The October 7, 2023, Hamas massacre, which claimed over 1,200 Israeli lives, exposed more than intelligence failures. It revealed the collapse of Israel’s decades-long strategy: outsourcing its survival to a U.S.-led order that profits from its vulnerability.
For years, Israel fought Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran under American constraints, trading decisive victory for diplomatic legitimacy. Even Operation Midnight Hammer (June 2025), the Trump administration’s much-hyped bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites, proved strategically hollow. Leaked assessments confirmed the strikes failed to cripple Tehran’s capabilities, underscoring a grim reality: Israel’s existential threats persist because U.S. policy prioritizes managed conflict over resolution.
This essay explores how, far from the myth of Israel dominance over Washington, America has systematically weakened Israel’s strategic position; first by imposing territorial concessions, then by trapping it in a two-state delusion. This framework has enriched the U.S. military-industrial complex and a transnational elite of national security profesionals and lobbyists while leaving Israel isolated, encircled, and perpetually at war.
Israel’s Post-1967 Concessions: How America’s Rules-Based Order Fueled a Precarious Conflict
Regardless of anyone’s stance on the relative claims and rights and wrongs of Israel v Palestine, The Six-Day War should have been definitive. Facing annihilation by a coalition of Arab armies, Israel’s preemptive strike secured the Sinai, Gaza, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights, all the territories it needed to provide critical depth and lasting security against future invasions. By any historical standard, this was a legitimate outcome: when wars are allowed to be won or lost, they always redraw borders, and especially in the case of ethnic conflict, settle the matter. Had the Arab coalition won, Israel surely would have been erased.
Yet something unusual, almost uniquely so, happened in the case of Israel. Instead of consolidating its victory in the way most nation-states have historically done, Israel became the first modern power to win a war, capture territory critical to its survival, and then hand it back to the defeated enemy. The reasons why are manifold and disputed, but the underlying and ultimate reason is that Israel ran headfirst into the postwar “rules-based international order”, a system backstopped by the United States and designed, above all, to prevent the normalization of territorial change through war, even when justified by self-defense.
Under immense U.S. pressure, Israel accepted UN Security Council Resolution 242, a vaguely worded document that became the foundation for “land-for-peace.” While Israeli leaders raised serious objections behind closed doors, they were successfully sold the idea that accepting the resolution would give them some leeway in keeping some 1967 war gains, while ensuring international recognition, locking in America’s long-term support, and giving Israel “strategic legitimacy”. It was a fateful tradeoff. In choosing diplomatic acceptance over military finality, Israel effectively outsourced its foreign policy to Washington, fatefully placing its national strategy inside the framework of American global norms.
Israel’s Strategic Concessions and outsourcing of foreign policy
The 1979 Camp David Accords set the precedent. Israel returned the entire Sinai Peninsula, sacrificing vital oil fields and buffer zones, in exchange for a cold peace with Egypt, one sustained not by mutual goodwill but by $1 billion in annual U.S. aid to Cairo. Egyptian officials have long admitted that without American subsidies, their commitment to the treaty would evaporate overnight. Public sentiment remains fiercely anti-Israel, and any shift in Egypt’s fragile political order, e.g. a Muslim Brotherhood resurgence or another Arab Spring, could unravel the agreement entirely. In this sense, Camp David did not secure peace; it outsourced Israeli security to Washington’s wallet and left it hostage to the internal stability of a deeply ambivalent neighbor and the ability of the US to keep it on side.
In 1994, the pattern repeated with Jordan. Israel formally recognized Jordan’s custodianship over Jerusalem’s Islamic holy sites, further diluting its own claims to its capital. The U.S. brokered the deal with promises of debt relief and aid, but the result was another paper-thin partnership. Jordan’s population, overwhelmingly Palestinian, harbors deep hostility toward Israel, and its monarchy survives through repression and foreign patronage. The treaty did nothing to alter the region’s fundamental power dynamics.
Then came the 2000 withdrawal from southern Lebanon, a retreat engineered not by Israeli strategic calculus but by longstanding overt and covert American pressure. Declassified cables reveal that U.S. officials, particularly in the CIA and Clinton administration, viewed Israel’s presence as a Cold War relic. They pushed for withdrawal, dismissing Hezbollah as a localized resistance movement rather than the Iranian proxy it would soon become. Israel’s hasty exit left its Christian allies in the South Lebanon Army to face Hezbollah’s vengeance, and within years, the group had transformed southern Lebanon into a launchpad for war.
The Oslo Accords: Illusions of Peace and the Fatal Embrace of the Two-State Trap
Through the 1993- 1995 Oslo Accords, Israel recognized the PLO and promised to give back more territory; in return, the PLO promised to renounce terrorism and recognize Israel’s right to exist. The accords were hailed in the West, especially in Washington and Brussels, as a bold step toward lasting peace. But the Accords didn’t emerge from Israeli strategic interest; they were the product of U.S. and European pressure, and of a desperate Israeli elite trying to buy international legitimacy. The assumption behind Oslo, that Palestinian nationalism, if granted space and funding, would moderate, was naïve. Arafat himself undermined this fantasy just months after signing, comparing Oslo to Muhammad’s Treaty of Hudaybiyyah, a temporary truce to be broken when conditions favored the weaker party. Instead of peace, the years after its signing saw a surge in suicide bombings and civilian deaths. The newly created Palestinian Authority proved corrupt and unable (or unwilling) to curb militant groups. Israel, meanwhile, was forced to supply it with weapons, money, and diplomatic cover, all under the pressure of American mediation. But the most damaging result was psychological and diplomatic: Israel was now committed, explicitly or implicitly, to the two-state paradigm. This idea, never seriously accepted by the Arab world before Oslo, became entrenched as the only “legitimate” solution. Yet, though no-one is allowed to say it in polite conversation, a Palestinian state is, was, and remains, fatal for Israel.
A Palestinian state based on the 1949 Armistice Lines ( the “1967 borders”) would reduce Israel’s width in its central corridor, from the Mediterranean to the West Bank border, to just 9 kilometers at its narrowest point. This would place Ben-Gurion Airport, Tel Aviv, and key military bases within minutes of mortar, rocket, or drone attack , or even armored incursion, if a hostile force gained a foothold.
Furthermore, Dimona, home to Israel’s nuclear weapons center, is located in the Negev Desert, about 30km south of Hebron. If a future Palestinian state controlled the high ground around Hebron and southern West Bank areas, rocket, drone, or commando attacks from that elevated terrain could place Dimona within easy strike range. In the unlikely event that today’s Palestinian leaders honor a deal and bear no historical grievance, there’s no guarantee their successors would. Regimes change. Populations radicalize. Goodwill is not a lasting security strategy.
Strategic Gaslighting
Strategic depth and sovereign control, not wishful thinking, are the only true guarantors of state security, as a rule, not just in the Middle East. Why then has the US been so insistent on imposing impossible terms on Israel? Readers outside the West (especially Russia and China), will know the answer very well: the United States promotes a so-called “rules-based international order,” not out of regard for morality or universal standards, but as a tool of strategic manipulation. Behind the language of rights, sovereignty, and norms lies a doctrine carefully designed to prevent the emergence of strong, territorially secure, and independent powers that could challenge American primacy.
Under this system, defensive territorial control is cast as aggression, spheres of influence are deemed illegitimate, and the rights of small ethnic groups or separatist movements are elevated and supplied funds, and sometimes arms, to assert themselves against the target government. When Russia acts to neutralize NATO expansion on its borders, or when China fortifies its position around Taiwan (to make sure it doesn’t remain the US “unsinkable aircraft carrier” in the South China Sea), Washington responds with cries of “violation of international law”, even as it actively arms, funds, and politicizes those territories. This is strategic gaslighting, and Israel, contrary to the mythology of being America’s closest ally, has been one of its most manipulated victims. For all the soaring rhetoric of “shared values” and “unbreakable bonds,” the United States has never wanted an Israel that is truly sovereign or strategically independent. It has wanted a controlled outpost: heavily armed but deeply dependent on American weaponry, strategically useful but never dominant.
The Reality of US Israel Policy
In truth, the U.S. has never tolerated the rise of any independent regional power in the Middle East, whether secular Iran under the Shah, revolutuonary Iran under the Ayatollahs, or Israel after its 1967 military triumph. A powerful, self-directed state, one that could unite, stabilize, or influence the region on its own terms, would threaten the very structure of American influence: arms sales, military bases, regional balancing, and above all, the global primacy of the petrodollar. The Middle East, in U.S. strategic doctrine, must remain fragmented, unstable, and perpetually reliant on American mediation, firepower, and currency systems.
This is the deeper logic behind Washington’s behavior, not just toward adversaries like Iran, but also toward supposed allies like Israel. Every time Israel approaches strategic autonomy, American policy acts to pull it back into the client-state framework. Whether through diplomatic pressure, arms dependency, or outright intelligence manipulation, Israel is reminded that its leash is long, but it is still a leash.
The Yom Kippur War laid this bare. In 1973, as Egyptian and Syrian forces prepared a surprise attack, Israeli intelligence picked up troubling signs, but according to former NSA official Bruce Brill, the U.S. withheld critical SIGINT (signals intelligence) from Israel, despite full knowledge of the impending assault. Why? As Brill and others argue, Washington deliberately allowed Israel to suffer a temporary military setback in order to soften its position for postwar diplomacy and to regain American primacy in regional negotiations.
Intellectual Capture and the prohibtion on One State Solution
Russia and China, as large enduring civilizational states, see through this facade and are ultimately willing to put their strategic depth above any condemnation, sanctions, diplomatic isolation. Israel is small, and its post 1967 dependence on American aid and diplomatic cover is very real. Yet it is still remarkable, and deeply unfortunate, just how far its leadership has submitted to the ideological constraints of the U.S.-led order. Indeed, at least until October 7th, what could be seen is not just strategic deference, but intellectual capture. The Israeli foreign policy establishment doesn’t merely pretend to believe in the American vision, it forgot any other possibility could exist outside of it: the One State Solution.
For decades, Israel has cycled through wars, ceasefires, withdrawals, and “mowing the grass” operations. All of them have failed. Why? Because the basic premise is flawed: the idea that Gaza—or the Palestinian question more broadly—can be managed within the parameters of the two-state model or through cohabitation under ongoing hostility. In reality, the solution is very simple, so simple, in fact, that its clarity is what makes it so threatening to Western ideological elites. A OSS means the full and final sovereignty of Israel over all land west of the Jordan River. It would indeed mean relocation of the Palestinians through humane, incentivized relocation.
This is not cruelty; it is realism. It is what every state in history did before the advent of the so-called “rules-based order” when wars were allowed to be won and ethnic conflicts allowed to be decided. In the wake of World War II, millions of Germans were expelled from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other parts of Central Europe. On the surface, such mass expulsions appear monstrous. But the result? No permanent refugee crises. No forever wars. No generations of festering ethnic grievance. The borders were redrawn, populations resettled, people moved on and they and their grandchildren prospered.
Compare that to the never-ending crisis of the Palestinians, a people frozen in time by international law and trapped in a permanent victim identity, weaponized by others but never empowered to move forward. Had the Palestinians been resettled, compensated, rehabilitated, and relocated, in the 1940s, 1950s, or even the 1990s, today they might live peaceful lives in Jordan, the Gulf, or the West. Instead, they live under warlords or UNRWA dependency, in a limbo preserved not for their benefit, but for others’ leverage.
The ideological capture was complete when throughout the 1980s and 1990s, under American pressure, Israel did not just reject the one-state solution, it actually uprooted and criminalized it. Figures like Rabbi Meir Kahane, who advocated full Israeli sovereignty and population transfer with compensation, were denounced not only as extremists but as existential threats to Israel’s standing in the “international community.” His movement was banned and writings censored. But it wasn’t the Palestinians who feared him, it was the Israeli elite, terrified that his realism would upset their fragile dance with Washington.
Under American auspices, the Israeli state waged war not just on terrorism but on any thought that challenged the Oslo paradigm or the myth of peaceful partition.
The Failures of the Neocons
Though there was an internal prohibition on a One State solution in line with US norms, there nevertheless was a need to deal with the unworkable realities of the two-state framework. And so a new political and ideological class emerged. Enter the neoconservatives, and with them, the rise of the “Israel lobby” as a formalized instrument of influence and pleader of funds and gifts from Washington.
While much has been written about the neoconservative shaping of a “pro-Israel” stance in US foreign policy, their real accomplishment was to engineer a security doctrine that did more to entrench Israel in endless conflict than to ensure its long-term sovereignty. They were particularly key in the transformation of Israel’s defense posture. Rather than building on indigenous capacity and strategic independence, as the early Israeli state had done, the Israeli defense establishment were encouraged to be increasingly dependent on American military “aid” (nearly 4 billion dollars a year mandated to be spent on US equipment), doctrine, and technology. This shift gutted Israel’s once-innovative arms industry, replacing self-reliance with dependency on hitech American systems (the scarcity of Patriot missiles in the recent 12 day war was palpable). The United States, for its part, was happy to subsidize a “permanent junior partner” in its Middle East architecture, using Israel as a forward base for both military projection and regional disruption.
The neocons, who were at the heart of U.S. foreign policy during the George W. Bush administration, were also instrumental in setting the stage for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Many were ideologically aligned with Israel’s security concerns and viewed Saddam Hussein’s regime as a regional threat who could be neutralized with American arms. However, the dream of making the Middle East safe for Israel, turned into a nightmare of failed states, empowered proxies, and an empowered Iran. In the end, the Iraq War did nothing to advance Israeli sovereignty, resolve its existential dilemmas, or produce peace.
Nevertheless, this record of failure still empowered this national security whose job was not to win wars, but to manage narratives.
The Failures of the Israel Lobby
The belief in narrative management, was was how Israel’s elite justified their strategic submission. They came to believe that the US could be influenced from within to adopt Israeli goals. The mechanism for this supposed leverage was the Israel lobby, a sprawling network of pro-Israel advocacy groups, think tanks, donors, and congressional allies that, at least on the surface, seemed like one of the most successful influence operations in modern political history.
Indeed, the visible wins were impressive. U.S. presidents from both parties declared their “unshakable” support for Israel. Congress routinely passed resolutions affirming Israel’s right to self-defense. Aid packages grew year after year. And every aspiring American politician made the ritual pilgrimage to AIPAC, promising to stand with Israel in speeches that often sounded more Zionist than the Knesset.
But beneath the surface, a sober truth was forgotten: this entire framework rested not on Israeli terms, but on American ones. No matter how much apparent clout the Israel lobby amassed in Washington, it never translated into permission to assert full Israeli sovereignty. A one-state solution, an actual resolution, was never on the table. Instead, the lobby worked to manage Israeli dissatisfaction with the two-state model by offering a more palatable, but ultimately dishonest, narrative: that the problem wasn’t the framework itself, but the character of the Palestinians. That, were it not for their supposed addiction to terror or cultural intransigence, peace would be possible and a Palestinian state acceptable.
But this was never an honest assessment, and it was never sustainable. Figures from a more honest time, like Ze’ev Jabotinsky and Meir Kahane (though polarizing) grasped a basic, unflinching truth: the Palestinian claim to the land is not an abberance. It is exactly what one would expect from a people who, rightly or wrongly, believe they are fighting for their homeland. It is profoundly naïve, even insulting, to imagine that Palestinians could be permanently pacified with promise of a political enclave, jobs, infrastructure, or improved living standards, while their fundamental political narrative remains unfulfilled.
By insisting that the only real problem was Palestinian behavior, it encouraged delusion, postponed reckoning, and obscured the reality that any genuine resolution requires not better PR, but hard, unsentimental choices about sovereignty, territory, and finality.
But illusions cannot last forever.
The Unraveling: October 7 and the Collapse of the Lobby Strategy
October 7th didn’t just expose a security failure: it shattered the illusion that Israel could manage conflict indefinitely while securing Western support. The Israel lobby’s decades-old strategy -win over Washington, contain the Palestinians, and preserve the status quo- collapsed in a single day of unimaginable violence.
Faced with the logic of survival, Israel has finally begun moving toward the only realistic outcome: de facto annexation and full security control over Gaza and other territories necessary for its survival. But this return to strategic clarity has triggered a ferocious backlash. The Western political and media class, has turned sharply hostile. Infact, accusations of genocide and apartheid have erupted from every sector of Western society. There is a simple reason: social media.
Decades of carefully cultivated relationships in Washington, bipartisan support, and billions in donor infrastructure are being blown away a a global media storm fueled by videos spread on Tik-tok and Telegram. Viral footage from Gaza, often stripped of context, spreads within minutes, overwhelming nuance with raw emotional impact.
For the first time, Israel is decisively losing Western public opinion. And worse, the lobby’s success has become a liability. Once-fringe conspiracies about Jewish or Zionist control, once confined to the margins, are now entering mainstream conversation. Epstein, Mossad, and “Zionist influence” are no longer taboo topics, even in elite circles.
Meanwhile, demographic and cultural shifts in the West have compounded the problem. As Western governments spent the last few decades bombing the world they simultaneously “invited the world”. Mass migration has resulted in the importation of a generation of Muslim voters now shaping domestic politics. In the UK, France, Canada, and parts of the U.S., these communities are increasingly vocal about the galvanizing issue of Palestine—and politicians, especially on the left, are responding (. Palestine has become the rallying cry for a growing bloc that the Israel lobby cannot silence or sideline.
Already, Britain and France have indicated they will recognize a Palestinian state after summer 2025, regardless of Israeli objections. These are not outliers, they are signals of what’s to come. In the old world, the Israel lobby only had to win over Western elites. In the new one, these elites will be forced to win over their new demographic base.
The Way forward
The mirage is dispelled. The old strategy—containment, lobbying, compromise, restraint—is dead. What comes next must be a new doctrine grounded not in appeasing the West, but in surviving it.
For the first time in a generation, Israel must face the reality that its long-term security lies not in appealing to Western politicians, courting Western public opinion, or submitting to liberal international frameworks, but in asserting its own doctrine of strategic autonomy, grounded in the hard truths of geography, demography, and military necessity.
That doctrine must begin with a clear rejection of the two-state illusion—a fantasy that only ever served American interests, not Israeli survival. It must include the consolidation of defensible borders, the reassertion of full sovereignty from the Jordan River to the sea, and a decisive break from the idea that war must never be won. It must also mean ending the policy of self-deterrence—where fear of bad press or Western outrage outweighs the cost of insecurity and terror.
And critically, it requires breaking the ideological and material dependence on the American-dominated system. That means diversifying military procurement, building new regional partnerships, and exploring strategic dialogues with non-Western powers—including India, Russia, and China—who, whatever their flaws, understand and respect the language and principles of statecraft, not performative liberalism.
Frank Levin is a writer and analyst specializing in Israeli politics and Middle Eastern geopolitics. He holds a master’s degree in International Relations and Public Policy from Tsinghua University, where his research focused on great power competition and regional security dynamics. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and deep regional insight, Levin writes with a sharp eye for power, sovereignty, and the strategic fault lines shaping the modern Middle East
