What’s driving Israel’s wars?

The obscenity of Israel’s actions is plain to see. The gloating teams of Israeli soldiers in the new Al Jazeera documentary Gaza, laughing and high-fiving as they systematically destroy schools, universities, hospitals and human life. The semi-public depravity of the systematic rape and torture of Palestinian prisoners in Israel’s prisons. The mass slaughter in Gaza, the West Bank, now in Lebanon—and soon perhaps Iran.

But what are Israel’s goals? Why is it doing what it’s doing?

If we were to believe the pro-Israel media, Israel is the victim here, an innocent party just trying to get on in hostile circumstances. This makes sense only if we ignore the 76 years of war, terror, apartheid and land seizures that make up Israel’s history. In other words, this explanation obscures more than it explains.

To understand Israel’s actions—since 1948 and in the past twelve months—we have to start from the objective that underpins it.

The self-declared aim of the Zionist project is to establish a Jewish supremacist state based in Palestine. But, as the early Zionists realised, this project could be carried out only in alliance with imperialist powers that could provide the military muscle to create and maintain a new state—mainly Britain (up to 1948 and to some extent beyond), and the United States (especially from 1967 to today). In return for their backing, these powers got a “watchdog”, uniquely positioned to help shape the region in their interests.

Importantly, there has always been a calculation—and often, a highly contested debate—among Zionists and their allies about how to integrate these sometimes conflicting objectives. For instance, Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, clashed repeatedly with his foreign minister, Moshe Sharrett, over exactly how aggressive Israel could be towards its Arab neighbours without wrecking the international alliances that kept Israel supplied with weapons and aid. Both were advocates and practitioners of “transfer”, i.e. the expulsion of Palestinians to create a majority Jewish state. But they differed sharply on state strategy beyond that.

A more recent example is the political turmoil in Israel in early 2023. Prime Minister Netanyahu and his far-right allies pushed for changes to Israel’s court system, which would limit the ability of the Supreme Court (among other things) to sanction West Bank settlers who attack Palestinians. A key argument of opponents of this move—who could mobilise hundreds of thousands on the streets, and included the overwhelming bulk of Israel’s military establishment—was that Netanyahu’s changes would damage Israel’s crucial international alliances, especially with the US. It’s crude, but not entirely inaccurate, to characterise this debate as between “ongoing apartheid, for now” on the one hand, and “more rapid expulsion and genocide” on the other.

Underlying this disagreement is the unfinished business of creating a Jewish supremacist state. Through war and terror, Zionists achieved a Jewish majority within the 1948 ceasefire line—around 7 million Jews and 2 million Palestinians. But if we include the 2.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and the 2.3 million Palestinians who a year ago lived in Gaza, in 2023 there were still approximately 7 million Palestinians living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

Over the past twelve months, the “rapid expulsion and genocide” factions grouped around Netanyahu have clearly set Israel’s agenda in Gaza. In the wake of 7 October, this became a national consensus as previous Netanyahu critics signed up for a genocidal campaign. Yoav Gallant, defence minister and the hero of the protesters just six months previously, announced a total genocidal siege on Gaza.

Though there have been some fractures in this coalition in recent months, expanding the war to Lebanon seems to have renewed a sense of unity. The only hard limit on Israel’s military ambitions at this point appears to be whether the US will keep supplying the munitions needed. And so far, each supposed “red line” declared by the White House has turned pink and then dissolved entirely. Whether this will apply to one of Netanyahu’s long-held ambitions—to launch a full-scale US-backed war on Iran that could cement Israel’s regional supremacy—remains to be seen.

So far, Israel has largely succeeded in annihilating Gaza and reducing the supposed “demographic threat” that its people represent to a Jewish supremacist majority “between the river and the sea”. Settlers in the West Bank are off the leash, and military assaults there are increasing. And the White House is green-lighting Israel redrawing the map of Lebanon.

All of this is a new and terrifying reality—and also a continuation and intensification of long-held, publicly discussed strategies of Israel’s military and political leadership. It’s worth taking a look at these changes and continuities in Israel’s strategies and motivations, on four of Israel’s war fronts.

‘Kill and kill and kill. All day, every day’: depopulating Gaza

Most of the mainstream media take at face value the pronouncements by Israel’s government that its actions in Gaza are centred on returning hostages and “dismantling” Hamas. But anyone who has paid attention knows that there is another longstanding aim of Israel’s assault.

Israeli demographer and government adviser Arnon Soffer authored the strategy for Gaza implemented by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon from 2005. Soffer is apparently one of the originators of the term “demographic threat” to describe the residents of Gaza—that is, a “threat” to an overwhelming Jewish majority in a Jewish supremacist state.

Soffer achieved worldwide notoriety in 2004 when he bluntly summed up his approach to dealing with this supposed “demographic threat”, telling the Jerusalem Post: “When 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it's going to be a human catastrophe ... It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.”

We now know what this looks like.

And if any doubt remains, we can turn to the pronouncements of retired Israeli major general and celebrity freelance military strategist Giora Eiland. It was Eiland who, on 12 October 2023, declared, “Israel needs to create a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, compelling tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands to seek refuge in Egypt or the Gulf ... Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist”.

The next month, Eiland was in the news again, stating: “The international community is warning us against a severe humanitarian disaster and severe epidemics. We must not shy away from this. After all, severe epidemics in the south of Gaza will bring victory closer”.

And just last month, Eiland formulated his latest piece of advice: a strategy of expulsion and starvation for the northern third of the Gaza Strip: “The right thing to do is to inform the approximately 300,000 residents who remained in the northern Gaza Strip ... [that] we are ordering you to leave the northern Gaza Strip. In a week, the entire territory of the northern Gaza Strip will become military territory. And this military territory, as far as we are concerned, no supplies will enter it”. This would allow those remaining a simple choice, according to Eiland: “to surrender or starve”.

This is not some fringe position—according to CNN, 27 of the 120 members of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, signed an open letter endorsing Eiland’s plan, adding, “After carrying out the program in this area, it is possible to carry it out in other parts of the strip”.

This plan is being put into effect in northern Gaza today. On 6 October, Al Jazeera reported on a renewed siege and ground offensive on the Jabalia refugee camp in the north of Gaza. Almost all of the north, and well over half of the rest of Gaza, are currently under evacuation orders by the Israeli military.

Journalists lie dead in the streets, while babies in humidicribs are evacuated amidst military siege. Jabalia refugee camp resident Mohammad Sultan tells CNN: “Three people were shot right in front of me. My brother and I tried to help the injured get to the hospitals, but a little girl was shot in the neck, and her father was also injured”. Medical aid group Medicine Sans Frontiers reported: “Israeli forces are turning the north of Gaza into an unlivable wasteland, effectively emptying out the whole north of the Strip of Palestinian life. To make matters worse, no humanitarian supplies have been allowed to enter the area since 1 October”.

There is no end in sight to this obscene operation. And even before it started, Israel could claim substantial progress on Soffer’s project of “killing and killing and killing”, in order to “solve” the supposed “demographic threat” that Gaza’s people pose to Israel.

In early October, 99 US health professionals who have worked in Gaza during the past twelve months signed a letter to President Biden in which they estimated that the total death toll in Gaza so far is at least 118,000. Three public health researchers writing in the Lancet in July observed that indirect deaths from the effects of war commonly outnumber direct deaths by at least three to one, and sometimes up to fifteen to one. They gave a conservative estimate of 186,000 deaths have or will occur in Gaza due to Israel’s attacks, “[e]ven if the conflict ends immediately”.

An estimated 150,000 to 200,000 Palestinians have escaped from Gaza since Israel’s onslaught began. Between the dead and this forced emigration, Israel is making bloody and obscene progress on Soffer’s goals—the state of Israel’s goals—in Gaza. “Killing and killing and killing” reduces and may ultimately eliminate the supposed “demographic threat” posed by Palestinians in Gaza to the Jewish supremacist state..

The West Bank: killings and expulsions

Hamas’ 7 October attack has been used as the pretext for Israel’s genocidal rampage in Gaza. The Israeli state has lacked such a high-profile pretext in the occupied territories on the West Bank of the Jordan River. Nevertheless, it has intensified the level of brutality on the West Bank—using bombing raids and missiles for the first time in two decades, laying siege to whole communities and targeting health services and healthcare workers.

With the fascist “Jewish Power” party of Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir a key part of Netanyahu’s coalition, Zionist settlers in the West Bank have more latitude and closer protection and cooperation from Israel’s army.

Back in 1980, an article by Don Will in the left-wing US-based news service Middle East Research and Information Project described the tension between settlers and the state in these terms: “The Zionist ‘minimalists’ have historically stressed the consolidation of a Jewish state on the territory under their control while the ‘maximalists’ have called for a Greater Israel based on the maximum extent of the ancient Hebrew kingdoms. The relations between these minimalist and maximalist Zionist camps have not always been amicable, but the differences have more often been tactical than strategic. This political dynamic lends a veneer of contention as the process of settlement inexorably proceeds”.

While the West Bank settlers expressed the “maximalist” sentiment, Will noted that even in 1980 the Israeli state was itself “carrying out an extensive and multifaceted takeover of West Bank lands which differs from that urged by the Gush Emunim [the movement of ‘extreme’ settlers] less in its substance than in its avoidance—for the time being—of flagrant confrontation”.

This distinction has been narrowed over the years as Israeli society and politics have shifted to the right, as Arab regimes have moved to make a profitable peace with Israel, and as the US government keeps aid and weapons flowing, no matter what. “Flagrant confrontations” involving both settlers and the Israeli state are now the order of the day. B’Tselem, Israel’s main human rights organisation, documents them. In one case in August, settlers drove out the 285 Palestinian residents of Khirbet Zanutah in the South Hebron Hills. When a court order was granted mandating the return of the residents, the settlers smashed up the residents’ homes. B’Tselem reports:

“As of 8 September 2024, the residents are sleeping in classrooms in the school and in their semi-ruined homes. They have no access to water, electricity or toilets, and the livestock is exposed to the elements. In these conditions, they cannot resume any sort of normal life and the women and children have not yet returned ... By working to complete the removal of the community in defiance of the High Court, Israel has proven that the state, and not the settlers, is the driving force behind the expulsion ... There is genuine concern that a full expulsion of the community will be achieved.”

The echoes of Gaza are inescapable in the West Bank. And now, as well, in Lebanon.

Lebanon: Dahiyeh looks like Gaza looks like Dahiyeh

Netanyahu’s threat was clear enough in his 10 October video: Israel is prepared to inflict “a long war that will lead to destruction and suffering like we see in Gaza” on the people of Lebanon. More than 2,000 have been killed already. Names and strategies that are strikingly familiar emerge in the coverage of Israel’s attack.

Giora Eiland, the man who recommended “humanitarian catastrophe” in Gaza, said in an interview with the US website Cipher Brief in July this year, “If we decide to fight only against Hezbollah they know that they can absorb a large number of casualties among their combatants because it is not difficult to draft others. They can use a lot of missiles and other weapons systems because Iran will bring others”.

The solution, according to Eiland, is for Israel to target not just Hezbollah but to “attack the infrastructure of the state of Lebanon: energy, communication, transportation, everything”. He repeats: “The only way to make the war shorter or maybe to deter Hezbollah even before we come to an [all-out] war, is if everybody understands that such a war will lead to the full devastation of the state of Lebanon”.

This murderous strategy will be familiar to many readers as a version of the so-called “Dahiyeh doctrine”. In 2008, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that several senior military and ex-military figures believed that the way to defeat a military force such as Hamas or Hezbollah was through a deliberately disproportionate military response, targeting not so much armed insurgents as civil infrastructure. Israel’s massively destructive 2006 bombing of Dahiyeh, the largely Shia suburbs in southern Beirut where much of Hezbollah’s leadership was based, was held up as a model. Giora Eiland was one of these military figures interviewed by Haaretz.

Israel’s deliberate targeting of health services, paramedics and other first responders in Lebanon today is a direct mirror of what it has done in Gaza for the past twelve months. In early October 2024, the Guardian interviewed Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a prominent British-Palestinian surgeon currently in Beirut, who worked in Gaza in late 2023. According to the Guardian, Abu-Sittah was “concerned that damaging the health system in south Lebanon is part of an Israeli strategy to clear areas along the Lebanon-Israel border of its inhabitants”.

It’s a horrific thought. And at first, the complete devastation of everything in Lebanon below the Litani River (30km north of Israel’s current northern boundary) might seem a fanciful project. This is an area of 1,000 square kilometres, around three times the size of the Gaza Strip.

But more than a million people have already been displaced from this area by Israel’s attacks. Israel’s military destroying society and making life unlivable in this zone is obscene, but perhaps not impossible—especially if the emphasis is on air power (to minimise Israeli losses), if there is no limit on the time in which the bombing continues and if there is a limitless supply of bombs to drop.

On these fronts, there seems to be nothing but green lights from the political and military establishment in the United States. In late September, Politico reported that senior White House figures were privately telling Israel that the US would support Israel ramping up military action in Lebanon—at the same time that the administration was publicly urging the Israeli government to “curtail” its attacks.

Similarly, David Hearst in Middle East Eye quotes Mike Herzog, Israel’s ambassador to the US, as saying: “The American administration ... did not limit us in time. They, too, understand that following Nasrallah’s assassination, there is a new situation in Lebanon and there is a chance for reshaping”.

As Hearst writes, “‘reshaping’ of Lebanon does not mean a targeted operation limited to the border. Nor was limitation in the thoughts of one Israeli army commander, who noted: ‘We have a great privilege to write history as we did in Gaza here in the north’”.

The most obvious purpose served for Israel in this “reshaping” is to destroy or at least seriously degrade Hezbollah—the only military force in the region that has pushed Israel’s forces out of occupied territory. There’s also Israel’s ongoing interest in the lines on the map that define Lebanon.

Most Zionist plans and proposals for their future state, from the late 1800s onwards, included the Litani River as a defensible northern border, or a valuable source of water, or both. The occupation of this land, especially if accompanied by the “transfer” or expulsion of its majority Shia inhabitants, also featured in hopes (stated at various stages by Ben-Gurion among others) of reshaping Lebanon into a majority Christian state—a potentially reliable ally for Israel against hostile Arab and Muslim neighbours.

There are also far more concrete and immediate incentives for Netanyahu to mount a serious military operation against Hezbollah. For one, it’s popular in Israel.

A recent poll shows that more Israelis believe Israel has lost the war in Gaza (35 percent) than those who think Israel has won (27 percent), though it’s not totally clear whether the main concern is that hostages haven’t been returned, or that the armed operations of Hamas continue to some extent, or that not every Palestinian has yet been killed or driven out of Gaza.

Launching a fresh onslaught against a more formidable opponent has led to a revival of war enthusiasm in Israel, for now at least. Though opinion polling still generally favours the opposition, one poll at the end of September showed that a Netanyahu-led coalition would get a majority of seats if a fresh election were held—the first poll to show this in 18 months.

Many of those who have been critical of Netanyahu are full of praise for the offensive in Lebanon. One of these is Defence Minister Yoav Gallant. Gallant, though a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party, was a prominent critic of Netanyahu’s Supreme Court changes in 2023 and has criticised Netanyahu several times over the past year. But in keeping with his threats last August to “send Lebanon back to the Stone Age” if Hezbollah attacked Israel, he is enthusiastic about this new war.

Similarly, the official leader of the Opposition, Benny Gantz, dropped out of Netanyahu’s war cabinet in June citing the lack of a postwar plan for Gaza and a lack of progress rescuing hostages—but Gantz is stridently in favour of the new offensive.

All of this helps Netanyahu. Attacking Lebanon gives cover to the murderous operations in Gaza, and helps tamp down any discontent among Israel’s public. And for both Israel and the United States, the degrading of Hezbollah means the degrading of their decades-old regional rival: Iran.

A war with Iran?

Netanyahu has wanted war with Iran for a long time.

It’s been widely reported that he issued orders in 2010 to prepare for an Israeli bombing raid on Iran’s nuclear facilities. On that occasion, the military hierarchy viewed the orders as illegal and insisted on a decision from Israel’s cabinet. Netanyahu backed down.

In 2012, Netanyahu’s plan to attack Iran was again thwarted, this time by Israel’s military commanders and the Obama administration. Obama had recently announced a “pivot to Asia”, basically a reorienting of the US empire for more serious competition with a rising China.

This “pivot” never really happened. The difficulties in extracting US forces from Iraq, the Arab Spring uprisings and the rise of Islamic State all limited the ability of the US to “pivot” fully out of region. This helps explain why the prospect of reducing Iran to a smoking, unstable ruin—which would quite likely require more time, focus and military intervention down the track—was not immediately appealing to the US. Netanyahu also failed to convince Trump to launch a war with Iran in late 2020.

The argument for attacking Iran, though, from the US and Israel’s perspective, was and is to contain or eliminate a regional competitor. Another motive, important for Israel, is to ensure continued US involvement in the region.

After all, without the US and its limitless supply of weaponry and bombs, Israel would be very far from the regional power that it currently is. So arguably, it’s in Israel’s interest to keep the US involved in rivalry with Iran, rather than pursuing de-escalation as it did under Obama.

That, at least, is the argument of many people in the US foreign policy establishment. One of these is Trita Parsi, a former adviser to Obama and a critic of Israel and Biden’s Israel policy. Parsi is no radical, but he accurately describes the path that Netanyahu is on regarding war with Iran:

“At this point, thanks to Biden’s blank check to Netanyahu, it seems irrelevant to Israel what Iran’s red lines are. Either Israel crosses them, and Iran reacts, which likely triggers the war Netanyahu wants, or Israel continues to attack and degrade the capabilities of Iran and its allies until Iran responds, at which point Israel gets its war. Netanyahu is happy with both scenarios.”

There are many champions of a war with Iran. Former prime minister Naftali Bennett ranted recently on Twitter: “Israel has now its greatest opportunity in 50 years, to change the face of the Middle East ... We must act *now* to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, its central energy facilities, and to fatally cripple this terrorist regime ... We have the justification. We have the tools ... This opportunity must not be missed”.

The attitude of the US administration is key here. Without the US, a serious exchange of fire between Israel and Iran will result in substantial damage to Israel. It’s only wholehearted US involvement that can tilt the scales decisively in favour of its ally.

Biden’s record of imposing “red lines” on Israel has been all but non-existent for the past year. His entire policy has consisted of mumblings and the occasional mention of a ceasefire while shipping bombs to Israel just as rapidly as Israel drops them.

Perhaps the one exception to this, however, has involved Iran. In April, after Iran gave notice of its intentions and then sent drones and some missiles to attack Israel, Israel—seemingly at the behest of the US—limited its retaliation to a single attack on part of Iran’s air defence system.

We can’t know if things will develop the same way this time around. But what we know already is damning enough. We know that in April, Israel’s “restraint” in responding to Iran’s drones and missiles served as cover for extending the genocide into Rafah.

We know that the supposedly “progressive”, Democratic wing of the US political establishment have been active partners in one of the great crimes of this already bloodstained century: an extraordinary campaign of mass death through bombing, shooting, starvation, disease and the deliberate destruction of civil infrastructure vital to sustaining life. The role of Australia’s Labor government is no less damning.

We know that all of this is fully in accord with the interests of Israel—debates between “minimalists” and “maximalists” notwithstanding—as an aggressive state committed to expansion and Jewish supremacy by whatever means necessary and to acting as an attack dog for the US empire in one of the most strategic areas on Earth.

We know enough to be horrified, and to take to the streets in solidarity with those under the bombs. And we know enough to commit to building forces utterly opposed to all of this, and to dedicate ourselves to its overthrow.