On the Eve of Rosh Hashanah, What We Have Learned About Ourselves from the Past Two Years of War in Gaza
Yossi Alpher — September 22, 2025
Photo credit: Greg Treitel, Shatil Stock
Views and positions expressed here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily represent NJN's views and policy positions.
Q. Start with the most glaring failure these days: How do you explain that Israel has lost virtually all its friends, with the exception of Trump’s United States?
A. The plight of Gaza’s civilian population dominates the world’s consciousness. It reflects a massive failure of Israeli intelligence, both military and political. And it reflects a prolonged breakdown in Israeli strategic analysis concerning everything involving Gaza and Hamas. We are currently ‘conquering’ Gaza for at least the second time in two years. And still no governance strategy, no exit strategy, and no Gaza Strip recovery strategy after we have destroyed it.
Prime Minister Netanyahu’s political survival has become the dominant factor in Israeli politics, with an entire religious/messianic/rightist coalition lining up behind him. Netanyahu himself seems increasingly unhinged,yet very much in charge: a dangerous combination.
The entire security establishment--IDF, Shin Bet, Israel Police--has been politicized. Increasingly, so has the legal establishment. The Israeli popular cultural-political narrative is obsessed with grief, heroism and martyrdom. The sympathy Israel earned on October 7, 2023 has been drowned by the tens of thousands of dead in Gaza. The IDF in Gaza is all too easily perceived as an instrument of vengeance, not strategy.
No amount of ‘hasbara’ can alter this reality.
No, this is not genocide. As former Deputy National Security Adviser Chuck Freilich notes, “Many dead, even far too many, is not the definition of genocide.” Neither does the occasional genocidal incitement from some right-messianist MKs and ministers define state-sponsored genocide. Still, this discussion does define a country and an army that have gone off the rails. How could it be otherwise, when Israel’s leadership bluntly refuses to launch an inquiry into its mistakes?
Any wonder the world is turning its back? The Israeli ‘trademark’--hi-tech excellence, military and intelligence prowess, academic and intellectual achievement--is increasingly boycotted. The Israeli identity is no longer a source of pride, even if for perverse reasons Netanyahu now boasts of Israel becoming an economically-deprived “Super Sparta” for years to come. In the pipeline are European boycotts of Israeli academia, culture, sports, weaponry, etc.
Paradoxically, the least critical family of global political actors from Israel’s standpoint is now the Sunni Arab world--an intriguing development.
Q. Indeed, how do you explain that Europe and parts of America boycott and protest, while the Arab world does not break relations and maintains security coordination? Do they see Israel differently?
A. They increasingly view Israel as falling into modes of state behavior that are familiar to them: violent, autocratic, callous with regard to human life. Is there a big difference between the way Turkey treats Kurds and Israel treats Palestinians? The way the UAE deals with human rights in Abu Dhabi and Netanyahu would like to deal with human rights in Tel Aviv?
Note that, despite everything, the Abraham Accords still hold. The world can recognize a (virtual) Palestinian state, yet most of the Arab world does not particularly care about the fate of the Palestinians, just as Israel doesn’t. Israel’s Arab neighbors are more concerned with Israel’s apparent loss of strategic wisdom regarding Gaza and the Palestinians.
Accordingly, Israel can attack in Gaza in the south even as it moves toward improved relations with Lebanon and Syria in the north. Even as it overflies multiple Arab neighbors en route to attacking Iran’s nuclear project. This is business as usual in the Levant.
Multitudes of dead in Gaza? I am reminded of an academic meeting with Arab colleagues in Rome, in February 1994, on the day Baruch Goldstein murdered 29 Palestinians as they prayed in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron. Seized with anguish and guilt, I very emotionally addressed the gathering and offered my personal apology for the atrocity. As the session ended, a Tunisian professor turned to me. “Mais Monsieur Alpher,” she said, “c’est normal chez nous.” “This is normal for us.”
It took me 30 years to grasp how right she was.
At the Doha Arab-Islamic summit in mid-September, Iran’s President Pezeshkian stated, “The Zionist regime has declared war on our sovereignty, dignity, and future [. . .]. A new order will emerge from the rubble of destroyed buildings in Doha, Beirut, Tehran, Damascus and Sana’a based on Islamic unity and not Zionist pursuit of superiority.”
He could not be more mistaken. Just as mass violence is normal in the Middle East, talk is cheap. Doha, despised by the non-Islamist Arab world, symbolizes disunity, not unity. Israel is now part and parcel of that reality, too.
Q. Apropos Doha, can you address the latest fiasco there, Israel’s abortive attack, in the context of your overall analysis?
A. Here is what happened regarding the Doha attack--dynamics that have become typical of a broad spectrum of Israel-related strategic issues: Poor intelligence. Decision-making in Jerusalem that ignored warnings and admonitions from within the strategic community. Attacking a facilitator of vital negotiations. Attacking in Qatar as a signal to the Israeli public that despite appearances and the corrupt behavior of his advisers, Netanyahu is not in thrall to the royals in Doha. Flexing Israel’s muscles as the Middle East’s primary power.
There is more: Sending a dangerous message to Egypt, an even more vital negotiator and facilitator. And apparently, coordinating with Washington in a deceptive or tardy manner. Here there is a danger that the very absence of US involvement signaled to Arab allies of the US that they must look elsewhere for defense against attack.
At the level of strategic intelligence, repeatedly assuming that fervent Islamists like Hamas, the Houthis, and Iran can be deterred or even crippled by killing their leaders. Indeed, Netanyahu seems to be obsessed with killing hostile Islamist leaders. They may have it coming, but their removal from the scene--in Gaza, in Sanaa, in Tehran, almost in Doha--changes nothing.
Q. The Washington angle begs the question: considering Israel’s growing strategic isolation, is the Trump administration a stable and reliable last-ditch ally?
A. Netanyahu, who frequently apes President Trump’s behavior, appears to think so, even to the extent that his strategic thought processes are increasingly murky like Trump’s. Some in Netanyahu’s circle appear to believe that Trump, with Huckabee as his Evangelical ambassador in Jerusalem, will even back some form of Israeli annexation in the West Bank and smooth over the UAE’s threatened retaliation.
Don’t they know that Trump is not a strategic thinker and that he changes his mind constantly?
Q. How do you explain the Netanyahu coalition’s callous attitude toward the fate of the Israeli hostages held by Hamas?
A. Here we come to what the past two years have revealed about Israeli society. The attitude of the right-religious-messianist establishment toward the hostages was evident immediately after October 7, 2023: The hostages are expendable; their primarily secular-liberal families and the liberal Israeli Saturday-night protesters are a nuisance. Total victory is far more important.
An Israeli hostage, an elderly woman who was returned at an early stage, related a conversation she had with her aging husband--also a hostage, who died in captivity--in their Gaza tunnel jail. “We’ll be home soon,” she told him. He shook his head in disagreement: “We’re kibbutzniks,” he explained. “It will take two years.”
“We’re kibbutzniks.” It turns out that was an optimistic assessment. Now, two years later, the wages of war have dulled and blunted the moral/ethical stain of October 7. Now it is easier to sacrifice the hostages. Just watch how Netanyahu does it.
One additional dimension of Jewish-Jewish tension bears noting: the very outspoken anger of non-Haredi right-wing and National Orthodox Israelis, not to mention secular Israelis, at Haredi draft-dodging. The issue has always been there. It took a long, grueling ground war in Gaza to bring it to the surface and highlight this very basic all-Jewish divide in Israeli culture.
Q. You mentioned the declared annexationist intentions of at least parts of the Netanyahu coalition regarding the West Bank. Could near-term annexation there be compensation or consolation for the failure to eliminate Hamas in Gaza, a failure now entering its third year?
A. When Netanyahu warns that we should prepare for ‘economic autarky’ and “Super Sparta” status, it certainly looks like he is gearing up for a move like West Bank annexation, along with prolonged war in Gaza, that will trigger boycotts and severance of relations. Super Sparta, he appears to believe, will reelect his coalition sometime in the year ahead.
Q. Bottom line?
A. To sum up, here are two key conclusions from the strategic dynamic, both within and beyond Israel, of the past two years. First, Israel is behaving more and more like its Middle East neighbors: religiously extremist, authoritarian, intimidating. By and large those neighbors can coexist with this version of Israel. Some, like the Persian Gulf emirates and Morocco, are happy to trade with Israel, buy its electronic gadgetry, and lean on it for security.
Second, the violent historical reality of the Palestinian conflict is becoming internalized by Israel. An internally-conflicted Israel fits right in with the tribal/sectarian violence of neighbors like Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Libya. Our Arab neighbors feature Muslim vs. Muslim (vs. Christian, Druze, etc.) friction. Israel now features Jew vs. Jew (vs. Palestinian) conflict.
Following the military defeat of Iran and Hezbollah and the collapse of Assad’s Syria--taken together, an exceptional strategic achievement for Israel--there is, for the first time I can recall, no existential threat to Israel. This is of course good news. But it also means that we are finally free to stew in our own juice.
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.
