Israel’s escalating wars reflect a long-standing strategy of military dominance, but recent conflicts are exposing its limits and internal contradictions.

It is tempting to argue that Israel’s new military doctrine is predicated on perpetual war – but the reality is more complex.

Not that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would object to such an arrangement. On the contrary, his relentless drive for military escalation suggests precisely that. After all, his openly declared quest for a “greater Israel” would require exactly this kind of permanent militarism – endless expansion and sustained regional destruction.

However, Israel cannot sustain an open-ended fight on multiple fronts indefinitely.

Israeli officials boast about fighting on “seven fronts,” but many of these are, in military terms, largely imaginary rather than sustained battlefields.

The real wars, however, are entirely of Israel’s making: from the genocide in Gaza to its unprovoked regional wars.

Still, that fact should not blind us to another reality: in the lead-up to the war on Iran, and in the escalation against Lebanon, there was near-total consensus among Jewish Israelis. An Israel Democracy Institute survey conducted on March 2–3 found that 93 per cent of Jewish Israelis supported the joint US-Israeli attack on Iran. Support cut across all political camps.

The same enthusiasm for war accompanied the Gaza genocide and the various wars and escalations in Lebanon.

Even Yair Lapid – so often and so falsely marketed abroad as a “dove” – fully backed these wars, admitting after the Iran ceasefire that Israel had entered them with........

© Pearls and Irritations