Israel nach dem Iran-Krieg: Das falsche Versprechen des totalen Sieges
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/israel/israel-after-iran-war
Israel nach dem Iran-Krieg: Das falsche Versprechen des totalen Sieges
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/israel/israel-after-iran-war
4 Kommentare
[Excerpt from essay by Shira Efron, Distinguished Chair for Israel Policy and Senior Fellow at RAND.]
War-weary Israelis long for a definitive victory against Iran. But it remains uncertain how the Israeli government will manage an unpredictable escalatory spiral—or that it can truly abandon a “mowing the grass” strategy that helps keep Israel mired in constant conflicts in its neighborhood. Whenever Israel addresses one security problem, it seems to only create another. The election is likely to come soon enough for Netanyahu to leverage the war to consolidate his position, regardless of long-term negative consequences. The domestic problems it is serving as a distraction from, however, will not go away—and Israelis who hope that this war will foreclose future conflict and lead to the normalization of ties with the wider Arab world could end up bitterly disappointed.
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Never say never but I doubt Israel’s reputation is ever going to recover from the Gaza war never mind this adventure. The U.S. public are pretty convinced that Israel started this war and, even worse, Israel is calling the shots. Mark my words, over the coming days and weeks we’re going to be inundated with Pro-Israel pieces that attempt to claim this is part of a grand plan by the U.S. as they try to distance themselves from being the instigators.
People often frame this conflict purely in terms of security, but I think there’s a deeper structural issue that makes the current situation unsustainable.
Right now around 5 million Palestinians live in the West Bank and Gaza without political rights in the state that ultimately controls most aspects of their lives. As long as that political question remains unresolved, Israel is forced to rely on continuous military management of the conflict.
Military operations can suppress violence temporarily, but they can’t solve the underlying political problem. You can manage unrest for years or even decades, but if millions of people live without a clear political future or rights, the conflict keeps reproducing itself.
There’s also a demographic reality. If Israel continues to control the territory indefinitely without creating a Palestinian state, the system gradually becomes one state in practice. At that point you have two possibilities: either equal political rights for everyone or a permanent system where one national group rules over another. Historically, systems where a minority rules over a disenfranchised majority tend not to last forever.
We’ve seen similar dynamics before in places like apartheid South Africa, French Algeria, and Northern Ireland before the Good Friday Agreement. The situations aren’t identical, but the pattern is similar: long-term political exclusion combined with security control eventually forces a political resolution.
That’s why kicking the issue down the road doesn’t actually solve anything. The status quo might be stable in the short term, but the longer the political question is left unresolved, the harder it becomes to avoid a one-state reality with deep inequality. And historically those kinds of systems tend to break down sooner or later.