally as well. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz likely spoke for many of his European peers when he praised Israel for doing the “dirty work” for other countries.

In contrast to the grinding conflict in Gaza, Israel’s regional conflicts have been conducted either from the air, or in the case of Lebanon and Syria, with relatively small ground operations, putting far less manpower strain on the IDF.

However it is fought, though, war is expensive. The 12-day war with Iran may cost around $6 billion, or 1 percent of Israel’s GDP. Israel spent close to 9 percent of its GDP on defense last year, with the largest increases since the 1960s — and that was before the war with Iran. Economists have warned that level of spending threatens the country’s fiscal stability and ability to provide social services.

For the moment, however, the economy is weathering the storm better than many expected with modest growth and low unemployment. Israel is burning through munitions at a rapid clip, but the Trump administration seems willing for the moment to continue providing them.

The better question than whether Israel can fight all these conflicts — for the moment, it seems like it can, or at least its leaders think it can — is what it all will lead to.

It’s an open question what impact an endless series of “forever wars” will have on Netanyahu’s ability to see through his other main regional priority: continuing the process of normalizing relations with other Arab governments. Trump is pushing a deal between Israel and Syria’s new government, as well as the perennial goal of Saudi-Israeli normalization.

But the carnage in Gaza has deepened the political costs of Arab governments engaging diplomatically with Israel, and while those leaders once pushed a hard line in Iran, most were opposed to last month’s war, fearing its impact on regional stability and investment.

Michael Koplow, chief policy officer at the US-based Israel Policy Forum, said that the prime minister likely doesn’t believe there’s a trade-off.

“Netanyahu believes that everything stems from Iran and anything else is a sideshow,” he said. “The idea is that the more that Israel projects strength, the easier it will be for Israel to normalize relations with other countries. I think we’re going to see that proposition tested.”

Israel’s multi-front war also only works if the United States keeps providing arms and political support. While Trump belatedly embraced the Israeli strikes on Iran and ultimately joined in, he has also run hot and cold on Netanyahu and shown a surprising willingness at times to act independently of Israeli interests in the region. Trump’s frustrated outburst in the early hours of the ceasefire that Israel and Iran are “two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing,” was an indication that his support for Israel’s larger regional ambitions should not be taken for granted.

Then, of course, there’s the question of whether “mowing the grass” will actually work.

“The risks are that you just are in an endless series of military strikes and you don’t actually achieve your goal,” said Crisis Group’s Zonszein. “There are those in Israel, in the security establishment or elsewhere, who believe that that’s the best you can get.”

While most of Iran’s proxies may be deterred for now, the Houthis, who have recently resumed their attacks on shipping through the Red Sea and actually sank two cargo ships in the past week, certainly don’t appear ready to back down in the face of Israel’s strikes.

At the moment, the degree to which Iran’s nuclear weapons program was set back by the bombing is still unclear, but there’s a strong possibility that if any capabilities remain, Iranian leaders’ desire to actually build a bomb has only been increased by the war.

And while Iran’s once-feared military and proxy militias look a bit like a paper tiger right now, there’s no guarantee they will stay that way. The October 7 attacks were just the latest example of the fact that governments have a consistently terrible record when it comes to predicting the will and ability of extremist groups to strike.

That’s not the lesson Israel’s political and military leaders appear to have taken, however.

“The lesson that they took away from October 7 is not that mowing the grass doesn’t work,” Raphael Cohen, a military analyst at the Rand Corporation, told Vox. “It’s just that they let the grass grow too long, and they need to cut it even shorter.”