Existential Crisis Envelops the Middle East
David Haggith

Israel's whole war paradigm has changed. The stakes are altogether different than any Middle-Eastern war in recent history.

The old paradigm for Israeli wars focused on deterrence, which meant retaliation had to cost enemies more than anything they gained to make it clear that attacking Israel comes with a heavy cost and to limit Israel’s enemies’ ability to repeat their offense. Israel’s friends and foes always used the UN and other means to try to hold Israel back from all-out war, and Israel stayed within, at least, the outer limits of what many nations would consider just deterrence against terrorists in order to retain global respect.

I believe that has now changed, and I think one has to understand that in order to realize the true gravity of the present situation. I think Israel is finally done with deterrence or justice or revenge as its objective in these conflicts, so it will do whatever it believes is necessary to change the Middle-East situation around itself entirely and for good. It’s looking to end a problem via war. 

It will pursue that goal regardless of the cost to its respectability in the eyes of many nations, but it is still limiting engagements to what it can handle, pacing things out, and to what will keep the US working in alliance with it. It may well go beyond what the US will go along with when it sees opportunity to seize that greater objective.

The old approach never resolved anything. It was a constant world-enforced stalemate that resulted in decades of Israel’s enemies regrouping and always making renewed attacks down the road. It resulted in endless of oppression of the people than just Jews. It became an endless war and always would remain so because of Israel’s attempts at some measure of proportionality to the immediate security need. It never led to generations of negotiations that never closed a deal after more than seventy years.

Under the deterrence approach, Israel was always expected by the US and other nations to limit its response to simply ending the immediate security problem but never use war to end its enemies. However, I think Israel’s position has changed, and its new objective has moved to winning a war that actually resettles matters in the Middle East for good.

That is impossible with the kind of proportionality that Biden said today he expects to see from Israel’s response to Iran—the usual US demand. Proportionality seeks balanced justice or revenge. If eye-for-an-eye revenge is the goal, then, yes, Israel’s response to Hamas has been unjustly disproportionate; but that’s just it. I don’t think that is Israel’s objective at all anymore. Israel is looking for a total game-changer at this point and is willing to pay whatever cost in global opinion it needs to in order to change its situation entirely so as not to keep fighting the same war over and over again. However, it will do what it can to mitigate that damage to itself along the way and to not take on more at a time than it can win if it can help it.

Israel is now seeking total eradication of its enemies.

If winning a war against people who constantly say they want to annihilate your nation is your objective, then a thousand lost by the enemy to one lost by you is your goal, or even ten-thousand if you can achieve it. You are guaranteed to lose any war if you seek a balanced number of losses or to endlessly fight that war as Biden is saying he expects Israel to do. That has always been the coerced approach, but it is like trying to win football by making certain not to outscore your opponent.

I think it is clear at this point that Israel did not respond to Oct 7 in order to right a wrong with eye-for-an-eye vengeance. It has determined it will settle this matter once and for all by war — to annihilate its enemies—not the Palestinian people or the Lebanese or the Iranians or the Syrians but the powers within each of those nations (and others) that seek constantly to harm Israel. Netanyahu probably had that in mind when he conveyed that regime change in Iran is not as far away as people think.

What is important for understanding our new times in the Middle East is that, for Israel, the paradigm has changed entirely from restraining evil attackers to annihilating all of them with whatever level of wars it takes. Its existential.

So, we’re witnessing a much more desperate fight than we’ve seen in the past. I think Israel has decided this is a war that will eliminate its enemies or else end in abject Israeli failure trying. They are all-in.

Is it a winnable war?

To be clear, I think this is an unwinnable conflict for Israel if their ultimate objective is to live in Israel peacefully by applying all their power now to eradicate their enemies because the more they cause civilian casualties, the more they are alienating the world around them; while the more they attack, the more enemies are joining the fray from the sidelines and from inside the areas where they are fighting.

I’m just saying that, in terms of how Israel appears to be thinking about this, if they were to win by war, they’d certainly have to kill hundreds of their enemy combatants for every Israeli soldier that dies because they are greatly outnumbered by the Iranians and the Lebanese and the Syrians and the Palestinians and several other groups who surround them. So, this kind of war is entirely different than anything we’ve seen Israel fight in recent decades.

As I said in earlier articles, I think it could easily wind up with Israel facing abject failure because of how much they are outnumbered and how much better armed some of their opponents are than in the past and find themselves facing that situation without any remaining friends if they push beyond US limits because they think they can claim the Promised Land by their own might or by divine blessing that still requires their own might.

While I don't care what the UN or the rest of the world thinks, Israel’s loss of global respect will become wider the more Israel kills and maims civilians like it did with the pagers when they blew up in marketplaces with children standing beside their exploding dads. No one wants that, but all-out war, once it is perceived as existential, tends to deliver that.

While Israel has often pointed to past wars that it won against all odds as proof God is aiding it, my own belief on those kinds of religious bases for fighting is that Israel cannot ultimately win the Promised Land without, first, accepting the promised Prince of Peace. They have enough of the land, however, to believe such victory is within their grasp until it becomes clear that it is not and to believe God is going to deliver it to them as they are until it becomes clear he is not. I believe a day of reckoning on that matter is eventually coming. A day of decision and judgment.

I don’t believe Israel will be able to deliver what its people believe was promised to them by their own power to wage war. I believe their fighting will take them to a point of ultimate desperation. The living at peace in the Promised Land is just not attainable by shear human strength, though many Jews believe God will aid them on their terms so that their cause will prevail due to God being on their side.

I think over time, this is the start of a change in war in the Middle East that is going to become very scary for them and everyone in the land because the other side also believes God will deliver the land to them. I don’t think either side is asking “are we on God’s side?” They are presuming God is on theirs, no matter how much they act by their own initiative. That is likely to build a lot of amplitude in the conflict between the two sides.

So, we are seeing something much different than we’ve seen in my lifetime. This has become existential. Israel is going to make sure it is existential for its enemies, too.

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