On July 16, Israel dramatically escalated its military intervention in Syria. During internecine fighting between Druze, Bedouins, and Syrian government forces in Sweida province, Israel threw its lot in with the Druze and launched more than 160 airstrikes in just 24 hours. It then leveled several government buildings in the Syrian capital of Damascus. Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz shared a video of the attack on X and said, “The heavy blows have started,” which implies that there would be more to come.
To justify the decision to pursue conflict over cooperation in Syria, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu argued that Israel had no choice but to act and “save our Druze brothers” from a massacre. His claim has—understandably—been met with skepticism. More than 600,000 people died during Syria’s civil war, and that figure likely includes hundreds if not thousands of Druze. But Israel’s interventions during the war were nowhere close to the scale of its recent attacks.
A better way to understand Israel’s actions is to look at the country’s shift from being a status-quo power to a revisionist one. Despite facing hostile actors at multiple borders—Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south—Israeli policymakers generally saw their strategic situation as tolerable and sought incremental improvements within the existing geopolitical dispensation. Netanyahu did his best to keep Hamas quiet, prevent a two-state solution, and pursue peace deals with regional autocrats.
Before Hamas’s attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, Israel also saw Syria’s civil war as an internal affair. It only intervened when Iran sought to use the chaos in Syria to supply advanced weapons to Hezbollah or entrench itself on Israel’s borders. In Syria, Gaza, and elsewhere, Netanyahu instructed the Israel Defense Forces to “mow the grass” and chop any revisionist threats down to size, rather than pursue regime change.
This was because the Israeli government felt that the local and regional status quo best served the country’s interests. It allowed Israel to seal its border with Gaza while also jettisoning any responsibility for the territory’s residents. In the West Bank, Israel also contracted out civilian governance to someone else—the Palestinian Authority—while entrenching its long-term occupation. Further afield, Israel normalized relations with other status-quo powers, including the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and Bahrain. It was ostensibly close to doing so with Saudi Arabia in late 2023.
Israelis have long called Netanyahu “the magician” for his political longevity, but he deserves this moniker more for having squared the impossible circle for so long. Under his rule, it appeared like Israel could keep the West Bank and also feel more secure militarily and increasingly integrated regionally.
But Hamas’s attacks changed all that. In response, Netanyahu abandoned the status quo. He has instead pursued “total victory” against Hamas in Gaza and repeatedly scuppered a cease-fire in the territory. Further still, Israel escalated its attacks against Hezbollah and Iran, crippling both. In short, Netanyahu has reinvented Israel as a revisionist actor that is remaking the region through military force.
In recent months, there has been a debate over whether Israel is now a hegemon in the Middle East. But that discussion misunderstands Israel’s new grand strategy. Israel does not aspire to be the kind of hegemon that U.S. policymakers often think of—consolidating and strengthening a strategically advantageous balance of power. Rather, Israel is now using military force to destabilize the entire Middle East in order to remake and reorder the region.
This means that instead of “mowing the grass” to contain its rivals, Israel is now employing its qualitative military edge to pursue “total victory” over them. Previously, an indefinite multifront conflict was Israel’s worst nightmare. Yet after Oct. 7, Israel has prolonged a “forever war” on each of its borders and beyond.
To the extent that Israel has an end goal in mind, it is now a much more ambitious and transformative one. Netanyahu may have obfuscated his “day after” vision for Gaza, but he has articulated his vision for a “new Middle East.” He believes that crippling the so-called Axis of Resistance will enable peace to emerge out of the ashes of the old order. He has claimed that “moderate” Arab states will be free to normalize relations with Israel once they no longer fear spoilers like Iran.
The goal here is still for Israel to have its cake and eat it, too: indefinitely controlling or even annexing parts of Gaza and the West Bank while also making peace with its neighbors. But the vision of how to get there has changed. Now, Netanyahu’s supposed path to peace is through intensified regional chaos.
But recent events in Syria illustrate why this vision is unrealistic. As soon as Syria’s Assad regime fell last December, Israel conducted an unprecedented number of strikes against Syrian military equipment and former regime installations, while its ground forces occupied around 77 square miles of Syrian territory. Consequently, Syria’s foreign backers—particularly Turkey and the Gulf states—participated in multiple backchannels to lower the tension. That evolved into direct Israel-Syria talks involving key Netanyahu allies, such as Tzachi Hanegbi, head of Israel’s National Security Council, and Ron Dermer, Israel’s strategic affairs minister.
This diplomatic progress dovetailed with Israel’s strikes on Iran and a subsequent cease-fire. As Netanyahu flew to Washington, observers speculated that he and Trump would use the recent confrontation as an impetus to end the deadly cycle of conflict plaguing the region. Netanyahu seemed poised to move from the first stage of Israel’s new grand strategy, conflict and chaos, to the second—normalization. Syria and possibly Lebanon were to be the first candidates.
But it was not meant to be. The much-heralded Trump-Netanyahu meeting ended without agreement. Shortly afterward, as instability enveloped Syria’s Sweida province, Israel launched strikes killing more Syrian security forces than ever before and humiliating the new Syrian government with its attacks on the capital.
Contrary to Netanyahu’s hopes, these are exactly the sort of actions that are making normalization less likely. They have intensified anger among Arab populations—which were already hostile to normalization—meaning that Arab leaders are now more constrained in what they can offer. What’s more, there is now a growing strategic divergence with pro-western Arab states, which remain status-quo powers that want regional wars to end. For Arab leaders, normalization is now a higher risk, with less strategic dividends.
The Trump administration, in turn, has repeatedly demonstrated that it fundamentally misunderstands Israel’s grand strategic shift. Frustrated U.S. officials recently called Netanyahu a “madman” who “bombs everything all the time.” But there is a method to his madness. Netanyahu has turned one of the greatest tragedies in Israeli history—Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks—into a transformative event that allowed Israel to pursue regional hegemony through a revisionist grand strategy.
This is also why the Trump administration is failing in its attempts to end the war in Gaza, establish a modus vivendi between Israel and Turkey, and make peace between Israel and Syria. Grand strategic change is difficult and rare. It took something as shocking and unexpected as Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks to end Israel’s attachment to the status quo. Trump needed to provide something equally dramatic. Whatever he offered Netanyahu was not enticing enough to pull Israel away from revisionism. Israel remains unwilling to convert its tactical victories over Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas into long-term political successes.
Worse still, the temptations to deploy force in new and seemingly transformational ways are multiplying. Israeli ministers have openly called for totally destroying Gaza and starving the territory’s residents. During the clashes in Sweida, one minister advocated that Israel “eliminate” Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa. Most preposterously, Israel Hayom, a newspaper often labeled as Netanyahu’s “mouthpiece,” recently published an op-ed calling on Israel to “liberate” Northern Cyprus from Turkish control.
If Israel keeps going down this path, Netanyahu’s “new Middle East” will likely continue to look a lot like the old one: no cease-fire in Gaza and no normalization with Arab neighbors. Israel’s revisionist grand strategy will continue to alienate regional states that fear the spread of chaos, pushing long-term success even further out of reach. Trump himself has railed against a U.S. grand strategy that relies on “forever wars” to reorder regions and societies through military force. Trump’s failure to constrain Netanyahu means that it is exactly this kind of utopian adventurism that he is now enabling.