Over the past 77 years, there has been a remarkable tendency for the so-called ‘international community’ to either dismiss Israel as a proverbial paper tiger or grossly overestimate its capacities. It began in 1948 when, defying conventional wisdom, a determined band of Zionists secured a United Nations endorsement for the partition of British-held Palestine. At that time, the Arab states contemptuously rebuffed the UN partition scheme that created a Jewish state and launched a military offensive that would, in effect, ensure another mass expulsion — if not extermination — of the Jews. Those wishing to understand the dynamics of Arab-Israel relations would do well to read histories of the 1948 war that Israel endured at a heavy price and which the Arabs failed to win. Among other things, it will explain why Israel is what it is.

The tendency to underestimate Israel resurfaced in 1967 when, egged on by the adulation that accompanied the pompous pan-Arabism of Egypt’s
president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Arab states thought it was an opportune time to try and choke Israel to death once more. As a schoolboy who followed that conflict through crackling short-wave radio broadcasts and the pedestrian coverage of the Middle East by the Indian media, the initial understanding was that it would be a matter of time before the Arab armies emerge triumphant. Six days were all that it took for Israel to accomplish its cherished dream of controlling the whole of Jerusalem and the strategic Golan Heights. Egypt lost control over the whole of the Sinai Peninsula and the east bank of the Suez Canal.

The outcome of the war was decided on Day 1 itself. In an audacious move that involved approaching Egypt from the sea, the Israeli air force destroyed the entire air power of Nasser on the ground. This was repeated in Syria and Jordan. In 1967, Israel redrew the map of the Middle East. It was now clear to the Arab states that the destruction of Israel was a pipedream. They would either have to reconcile themselves to a powerful Jewish state or use the Palestine issue to symbolically whip up emotions on the Arab street.

The move towards acknowledging the reality of Israel has been patchy but marked. Egypt under President Anwar el-Sadat made the first move in 1978 which was hesitantly followed by Jordan, a grudging participant in the misadventures of 1948 and of 1967. Syria under the Assad dynasty kept up the pretence of uncompromising opposition to Israel but maintained back-channel connections. The Palestine Liberation Organization under Yasser Arafat maintained a form of strategic ambiguity in its dealings with the Arab states and other so-called non-aligned countries with large Muslim populations. It was bankrolled by Arab money and other international contributions (India under the Gandhis contributed handsomely and even played banker to the PLO) and maintained an arms-length relationship with international terrorist outfits that harassed Israelis globally. A country which was destroyed in the crossfire of internecine conflict was Lebanon. The rise of the fanatical Hezbollah, aided and abetted by the Islamist regime in Tehran, triggered a new wave of complications whose outcome was the Hamas takeover of Gaza and its declaration of war against Israel on October 7, 2023. It is a war that is still being waged.

The Hamas massacre of more than 1,200 Israelis across the Gaza Strip was, arguably, a great military success. It was premised on the belief in some circles that civil society in Israel had become weary of living in a state of permanent military readiness and was seeking soft solutions. The assumptions were not entirely baseless. The ‘land for peace’ Oslo Accords of the mid-1990s that Washington hoped would pave the way for enduring peace centred on the belief that Arafat would settle for a truncated Palestine on the West Bank rather than nothing at all. The mood in Israel, too, was that the PLO should be given a chance to junk the irredentism of the past. The mood against Zionist radicals became particularly virulent after the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995. Political opinion in Israel didn’t side with the Zionists in the 21 Jewish settlements of Gaza when they were evicted in 2005.

In hindsight, the optimism of the Israeli Left proved horribly misplaced.

First, the PLO leadership reneged on the Oslo Accords by not acknowledging the one thing Israelis were insistent upon: a recognition of Israel’s right to exist. In Gaza, the Hamas leadership used the huge international aid it received to create a network of tunnels that would be useful during a military campaign against Israel. In the West Bank, the corrupt inheritors of the Arafat legacy looked the other way as youngsters were fed on a virulent ideological diet of anti-Semitism and jihad. As Israel moved ahead as a start-up nation and excelled in agriculture, the ‘self-governing’ Palestinian areas wallowed in dreams of martyrdom.

Secondly, Palestinian intransigence was fuelled by the regional ambitions of the Ayatollahs in Tehran. Following international scrutiny of its nuclear ambitions and the collapse of the US military projects in Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran stepped up its involvement in a grand anti-Israel alliance involving the Alawite regime in Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, disgruntled Arabs in the West Bank and the pirates in Yemen. Benjamin Netanyahu’s unexpectedly sharp military response to the Hamas attacks in October 2023 and the decimation of Hezbollah’s top leadership were bad news for Iran since they removed the proxies that Iran had used to prey on Israel.

Thirdly, what both Ramallah and Tehran feared most was that the Abraham Accords would eventually lead to a pragmatic understanding of mutual interests between Israel and the Arab states of the Middle East. A recognition of Israel by Saudi Arabia that was widely expected in late-2023, when the war with Hamas intervened, would have been a game-changer. Now, with President Donald Trump back at the helm, it is back on the agenda.

Finally, it is apparent to Tehran that Netanyahu is determined to go for the jugular and destroy its nuclear programme completely. In this, there is a convergence of interests between Israel and the US. Israel has achieved total air superiority, but it needs the US bunker busters to penetrate the nuclear facilities deep inside the mountains. There is another reason why Israel wants the full participation of Trump in its Iran project. Redrawing the map of the Middle East implies overthrowing the regime of the Ayatollah in Tehran. From all accounts, public opinion in Iran seems ready for the change.