Attrition Wars & Rise of Phoenix
In the context of current Middle East crisis, Israel has consistently viewed any lasting US-Iran peace or nuclear accord with deep scepticism, fearing that sanctions relief and diplomatic normalization would strengthen Iran economically and militarily while leaving its nuclear capabilities largely intact. Israeli governments have constantly argued that Iran could exploit negotiations to preserve its strategic ambitions and continue supporting regional proxy terror groups hostile to Israel. In contrast, the United States, while affirming its resolve to Israel’s security, has repeatedly cautioned Israel against unilateral military action that could derail diplomacy, trigger a wider regional conflict, or draw Washington into another Middle Eastern war. President Donald Trump’s administration has emphasized exhausting diplomatic avenues, while privately and publicly warning Israel against pre-emptive strikes during sensitive negotiations. Israel, however, has maintained that it reserves the sovereign right to act independently if it concludes that a proxy group is posing a serious threat to its security or Iran is approaching a nuclear weapons capability, insisting that no international agreement can override its obligation to ensure own national security.
Therefore, Israel’s deep scepticism toward the recent US-Iran interim peace agreement stems from their calculation that the alleged accord prioritizes short-term economic stabilization over long-term regional security. By offering upfront concessions such as unfreezing billions in Iranian assets, waiving core oil sanctions while going soft over the nuclear programme and missile development, the settlement provides Tehran with immediate economic relief and other concessions while leaving its underlying nuclear infrastructure and aspects of regional threat largely intact. Furthermore, because the accord mandates a broad ceasefire that explicitly covers fronts like Lebanon limiting Israel’s operations against terror network, Israel’s apprehensions are that the framework will, on one hand, prematurely curtail Israeli operations; on the other hand, effectively allow deeply entrenched proxies to reconstitute and refurbish their forces under a diplomatic shield without dismantling the strategic architecture that triggered the war. This being a complex issue, the writer intends to explore the subject in two parts: The first part explores civilizational conflict, wars of attrition and rise of the State of Israel while the second part would address more recent developments, complexities and way forward to resolve the Middle East crisis.
Geography & Demography
Geographically, Israel is conspicuous for its extreme structural narrowness and highly concentrated topography, compressed into a total land area of just about 22,000 square kilometres along the eastern Mediterranean. The country is defined by distinct parallel features: a rather densely populated coastal plain, a central spine of rugged highlands including the Judean Mountains, and the expansive & arid Negev Desert that covers more than half of its southern territory. Significantly, at its most vital economic and population corridor, including the coastal strip anchoring Tel Aviv, the country narrows down to a mere 15 kilometres in width, thereby leaving its major urban centres and critical infrastructure vulnerable within direct, short-range striking distance of the country’s immediate land borders.
Demographically, Israel’s population of approximately 9.6 million (UN data) to 10.2 million (official Israeli data) reflects a complex, highly stratified multi-ethnic and multi-religious fabric. The majority Jewish population roughly constitute about 73.5%, which is further split across diverse cultural lineages and deep socio-religious lines ranging from secular to ultra-Orthodox. Then Israeli Arab citizens, predominantly Sunni Muslims alongside smaller Christian and Druze communities, constitute the state’s largest minority at a little over 21% of the population. This unique population layout operates under an exceptionally high national growth rate for a developed economy, more so among the minorities resulting in an increasingly dense, urbanized society primarily clustered in the central districts and metropolitan Jerusalem.
This paradoxically compressed geography and fractured demography present many internal uncertainties and vulnerabilities posing the traditional “melting pot” concept of the state. Geographically, the sharp polarization between the highly developed coastal tech-hubs and the less developed periphery fuels socio-economic alienation. The extreme lack of strategic depth poses a threat that any domestic unrest along ethnic or political fault lines can instantly paralyze the nation’s core transit routes and industrial centres. Demographically, too, the contrasting birth rates among different communities, particularly the rapid expansion of the non-Zionist ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) community as well as the Arab minority, create a serious societal friction. As these communities grow, the widening rift over fundamental civic responsibilities (such as mandatory military service exemptions), economic burdens, and the very definition of the state’s national identity threatens to erode the foundational social arrangement from within.
Civilizational History of Jews Persecution
The civilizational history of the Jewish people spans nearly four millennia, tracing its origin to the ancient Near East during the Bronze Age. Originally based in the Levant region, Jewish identity crystallized through a distinct ethno-religious framework that professed ethical monotheism in the ancient world. The vintage and glory of Jewish civilization reached its peak during the United Monarchy under Kings David and Solomon in the 10th century BCE, marked by the construction of the First Temple of faith in Jerusalem. This era not only established Jerusalem as a political capital, but also as the permanent spiritual and cultural anchor of the Jewish identity. The period is often cited as the golden age of sovereignty, literary output and architectural achievement that survived many subsequent subjugations by successive empires.
The first major challenge and disruption to Jews sovereign continuity came with the rise of Christianity within the Roman Empire. Following the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE and the suppression of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 CE by the Roman forces, the Jewish population was systematically expelled or enslaved, turning them into a minority in their own homeland. As Christianity had transitioned from a persecuted sect to the state religion of Rome under Emperor Constantine, the theological anti-Judaism became codified into the Christian Rome’s imperial law. Jews were stripped of citizenship rights, barred from public offices, and subjected to many social and legal restrictions designed to relegate them to a permanent subordinate status across Europe, setting a precedent for centuries of systemic marginalization.
However, the geopolitics of the region again shifted drastically during the 7th century with the Islamic conquests, which forcibly the brought Jerusalem and the wider Levant under Arab Muslim rule. Under the Islamic legal dispensation, apart from being subjected to severe atrocities, Jews were classified as Dhimmi i.e. protected people or people of the Book. While this status granted them a right to practice their religion and certain degree of autonomy within community but this concession and safety to life was guaranteed only after payment of jizya (a special poll tax); this essentially marked or inherently institutionalized a second-class citizenship for them. Periods of relative cultural and intellectual flourishing, such as the Golden Age in Muslim-ruled Spain, fluctuated wildly with eras of severe persecution, forced conversions, and the destruction of synagogues under more fundamentalist dynasties across the Middle East and North Africa over a long period.
By the late Middle Ages, the cumulative effect of different imperial onslaughts rendered the Jewish people completely stateless, scattering them into a global diaspora. Cut off from a sovereign land, they survived as insular, self-governing communities for long embedded within host countries that often viewed them with deep suspicion. In Western Europe, this statelessness translated into extreme vulnerability when Jews faced mass expulsions, most notably from England in 1290, France in 1306, and Spain in 1492, with simultaneous confinement to overcrowded ghettos, strict prohibitions on owning land or entering prestigious professions, and frequent violent blood libels that led to widespread massacres of Jews.
The dawn of the Enlightenment and the 19th-century Emancipation initially assured to break this vicious cycle by offering Jews legal equality and civic integration across Europe. However, though the traditional religious hostility, it was largely subsided but it was quickly replaced by a modern, pseudo-scientific racial antisemitism. In the Eastern Europe and the Russian Empire, where the majority of the world’s Jewish population lived within the restrictive borders of the Pale of Settlement, the late 19th century was defined by state-sanctioned pogroms, violent anti-Jewish riots that decimated entire communities in certain regions. By the closing decades of the 19th century, it became tragically evident that neither assimilation nor legal decrees had erased the fundamental vulnerability of statelessness of Jews across Europe. Evidently, it was clear that the long-term survival, safety and security could only be guaranteed by reclaiming political self-determination and rebuilding a sovereign national home preferably in their ancestral land.
World War II & Emergence of Jewish State
The first half of the 20th century turned out to be systemic discrimination and a nightmare for the Jews threatening their total annihilation. Under the Nazi regime from 1933 to 1945 during the World War II, antisemitism became the core organizing principle of a modern state in Europe, culminating in the Holocaust (Shoah). The state-sponsored bureaucratic genocide under the Nazi forces sought the physical eradication of every single Jewish person within European soil. Through the Nuremberg Laws, Jews were stripped of their citizenship, forced into squalid ghettos across Eastern Europe, and ultimately transported to purpose-built extermination camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau. The genocide was not limited to Germany alone; it has implicit concurrence and active collaboration or passive complicity of local authorities and citizens across the occupied Europe.
According to estimates, this led to the systematic extermination of about six million Jews i.e. almost two-thirds of the European Jewish population. The tragic part is when this genocide occurred and Jews were being slaughtered, the international response under the most powerful nations like Great Britain and USA lacked both a genuine will by granting them refuge and/or military action to save them by disrupting the logistics of the death camps. Following the World War, the geopolitics shifted the responsibility to global diplomacy, wherein Great Britain, the United States, and the newly formed United Nations played pivotal, though quite often conflicted, roles in the creation of the State of Israel. Exhausted by the financial toll of World War II and facing an armed Jewish insurgency alongside Arab rejectionism in the Mandate, Britain decided to withdraw shifting the “Question of Palestine” to the United Nations in 1947.
The United States, under President Harry S. Truman, emerged as a critical diplomatic patron of the Zionist cause, driven by a combination of humanitarian concern for the Holocaust survivors languishing in displaced persons camps, the domestic political pressure and strategic interests in the onset Cold War. Working under UN mandate, the UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) concluded that the claims of the two communities to the same land were irreconcilable and recommended a formal partition into independent Jewish and Arab states, with Jerusalem under international administration. The UN resolution passed and backed by both the United States and the Soviet Union, was impromptu rejected by the Arab nations but the Jewish leadership accepted the international mandate. On May 14, 1948, the provisional government declared the independence of the State of Israel, marking the formal end of nearly two millennia of statelessness and the beginning of modern Israeli statehood.
Constant Conflicts and Attrition Wars
The declaration of the State of Israel in 1948 transformed a localized territorial dispute into a major interstate conflict and recurring wars. The neighbouring Arab states immediately rejected the UN Partition Plan on the plea that the creation of a Jewish sovereign state on the Arab-majority land was an act of Western imperial aggression. Consequently, neighbouring Arab nations indulged in Arab-Israeli War of 1948 that ended in a decisive Israeli military victory but left the underlying political issue completely unresolved. From their perspectives, the Palestinians-Arab called it Nakba (Catastrophe) while Jews as the War of Independence. As exploits of the Arab imposed war, Israel expanded its territory beyond the original UN boundaries, Jordan took control of the West Bank and East Jerusalem and Egypt occupied the Gaza Strip, rendering the Palestinian population fractured and stateless.
In the subsequent years following 1948 war, opposition to Israel became the central rallying cry for a pan-Arab nationalism. The Arab world adopted a policy of total diplomatic, economic and political boycott of Israel, formalized at the 1967 Khartoum Resolution with the famous “Three No’s” i.e. No peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, and no negotiations with Israel. The key state actor included the most populous and powerful nation Egypt as leader of the anti-Zionist coalition and champion of the Palestinian cause, that spearheaded regional military alliances to dismantle Israel. Syria emerged as the most ideologically rigid opponent, frequently resorting to artillery bombardments of Israeli agricultural communities from the strategic heights of the Golan. Though Iraq had no direct border with Israel, it militarily assisted Jordan and Syria in every interstate war. The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), founded by Yasser Arafat in 1964, started waging a guerrilla and asymmetric campaign against Israel, launching cross-border raids and international hijackings to achieve a Palestinian state through armed struggle.
By mid-1967, Arab-Israeli regional tensions reached a breaking point. Following Nasser’s expulsion of UN peacekeepers from the Sinai, his closure of the strategic Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, and the amassing of Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian armies on Israel’s borders, Israel launched a pre-emptive strike on 5 June 1967 leading to a 6-days intense war between the two sides. Israeli military completely shattered the combined Arab armies and occupied several new territories, in a way, rewriting the geopolitical map of West Asia. The important outcomes of this war inter alia include Israel gaining vast strategic depth by occupying a large land area bringing over a million Palestinians under direct military rule. Further, Israel also annexed East Jerusalem declaring the unified city its eternal capital, which was opposed by most international community for many subsequent years. The total defeat of the Arab states compelled Palestinians to realize that they could not rely on foreign Arab armies to liberate their land; this nemesis at the hands of Israelis made Palestinians to resort to many independent Palestinian fedayeen (guerrilla) factions and terrorism in the region.
Following 1967 Gulf War, the Arab-Israel conflict evolved through several distinct phases of high-intensity conventional warfare and grinding asymmetric insurgencies:
(1) The Yom Kippur War (1973)
Seeking to reclaim the lost honour and territory in 1967, Egypt and Syria launched a massive, coordinated surprise attack on Israel on 6 October 1973, thereby catching their adversary off guard on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar. After initial grave losses in the Sinai and the Golan Heights, Israel successfully mobilized its forces and launched counter-offensive, crossing the Suez Canal and advancing within artillery range of Damascus. The military victory for Israel tremendously boosted its morale and paved the way for the historic 1979 Camp David Accords, wherein Egypt became the first Arab state to sign a peace treaty with Israel in exchange for the return of the Sinai Peninsula.
(2) The First Lebanon War (1982)
Following it formation, the PLO had established its base in the Southern Lebanon “a state within a state”, which indulged for years in cross-border shelling and international terrorism. which had established a “state within a state”. Israel launched a military offensive on 6 June 1982 officially codenamed “Operation Peace for Galilee” following an assassination attempt its ambassador in the United Kingdom. Israeli forces advanced all the way to Beirut, successfully forcing Yasser Arafat and the PLO leadership to fled to Tunisia. However, the vacuum left in Southern Lebanon directly catalysed the rise of anther dreaded and highly effective asymmetric adversary backed by Iran, namely Hezbollah.
(3) The First Intifada (1987–1993)
A spontaneous, grassroots Palestinian uprising broke out in the West Bank and Gaza against twenty years of Israeli military occupation. Characterized by mass protests, civil disobedience, and youth throwing stones at Israeli forces, the conflict fundamentally shifted international public perception. Palestinians used the term to describe rebellion against Israel’s military occupation exercising control over the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The international political pressure from eventually forced both sides to the negotiating table, leading to the 1993 Oslo Accords, which established the Palestinian Authority (PA) and granted limited self-governance in parts of the occupied territories.
(4) The Second Intifada (2000–2005)
Following the collapse of the Camp David peace summit, a far more violent Palestinian uprising erupted. Unlike the first, this conflict was defined by a brutal campaign of suicide bombings targeting civilian buses, cafes, and hotels inside Israeli cities, carried out by factions like Fatah’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades and the Islamist group Hamas. Israel had Operation Defensive Shield to deal with rebellion and terror activities leading to a large scale incursions into the West Bank cities and began constructing a massive, controversial West Bank separation barrier. The intense violence traumatized both societies and dampened the Israeli peace movement.
(5) The Second Lebanon War (2006)
A cross-border raid and ambush by Hezbollah militants on 12 July 2006 (Operation Truthful Promise) resulted in the killing of Israeli soldiers and capture of two others. This treacherous offensive triggered a fierce over a month conventional war wherein Israel launched massive airstrikes against Lebanese infrastructure and Hezbollah strongholds, while Hezbollah fired thousands of rockets into northern Israeli cities. The war ended in a tactical stalemate under UN Resolution 1701, in a way reinforcing Hezbollah’s position as Iran’s primary asymmetric deterrent on Israel’s northern border.
(6) The Risings of Gaza and Periodic Wars (2007–2023)
Following Israel’s unilateral withdrawal of all settlers and soldiers from the Gaza Strip in 2005, another Islamist militant group Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections and gradually seized almost complete control of Gaza after a brief civil war with Fatah in 2007. In response, Israel and Egypt imposed a strict land, air and sea blockade on the strip essentially to contain weapon smuggling by militants. This containment policy led to a cyclical high-intensity military operations over the next decade and a-half. These clashes followed a predictable devastating pattern i.e. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad would fire massive rocket barrages into Israeli population centres, and Israel would retaliate with overwhelming precision airstrikes and artillery bombardments targeting militant infrastructure embedded within Gaza’s dense urban terrain. A major conflict erupted on 7 October 2023 when Hamas launched a surprise assault killing over 1,200 Israelis and taking hundreds of then as hostages. The consequent Israeli military operation led to catastrophic destruction and displacement along the Gaza Strip.
Shifting Focus from State Conflict to Terrorism
Following the conventional military defeats and/or stalemates of 1967, 1973 and 1982, the Arab states realized that defeating Israel through conventional large-scale interstate warfare was virtually impossible. This stark realization caused a gradual and tactical shift away from overt state-vs-state mobilization to an asymmetric, unconventional warfare. This is something that the Arab world and their sympathizers justify as Jihad but the rational thinkers and humanists call it terrorism. Various nationalities across the globe too are divided on similar lines. Unable to match Israel’s conventional dominance and air superiority, adversaries realized they could exploit Israel’s high sensitivity to civilian casualties and prolonged conflict. By shifting the battlefield into dense urban centres and utilizing highly localized proxy forces, these actors sought to drain Israel’s economic, psychological, and military resources through a grinding war of attrition without triggering a catastrophic, direct retaliation on their own capitals.
The aforesaid strategic shift was heavily capitalized upon by the external regional actors, most notably Iran following its 1979 Islamic Revolution. Seeking to export its ideology and project power across the Arab world, Iran primarily through the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) systematically raised, funded, and armed a network of non-state terror outfits known as the “Axis of Resistance” though many other Islamic countries such as Syria, Iraq (via Iran-backed Shiite militias) too support them in various ways. In Lebanon, Iran built and nurtured Hezbollah from its infancy in 1982 into the most heavily armed non-state military actor in the world. In the Palestinian territories, Iran found common ground with Sunni Islamist groups, providing hundreds of millions of dollars annually, advanced rocketry, and tactical training to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) in Gaza. Even further afield, state sponsors utilized Syria as a vital logistics hub to funnel these advanced weapon systems to the Levant, while more recently backing the Houthi movement in Yemen to choke global maritime trade routes bound for Israeli ports.
These terror groups have heavily harmed Israeli interests by systematically targeting its civilian population and economic stability from time to time. For decades, Hamas and PIJ orchestrated devastating waves of suicide bombings in Israeli cafes, hotels and transport, eventually evolving into an entrenched rocket-launching enterprise in Gaza that held millions of Israeli citizens in perpetual reach of bomb shelters. Concurrently, Hezbollah effectively turned Northern Israel into a frontline zone, utilizing a massive arsenal of precision-guided missiles, anti-tank rounds, and explosive drones to kill or displace entire communities, destroy agricultural and industrial assets, and paralyze local economies. Furthermore, these outfits have targeted Israeli interests globally, executing catastrophic international operations such as the 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires and the targeted killings of tourists and diplomats abroad.
The rationale behind Israel’s severe, often unilateral military actions against these groups is anchored strictly in the doctrine of restoring deterrence and ensuring fundamental national survival but on most occasions, they have acted with response to terror attacks on their lives and assets. In a miniscule country possessing minimal strategic depth, Israel cannot afford to absorb continuous asymmetric attrition war. When proxy groups utilize human shields and embed rocket launchers within schools, shrines, and residential high-rises, Israel surmises that failing to respond aggressively would only invite more audacious incursions. Therefore, Israel operates under the strategic imperative that it must periodically dismantle the physical infrastructure of these jihadi or terror groups, eliminate their senior command structures, and physically sever their state-sponsored supply lines. For Israel, these operations are not merely retaliatory measures, but a defensive necessity to prevent its borders and land from becoming permanently unliveable.
To sum up, in the modern age, the existential threats confronting Israel and the Jewish people are rooted in a volatile combination of conventional, asymmetric and ideological hostility across West Asia that includes many Islamic countries and a terror network. At the immediate frontline of late, Israel faces multi-front challenges from Iran’s “Axis of Resistance,” primarily through well-armed proxies like Hezbollah in Lebanon, which continue to challenge Israeli territorial sovereignty and force mass displacement. Other important proxies include Hamas (Gaza Strip), Palestinian Islamic Jihad (Gaza Strip and West Bank), and the Houthis – Ansar Allah (Yemen), which intermittently become hyperactive with the same coon goal. Besides, overarching these proxy engagements is the systemic threat of an adversarial regional power committed to Israel’s erasure; which is further magnified by Iran’s advanced ballistic missile capabilities and its persistent efforts toward a nuclear breakout that the present Israeli establishment views as totally unacceptable and non-negotiable threat to the nation’s survival.
Israeli Military Preparedness & Political Realignment
For Israel, it is question of survival in adversity where it is not only land-locked by enemies but also find a majority world order constantly opposing it even in the forums like the United Nations. Therefore, to survive in a geography devoid of strategic depth and surrounded by hostile neighbours, Israel heavily relies on a specialized doctrine of self-reliance, qualitative superiority and constantly resetting diplomatic alignments. Israel has resolved to maintain its Qualitative Military Edge (QME) over the adversaries all the time because it cannot match them in raw numbers of fighters, geographic spread, or population size. Accordingly, its military framework is designed completely on maintaining an overwhelming technological superiority and intelligence-driven Qualitative Military Edge (QME), relying on three main doctrinal & operational pillars.
The first being the element of pre-emption and rapid mobilization in eventualities. They know that the country cannot afford to fight prolonged wars on its own soil. Therefore, its defence model relies on world-class intelligence gathering to detect threats in the making, a small but highly advanced standing force, and a massive civilian reserve system capable of mobilizing within 2 to 3 days. Secondly, Israel has developed own layered multi-tier comprehensive air defence network with the passage of time with a view to protect its highly concentrated coastal population from constant rocket and missile threats. Thus, to cop with short-range rockets and artillery, they have Iron Dome; and David’s Sling for the medium-range incoming tactical ballistic missiles and cruise missiles. Their Arrow-2 and Arrow-3 weapons are very effective for high altitude and exo-atmospheric interception of long-range strategic missiles. Israel learnt from the political uncertainties and early arm embargoes that it could never fully rely on foreign supply chains during a crisis. This catalysed them for the creation of a massive, state-backed domestic defence sector ensuring absolute independence in manufacturing of vital armour, munitions and electronic warfare assets.
No point in calling names but it is stark reality that the state of Israel and Jews as a community have experienced massive atrocity, oppression and isolation for centuries. Now under the present political dispensation, Israel has shifted its strategy from isolation to strategic alliances. Over the past few decades, Israel’s foreign policy has adapted from a state of almost total regional isolation to a highly reckoned network of global and regional partnership and cooperation. Thus, codified and evolved over the decades, the US-Israel relationship serves as Israel’s ultimate diplomatic and military backstop and strength. The US legally guarantees the maintenance of Israel’s QME, provides billions in annual foreign military financing, and utilizes its veto power in the UN Security Council to shield Israel from international isolation. Recognising Iran posed threats to both Israel and Sunni Arab monarchies, under a profound diplomatic shift, Israel has successfully normalized its relations with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan. This move has shifted the regional paradigm of the “Arab-Israeli conflict” to a more pragmatic anti-Iran intelligence and security coalition.
India and Israel share deep-seated security concerns rooted in cross-border terrorism, radical extremism, and volatile neighbourhoods. Due to domestic compulsions, many previous governments in India maintained a political and diplomatic distance from Israel. After formally establishing full diplomatic ties in 1992, their relationship has continuously warmed particularly under present government since 2014. It evolved from just a buyer-seller dynamic into a “Special Strategic Partnership” characterized by intelligence sharing, counter-terrorism drills, and joint defence manufacturing of high-tech drone and missile systems. This alignment represents a profound shift from India’s past pro-Arab stance. While New Delhi continues to face domestic political opposition from factions concerned over its traditional solidarity with Palestine and Muslim voter sentiment, India has firmly adopted an “issue-based” foreign policy and support to Israel’s genuine cause. This pragmatic mutual beneficial relationship enables India to openly advance its vital defence, cybersecurity and technological cooperation with Israel. While maintaining an strategic partnership with Israel on security and other vital subjects, India maintains a highly nuanced, “de-hyphenated” voting pattern at the United Nations that balances its historical commitments to the cause of Palestine with its strategic partnership with Israel.
Contd…in Part II
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