Israel after Fordow

In a matter of months, Israel has struck at four states, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran, exploiting its present aerial supremacy over the region. In September 2024 it wiped out much of Hezbollah’s command structure, dropped eighty bombs on Nasrallah’s home, blasted Beirut and the Bekaa Valley, then reoccupied southern Lebanon. In October it destroyed Iran’s main air defences, after Khamenei responded to Nasrallah’s death with a token missile shower. In December it greeted the capture of Damascus by al-Nusra insurgents with extensive bombing of Syria’s undefended infrastructure. In March 2025 it ripped up Trump’s Gaza ceasefire to continue the shelling of homes, hospitals, refugee camps and food queues, expanded its torture centres and blocked food aid, imposing widespread starvation. In the West Bank, it has driven thousands from their homes and authorized twenty-two new Jewish settlements. On 13 June 2025 it launched an attack on Iran, supposedly aimed at setting back Tehran’s nuclear programme on grounds of Israel’s ‘right to self-defence’, but actually targeting the regime itself—the military high command, irgc leaders, intelligence chiefs, Basij, energy and broadcasting infrastructure. Finally, it succeeded in drawing Washington into its war on Iran. On 22 June, American B2s dropped their 30,000-pound payloads on Fordow and Natanz, while a us submarine launched 30-plus cruise missiles at the sites.

There have been few such explosive bids for regional dominance since the upsurge of Imperial Japan, annexing Korea, Taiwan and southern Manchuria—or, perhaps, South Africa’s ‘total strategy’ in the 1970s and 80s, targeting Angola, Namibia and Mozambique. Israel’s is different in many key respects. First, though Japan had London and Washington’s backing through to the 1920s, it acted alone. It possessed, a British diplomat noted, ‘both the desire and the capabilities’ to do so.footnote¹ Israel’s desires still outstrip its capabilities. Early Zionist leaders had no doubt about the need for imperial backing. The infant statelet could not have survived the 1938 Arab Revolt without British arms, nor got away with the Nakba if British troops had not stood back to allow it, nor achieved international recognition without Washington to promote it at the un. Israel has fought tenaciously for operational autonomy, building up a $200 billion war chest to cover any blips in America’s annual $3.5 billion assistance, but an irreducible minimum of diplomatic and material dependency remains; it still needs Washington to keep Egypt chained.footnote²

Second, Japan had a long pre-history of relatively peaceful urban development before the arrival of us warships in the 1850s; it entered a world stage already divided between great imperial powers and set out to carve a place among them, if only to avoid becoming a colony itself. Israel was founded as an ethno-confessional settler statelet, mentally and materially surrounded by a ‘wall of bayonets’, in Jabotinsky’s term: ‘Zionism is a colonizing venture and therefore it stands or falls on the question of armed force.’ No native population would willingly accept an alien majority; if a Jewish home in Palestine was the aim, it would have to be imposed.footnote³ Though Labour Zionism liked to claim it had no conflict of interest with Arab workers, only with effendis and landowners, its military practice—the Nakba, 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973—followed the same logic. In the Zionist narrative, Jewish ownership of the land is a realization of God’s promise, in a direct line from the golden age chronicled in the Pentateuch, while the armed forces are the core ideological state apparatus, the social instrument that transformed European—and Arab, African, Soviet—Jewry into Israelis: ‘the nation is the creation of the army, which is in turn the crowning glory of the nation.’footnote⁴

A third difference: Imperial Japan set about a far-reaching programme of industrial and infrastructural development in the lands it conquered, mobilizing forced labour to build ports, railways, plants and mines. In its half-century rule over the West Bank and Gaza, Israel has reduced much of the Palestinian population to mendicancy, while its favoured contractors have become hyper-rich. De-development and ‘regime degradation’ have been its aim in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq. Rather than annexation it aims at the fragmentation of surrounding states, with the iaf as their aerial overseer. Here it is closer to apartheid South Africa’s pattern of pre-emptive strikes, targeted killings and cash for local proxy forces. But South Africa’s goal was political: it was fighting broadly Soviet-aligned liberation movements as a Cold War ally of the us; absent that condition, the whole apartheid structure collapsed. Israel’s goals are ethno-nationalist and its relationship to us foreign policy has been more intimate, if objectively more fraught.

Comparison serves to underline Israel’s unique character as an ethno-confessional settler state, politically autonomous but existentially dependent upon a distant superpower in which its co-religionists occupy a significant but not dominant position. Zionism has always had to fight on three fronts: crushing native Palestinian resistance, combating Jewish-diaspora scepticism and battling for Great Power support. A century of precarious dependency, with setbacks at London’s hands in 1922 and 1939, then Washington’s in 1956 and, for an agonizing moment, 1973—before the airlift of us tanks to the desert battlefields allowed it to storm into Egypt—has taught Zionist leaders indelible lessons in the unreliability of the big powers. The abyss that gaped in 1973 brought home more dramatically than ever the need for a shaping hand in us Middle East policy. Israel had ample military capacity in tanks, planes and troops for a low-level colonial war against the poorly armed Palestinians; to take on the Arab states in its neighbourhood, it needed the superpower. From the mid-70s onward, with cumulative effect, Jewish leaders mounted an unprecedented political-organizational campaign to re-tool aipac and its sister organizations to solidify support for Israel in Congress, the Executive, the think-tank world and the media, underpinned by the cultural infrastructure for a novel brand of Holocaust Memorialism that equated any criticism of Israel with the onset of a new Judeocide.footnote⁵

Since then, the material wealth of the Jewish-American bourgeoisie has grown in tandem with the expansion of the financial sector and general inflation of asset prices. The marriages of Chelsea Clinton and Ivanka Trump are testimony to the cultural symbiosis of goyish and Jewish inherited new wealth and the pro-Israel stance that informs America’s oligarchic conviviality. Meanwhile America’s high-tech giants have lined the coast near Tel Aviv with massive r & d departments, staffed by the idf officer class, with revolving doors to Israel’s military-intelligence apparatus.footnote⁶ Richer now than in the 1990s, its human capital boosted by a million highly qualified ex-Soviet immigrants, and politically more confident, having seen off—by disdaining even the ostensible restraints of the Oslo accords—the most the West could offer by way of engineering a palatable Palestinian surrender, Netanyahu’s Israel can convincingly present itself as a winner against a backdrop of shattered Arab states.footnote⁷

But if the conditions of Israel’s precarious dependency have evolved, it remains a tiny country imposing itself by force in a hostile region, still reliant for its expansion on Washington’s backing, which cannot always be assured. Though Israel’s grip on us Middle East policy has strengthened, the stakes are getting higher, and American national interests more obviously distinct from those of the Jewish state. To have Egypt subordinate to Washington is a rational us goal; to keep its 120 million people under military and police-state lockdown would be unnecessary, if not for the additional strains imposed by its rulers having to turn a blind eye to the Palestinians’ fate. Saddam’s Iraq was no threat to the us and had requested permission from it before invading Kuwait; Bush’s occupation of Iraq, pressed by the Israel hawks, is now considered a mistake. Preserving Israel’s nuclear monopoly need not in itself be a us concern; Iran would never attack North America and a symmetrical deterrent would be more likely to stabilize the region, as has de facto been the case with India and Pakistan. Since 2012, a semi-official Washington common sense has held that the Middle East takes up too much bandwidth, distracting from larger imperial tasks like China and nato’s eastern border, and bogging the us down in otherwise unnecessary wars.