The New Middle East and the Challenges to Israel

The New Middle East and the Challenges to Israel

Jonathan Schanzer for Commentary.org

Behold, the Guardian of Israel will neither slumber nor sleep. PSALM 121:4

The last live hostages are out of Gaza. Hamas is battered and bloodied. Indeed, all of Israel’s regional foes are worse off than they were two years ago. President Donald Trump has declared the Middle East to be at peace. But the guardians of Israel know that’s not true. There is still some fighting left, both out in the open and in the shadows. It is important now for Israel to lock in the gains from these grueling two years of war. 

There has never been a war quite like the one Israel has just fought (and may still be fighting). The war played out on seven kinetic fronts—eight if you count Israel’s September 9 strike on Qatar—with additional battles in cyberspace, the mainstream media, social media, college campuses, courtrooms, the United Nations, and beyond. Growing political isolation was among the most painful aspects of this war for Israel’s traumatized 10 million residents. The world’s only Jewish state was singled out as the Jew of nations. The hate spewed forth, even as the Israelis fought for their lives against the Islamic Republic of Iran and its well-armed proxies. 

Israel stood unwavering in the face of withering assaults, one more punishing than the next. And with help from the American president, it emerged from the fighting bruised but intact. Its admittedly polarizing prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was under constant attack within and without—but never lost sight of Israel’s strategic goals and, whether all its citizens liked it or not, steered the country to the advantageous position where it is now perched. 

Israel is back where it began on October 6, 2023. It’s a politically divided nation that must begin to grapple again with core issues that were obscured by the war and must still be wrestled to the ground. The controversy over judicial matters, stemming from the country’s lack of a constitution, will once again flare up. The question of Orthodox conscription will, too. There will be some who wish to avoid these debates, for fear that Israel is too tired or too divided to tackle them. But they are inevitable, and if they can come to some resolution, that will only make Israel stronger.

The raucous domestic politics of Israel will return, not that they were ever really suspended. Netanyahu will be at the center of the noise. During his address to the Knesset on October 13, Donald Trump appealed directly to the Israeli president and the Israeli people to drop the legal cases pending against him. That is not likely to occur. But what is likely: The longest-serving prime minister in Israel’s history and the most successful democratic politician of the 21st century anywhere in the world will run for another political term. There are no limits preventing him from doing so. But even his supporters are weary of what seems like one-man rule. An Israeli soldier I spoke with this year told me she has known only one leader in her entire life, save 2022 (the one year since 2009 during which Israel had a different premier). Even so, King Bibi may be crowned again in the forthcoming elections, primarily because the field of challengers appears shallow. 

Netanyahu will be dealing with an economy in need of rebuilding. The Israelis reportedly spent a whopping 300 billion shekels on this war. That’s about $90 billion in military mobilization and munitions and benefits to the families of the fallen and injured, and payments to reservists for their time. The country is not likely to experience the stagflation that marked the period after the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The return of soldiers to their tech start-ups, not to mention the return of tourists to the country, will soon help resuscitate the economy (if the cease-fire holds). But the fiscal challenges must not be minimized, primarily because Israel is now already in the process of rebuilding its stockpiles and capabilities in preparation for the next war. Renewed conflict is all but guaranteed, though the enemy is uncertain and the time unknowable.

What is not guaranteed is Israel’s supply chain for weapons. The Biden administration gave us a glimpse of a dangerous future for Israel when it withheld weapons from the Jewish state in 2024, bending to the information onslaught that isolated Israel. This weakened Israel’s hand on the battlefield. European nations, led by the obstreperous Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, began to engage in similar virtue-signaling in the months leading up to the Trump cease-fire. All of this means that Israel will need to rethink its long-standing reliance on others for the guns and bombs that have long enabled its military dominance. But thinking about how to do that is one thing. Acting on it is quite another. Building a domestic defense-industrial base is complicated, costly, and certainly won’t happen overnight. The good news for Israel is that plans for long-term self-reliance are already in the works.

However, armaments are not the only thing being denied to Israel from the international community. In sports, academia, entertainment, and beyond, Israelis continue to be shunned and excluded. Israel’s legitimacy will likely remain under assault. The stated reason for this over the past two years was purported Israeli war crimes in Gaza. But by now it should be clear that this is a well-financed and orchestrated campaign in which Israel remains the constant target, but the ostensible grounds for the attacks are infinitely malleable.

The list of campaigns to isolate Israel is long and littered with failures. These include, but are not limited to, the Arab boycott of Israel at its founding; the oil embargo after the 1973 Yom Kippur War; the support in the West for the first and second intifadas; the Durban Conference in 2001; and the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement modeled on the campaign that brought down the apartheid regime in South Africa. Despite Israel’s pitiful efforts at public relations, the country has battled back and won. 

That said, Israel has never quite been under assault the way it is now, with the Jewish people worldwide in the crosshairs as well. New solutions are needed, and they are not hard to grasp. Just as this assault has been driven by technology, Israel will need to respond in kind. This will require the use of emerging technologies, like artificial intelligence, to alter the informational battlefield to Israel’s advantage. As it happens, Israel stands at the forefront of this space. Opportunities abound.

But the most significant opportunities awaiting Israel are of the diplomatic variety. The widening of the Abraham Accords beckons. This is certainly the goal of the American president, whose second term has taken a surprising turn. He has his eye on a Nobel Peace Prize. And, as it turns out, the war that Israel has just fought affords Donald Trump a new path to glory that did not exist even during his first term, when he brokered the historic Abraham Accords with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco. Today, there exist possibilities of normalization with Lebanon, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Indonesia, among others.

Normalization with Lebanon is possible now because Hezbollah has been hammered beyond all recognition. The government in Beirut, dysfunctional as it is, has a once-in-a-generation chance to cement the primacy that it now enjoys thanks to Israel’s punishing campaign against Hezbollah, during which the IDF decapitated the Iranian proxy’s leaders and top fighters. 

Normalization with Syria is also in view, thanks to the collapse of the Bashar al-Assad regime in December 2024. That was made possible by Israel’s beat-down of the Syrian military and the Iranian militias that should have been working to buttress Assad but instead trifled with Israel once the October 7 war erupted. It was a fatal error. Once the Assad regime fell, only to be backfilled by an unstable regime run by a purportedly reformed jihadist, the new Syrian government quickly realized it was weak and vulnerable. The notion of continued war with Israel was understood to be a liability. So President Ahmed al-Sharaa is now angling for a “security agreement” with Israel. Should that materialize, and should it be maintained, it’s not unimaginable that the two countries could enter a wider diplomatic pact.

The Saudis are Trump’s ultimate prize. The American president had Riyadh on the five-yard line to join the Abraham Accords back in 2020, only to lose the election. Team Biden then promptly erased all of Trump’s progress by alienating the Saudi leadership over human rights concerns—only to come back to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, hat in hand, seeking energy guarantees after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The Saudis demurred, but the prospects changed when Donald Trump returned to the White House. Still, MBS and the Saudis couldn’t take an open step toward Israel until the Gaza war ended. Time will take care of that. If Trump’s cease-fire holds, the Saudis could come to the table before the president’s second term ends.

In the meantime, one interesting normalization agreement may be coming sooner than anyone expected. The world’s most populous Muslim country is mulling a diplomatic pact. Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto rose before the United Nations on September 23 and declared that the Middle East would never achieve peace until Israel’s security was vouchsafed. Unbelievably, he ended his speech with the word “Shalom.” Then, less than a month later, on October 13, just as the hostages were being reunited with their families, Israeli news began to report that Subianto was on his way to Israel. Those reports were soon denied by Jakarta. It may have had something to do with his visit coinciding with the holiday of Simchat Torah, during which the Israelis could not have possibly hosted him. We’ll see what Subianto’s next moves might be.

All these deals are possible now. But the odds that they come to fruition hinge on whether the region can maintain the quiet that Donald Trump brokered. And that depends on the Islamic Republic of Iran and its proxies, as well as Turkey, Qatar, and the Muslim Brotherhood.

The regime in Iran is undeniably angling for another tussle with Israel. The 12-day war in June was a bitter defeat, punctuated by the painful destruction of the Iranian nuclear program, thanks to Trump’s remarkable surprise decision to participate. The regime is now working feverishly to reestablish its air defenses, rebuild its ballistic missile arsenal, and perhaps even rebuild its nuclear program. Israeli war planners quietly speak now of a possible need to head back to Iran as early as next year, to keep its most powerful enemy from growing any more powerful.

There is also the rest of the Iranian axis. So long as the regime maintains its ambition of destroying Israel, its proxies will do the same. This includes Hezbollah, Hamas, Shiite militias in Iraq, and the Houthis in Yemen. They continue to receive weapons, funding, and other support from the regime, albeit at far more modest levels. In other words, the “ring of fire” is not yet extinguished. This means that Israel must continue to attack them all, whether openly or in the shadows, to ensure that their strength does not return. This is the “Campaign Between the Wars” that Israel waged before October 7. It must continue to do so now, perhaps with even greater intensity.

And then there is the question of Turkey. The country with the second-largest army in NATO has openly called for the Islamic world to coalesce and destroy Israel. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a pugnacious figure with neo-Ottoman ambitions, may see an opportunity to fill a possible void left by the Iranian regime after its defeat this summer. The Erdogan regime’s key ally is the wealthy microstate of Qatar, which cannot offer Turkey much help on the battlefield. But it can certainly help fund Turkish ambitions, while offering support through the networks of Islamist adherents to the Muslim Brotherhood movement that Doha has quietly cultivated over decades. Indeed, a new enemy front may be forming.

The challenges and possibilities for Israel right now are enormous. Israel has an opportunity to wrestle with its domestic demons, secure the military wins it notched, and convert diplomatic possibilities into pacts. None of this would be feasible without the Gaza cease-fire, which was primarily the result of Israeli fortitude (and a fair amount of regional exhaustion). But this is no time for a breather. For Israel, after two years of a grueling war, a new kind of hard work begins.

Photo: Amir Levy/Getty Images