One thousand days of stress and solitude. Oh, and ‘total victory’
Yossi Alpher — July 6, 2026
Views and positions expressed here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily represent NJN's views and policy positions.
Q. Last week Israel marked a thousand days since the war that began October 7, 2023 — its longest war. There are around 2,000 dead Israelis, soldiers, and civilians. And yes, the country is more stressed and isolated than it has ever been. What else have the past 1,000 days taught us?
A. I was struck by the cartoon in Yediot Aharonot on July 2. An IDF soldier trudging along a red road as he crossed the “1,000” mark. In the air, drones. To his left, green fields. To his right, filling fully half the frame, blackened, flattened buildings like we see in Gaza. Down that blood-red road, there is no end in sight.
Q. So much for Netanyahu’s promised ‘total victory’…
A. That is one meaningless concept that has informed the past thousand days. Currently, Israel’s wars on three fronts — Iran, Lebanon and Gaza — suggest the ever-patient ‘open conflict’ concept that has characterized Arab and Iranian attitudes toward Israel for decades. Endless war. Some commentators even suggest that this concept serves PM Netanyahu’s political purposes.
Israeli deterrence has failed. ‘Muqawama’ resistance, as embodied in the Iran-led primarily Shiite “axis of resistance,” has sustained heavy losses but has withstood all of Israel’s blows.
That Netanyahu could promise total victory in this conflict is a clear indicator that he does not understand the nature of either the conflict or of the Islamist enemy. Worse, the intelligence establishment appears also not to understand. All this, in a thousand days. All this, without an end in sight.
Q. What other Israeli concepts have been dashed by the realities of the past thousand days?
A. Reliance on assassination of enemy political and military leaders, for one. US Vice President JD Vance was not far off the mark when he bluntly told Israel recently, “You can't just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have." It turns out Islamists — in Tehran, Beirut or Gaza — don’t meekly capitulate when you kill their leader. Regarding Iran in particular, it seems clear we and the United States would have been better off today negotiating with Ayatollah Khamenei than with phantom revolutionary guards who hide behind his missing son and send the likes of Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf to talk to Trump’s son-in-law and real-estate buddy.
In this context, yet another badly miscalculated concept was the notion that we in Israel could, with American and Kurdish help, engineer a coup-d’etat in Iran. The embarrassment only deepens when you hear Israelis and Americans expressing astonishment that Iranians are genuinely weeping at the funeral of Khamenei. My advice is that if you don’t understand Iran and Iranians, just shut up; don’t embarrass yourselves.
Note, too, that one at least indirect outcome of Israel’s assassinations has been direct US talks with Islamist leaders from Gaza and Beirut who refuse to talk with Israel. It turns out these are people President Trump can “do business” with — behind our backs, of course. True, Trump was cozy with Islamists like Qatar even before October 7. Indeed, so was Israel. But there has been a parting of the ways over these thousand days, with Israel’s isolation only amplified by Trump’s flirts with Qatar and Hamas.
Apropos Trump and the US role, we have learned during these thousand days that Netanyahu, with his perfect English and his US education, actually understands very little about the inner workings of America. In three years of death, displacement, and destruction in Gaza and the West Bank, we have lost many of our friends in the United States, beginning with the liberal Jewish community and the Democratic Party. Even the Evangelicals Netanyahu has cultivated are having second thoughts.
Israel’s international and intra-Jewish isolation is perhaps the most profound by-product of these one thousand days. Israel’s strategic security has for many decades been built on the support of the United States and the American Jewish community. The tragic mismanagement of relations with both will be hard to repair, even if and when the US has a more stable and predictable president.
And apropos the death and destruction in Gaza and the West Bank, the cynical view is that if we are going to unleash such fierce revenge attacks on Palestinian civilians after the slaughter of October 7; if we are going to qualify for accusations of apartheid, genocide and mass murder; if our extremists are going to bandy about biblical terms like “Amalek” and “Messiah;” then at a minimum we should be able to claim we won the war and vanquished the enemy. But no: we have not “won” on any front.
Q. And at least one new front…
A. Yes, Turkey. Here we cannot easily or only blame ourselves. But Turkey has become more Islamist in these thousand days, closely backing Hamas, thwarting Israeli schemes to deploy the Kurds against Iran, and extending Ottoman-style hegemony into Syria. Trump’s close affiliation with President Erdogan is a concern. Could these thousand days have made a new enemy for Israel, and with US help, to boot?
Q. How about the lessons and ramifications of these thousand days regarding mistaken concepts on the crucial Palestinian front?
A. Israel’s energetic National Religious (Orthodox) minority has exploited the “God-sent” (that’s how some of them see it) national trauma and preoccupation with the destruction of October 7 to spearhead a messianic drive aimed at expanding West Bank settlements by expelling Palestinians from their lands and terrorizing even the Palestinian Christian minority. This has lost Israel a lot of friends. Yet the National Religious settlers, led by Finance Minister Smotrich, could not care less. For them, this is a moment in history of biblical proportions.
Consequences of this twisted fascist concept of land, God, and deliverance? For comparison, look at the wasteland of neighboring Syria after years of Islamist extremism and mass expulsion of its own citizenry.
Q. These thousand days begin with Gaza…
A. And the Israeli misconceptions begin before the thousand days. Then, as now, the West Bank-based PLO offered a far better option for Israel’s management of the Strip and for the Palestinian future than did Hamas. Here it is instructive, and profoundly depressing, that a thousand days later the government of Israel resolutely opposes introducing elements of PLO governance to the decimated Strip. There are messianic Israelis who still covet this cursed land.
The folly of the Trump plan for Gaza, with its riviera and its Miami-style glitz, is equally instructive. Hamas is thwarting it without Israel’s help.
Q. Finally, the home front: Israeli politics…
A. Sima Kadmon summed it up nicely, and sadly, in last Friday’s Yedioth: “Something is apparently flawed in us citizens of Israel if the government responsible for [October 7] is completing four years in office and intends to seek a new term. Something in us is very flawed if a national commission of inquiry still does not exist.”
If we did not know it before October 7, these one thousand days should have taught us that something in Israel is seriously broken. Will October’s elections fix it? Or is the demographic-social-religious structure of modern-day Israeli society hopelessly programmed for long-term destruction? By October’s elections, the Netanyahu coalition is planning to institutionalize the privileges of the Haredim (ultra-Orthodox) — no military service, no secular education, lots of government subsidies; dismantle Israel’s judicial branch; and seriously dilute the rule of law.
Are we condemned to look increasingly like our more dysfunctional neighbors here in the Middle East?
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.
