The region has been paying a horrifying price for its conflict with Israel for the past half century. We were told that Israel was a fragile polity propped up more by foreign support with limited domestic cohesion and legitimacy. This portrayal gave rise to a broad range of nationalist, Islamist, and leftist narratives that predicted Israel would inevitably and imminently collapse. These ideological projections often filled the void created by a lack of serious political projects, allowing their advocates to justify evading their historical responsibility toward their peoples and their countries.
On the other side, however, another illusion, one that might be even more dangerous, has begun to take hold: Israel no longer needs politics or political ideas. Its dominance ensures an eternal deterrent that can replace the recognition that it once sought through peace accords, normalization, and negotiated settlements, as Israel can reshape the region unilaterally through force alone, without negotiations or partnerships.
That is precisely the message conveyed by the strike on Damascus in the aftermath of the events in Sweida: a strike that was remarkable in its timing and intensity, creating a shocking spectacle in the heart of the capital. It was a geopolitical message: Israel is no longer satisfied with merely preempting active threats and is now ready to fully leverage its military superiority to impose its terms.
Although the strike came on the heels of a flurry of reports about promising peace talks between Damascus and Tel Aviv, Israel’s attack has undermined the pragmatic view that neutralizing threats to regional stability necessarily entails building alliances, deepening mutual understandings, and pursuing shared interests.
It is as if Israel is now living its own “Nasserite moment,” applying the maxim that “what is taken by force can only be recovered by force” but from the opposite side. It seeks perpetual hegemony, seeing any settlement as an existential threat and political recognition as a burden, an obstacle to its pursuit of a new regional model. This model is being built in the skies, without partners, negotiations, or even the need for mediators.
However, Nasserism collapsed when it led the masses to believe that speeches could replace a real political project. Its collapse is a cautionary tale that should worry the architects of Israel’s current model, as they seem to believe that F-35 fighter jets replace political horizons and unburden Tel Aviv of the need to articulate a political vision- not only to its adversaries, but also to its allies, its own society, and the wider world.
Conflating Israel’s legitimate need for effective deterrent tools and its ability to employ these tools within a sustainable strategy could prove fatal. It needs a vision underpinned by a coherent domestic political framework and clear regional and international backing on how to achieve a viable political project for the region. The alternative now looming on the horizon is a state of perpetual attrition, for Israel and the region: resources are depleted, social fragmentation deepens, and the legitimacy of political and strategic decision-making erodes. In this scenario, seeking to impose stability by force becomes nothing more than fuel for chronic instability.
This model also threatens to upend what remains of the region’s balance, undermine pragmatic realism, and discredit moderation and arguments in favor of building bridges between Israel and its surroundings.
This alarming lack of political vision, even for conflict management, that has rendered military superiority into a kind of national identity and the region into an open theater of operations, has another repercussion: it frees rejectionists from the burden of adaptation and change. It allows them to reproduce their obsolete narratives about Israel’s existence and its supposed determination to "divide and weaken Arab states."
Israel has failed to establish the legitimacy of its regional standing, despite its longstanding military and technological superiority, because it rarely moved beyond the logic of perpetual defense. It has defined itself through opposition rather than proposing solutions, through fears rather than aspirations. Today, Israel appears content to be on offense constantly, from Khan Yunis to Isfahan. Between these two postures, it is difficult to point to a sustained effort to develop a political or moral narrative that consolidates its durability in the Middle East, not merely in its geographical survival.
What Israel fails to grasp, and what we too often overlook, is that the Middle East is not in an arms race but in a race of narratives.
In this regard, Arabs also have a part to play. A coherent political project for de-isolating the crises of Gaza, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Sudan, and Iraq, as the region needs a comprehensive vision that redefines the possible. Compounding this failure is hesitation and skepticism of the notion that broken regimes can be politically restructured, that they are not inherently doomed to reproduce pre-collapse conditions. The collapse of regimes should not be seen merely as a “situation to be managed.” Indeed, it is an opportunity to impose alternative political frameworks that underpin durable domestic settlements.
In truth, the real threat, both to Israel and to us, is political fragmentation. The Arabs seek refuge in geography, as though it were a permanent source of legitimacy. Meanwhile, Israel relies on militarism, as though it could even constitute a sustainable political project.
Reducing politics to aerial and intelligence superiority, legitimacy to mere geography or history, can create a massive vacuum; in this region, vacuums are almost always swiftly filled by an adversary or catastrophe.
