Five fronts, three ceasefires, no celebration
Yossi Alpher — April 20, 2026
Views and positions expressed here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily represent NJN's views and policy positions.
Q. President Trump has delivered--practically imposed--ceasefires between Israel and Iran, Israel and Hezbollah, and earlier between Israel and Hamas. Surely this is a feather in his peacemaking cap.
A. There is more. Trump is now claiming his tenth peace agreement. On the occasion of Israel’s 78th Independence Day, Prime Minister Netanyahu and his senior ministers are making triumphal declarations. And undeniably, Israel’s military achievements against Iran and Hezbollah are considerable.
Yet for most Israelis, beginning with those in the north near Lebanon emerging from their shelters (those who have shelters) but including those in Tel Aviv who at least temporarily have no missiles to worry about, there is little to celebrate and a lot to be apprehensive about.
The polls indicate that Americans, too, are not exactly “celebrating” Trump these days. A new Politico poll indicates that only 15 percent of Americans believe Trump has achieved his goals in the campaign against Iran.
Q. Are the issues political or military? Or is the problem on other fronts besides Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas?
A. All of the above. Let’s start by defining victory in the campaigns just interrupted. Remember the heady days when Trump and Netanyahu, together and separately, talked about removing the regime in Tehran and weakening Hezbollah to the extent that the Lebanese government could function? Netanyahu promised ‘total victory’ and compared the conflict to the fight in WWII against the Nazis, who had to be eradicated. Iran, Netanyahu predicted, would lose its nuclear option, its missile arm, and its control over proxies like Hezbollah.
None of this has transpired. The conflict with Iran is now about Hormuz and oil--where Iran has a distinct geopolitical advantage--rather than about nuclear, missile, and proxy issues. Iran retains a huge missile reserve, including its highly effective cluster warheads, to threaten Israel. Hezbollah, too, can keep firing missiles and paralyzing life in northern Israel. The government of Lebanon is still subject to Hezbollah blackmail and threats.
Iran and Hezbollah have not just survived this war. Iran has not merely withstood the decapitation of its senior political and military leadership echelons. The ceasefires with Iran and Hezbollah are extremely fragile because, politically nothing has been resolved.
Both Israel and the United States have yet to fully comprehend the corrections in tactics and strategy that are required in waging war against dedicated Islamists, whether sovereign states or terrorist guerrilla movements. For Israel, that observation includes Hamas in Gaza, though it is too early to talk about conclusive lessons because negotiations are ongoing in Egypt.
Israelis, understandably, will celebrate Independence Day on Wednesday hesitantly and cautiously.
Q. And on other fronts?
A. There are two, and they are far more alarming than Iran and Hezbollah, where the IDF can at least take solid credit for once again dramatically “cutting the grass.” One additional front, the West Bank, is part and parcel of the Israel-Arab-Iran-Islam conflict. The other front, the gathering collapse of support for Israel in Europe and especially the United States, may not be ‘geostrategic’ in the classic sense of, say, Iran and the West Bank, but it is very definitely ‘grand-strategic.’ It is critical, and it is a looming disaster.
Q. Start with the West Bank.
A. Under cover of seemingly endless warfare elsewhere, over the past three years the Netanyahu-Ben Gvir-Smotrich government has brutally and relentlessly expanded Israeli settlements throughout most of the West Bank while oppressing and expelling the Palestinian population. No fewer than 103 new settlements, including 34 just decided on, have been or are being established--not to mention the ‘unauthorized’ camps of marauding ‘Hilltop Youth’ who in effect constitute the vanguard of this messianic settlement movement. West Bank Palestinians are losing their homes, their livelihoods, and in some cases, their lives.
The objective is clear: exploit the fog of war elsewhere to annex and Israelize the West Bank in the name of messianic Judaism. At a time when fully half of Galilee Israelis have been absorbing missile and rocket fire without adequate shelters, the government is spending NIS 19 billion (currently over $6 billion) on the West Bank.
Bezalel Smotrich, as minister of both finance and West Bank settlement, provides the money and the settlement strategy. Itamar Ben Gvir, minister of ‘national security,’ guarantees police complicity in this campaign of theft and brutality. The IDF, which is supposed to wield overall responsibility in the West Bank, is suffering such a severe manpower crisis due to a multiplicity of fronts that Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir is publicly “raising ten red flags” about the army’s future. Besides, the messianic National Religious movement is busily infiltrating the security establishment too, beginning with the new head of the Shabak (Shin Bet) Internal Security Agency.
All this, under a compliant Netanyahu whose primary concern appears to be to placate his political base and his family, stay in power, and avoid conviction in his corruption trial.
The emerging outcome is not just international condemnation (see below). The messianic, fascist, and ultra-orthodox Israeli government majority supports and condones this ‘victory’ on yet another front, the West Bank, with its three million Palestinians. They do not seem in the least perturbed by the gathering specter of a binational Israel, fully fifty percent (and growing) Palestinian Arab, non-democratic, and festering in intercommunal conflict and violence.
Q. This brings us to that fifth front, the gathering collapse of popular and political support for Israel in Europe and the United States.
A. Israel is losing vital support in the West in three areas. In Europe, right-wing populists who support Israel, like Meloni in Italy and Orban in Hungary, are either losing interest or losing elections. In the US, according to recent polls, the setback is dramatic among Democrats and the younger generation, including younger Republicans.
Third, and not least by any means, there is Trump, who does not share the traditional gut pro-Israel sentiments of, say, a Biden and has no problem treating Israel and Netanyahu like subordinate proxies when realpolitik dictates harsh pullbacks and concessions in Gaza or Lebanon.
Netanyahu can help persuade Trump to attack Iran and together they can define victory there in the emptiest terms imaginable. But it turns out that when human lives are at stake--in the Persian Gulf and in the Galilee--fewer and fewer Trump and Netanyahu supporters are convinced by those hollow victory declarations. Worse, inevitably these hasbara (public diplomacy) setbacks are being translated into denial by Europe of transit rights for arms shipments to Israel and refusal by a growing segment of Congress to countenance the sale of certain arms to Israel. Trump’s contempt for NATO is making matters worse.
Well-established taboos are being broken right and left--both literally and politically. Netanyahu, in constant denial, seems alarmingly indifferent to the negative ways his strategic mistakes and misconceptions are being translated into net strategic losses for Israel. As for Trump, his unpredictability may be effective here and there in dealing with fellow leaders like Russia’s Putin, but it does not seem to work as well in the Middle East, where in any case, nothing has ever been predictable.
Q. Israelis go to the polls in October; Americans in November. How will elections reflect these strategic blunders?
A. Sadly, elections in Israel are about more than its strategic dilemmas and denials on five fronts. They reflect the reality of political demography where the right and the messianic are an emerging plurality, if not majority. And where the political opposition, much of it also (in keeping with demographic trends) right-wing, is in distressing disarray.
(I’ll stay out of US politics.)
Yossi Alpher is an independent security analyst. He is the former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, a former senior official with the Mossad, and a former IDF intelligence officer.
Photo by Alaexis2, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
