Israel: From neutralizing the frontline states to neutralizing the Axis of Resistance

Israel’s occupation of Arab states does not necessarily have to take a physical form, as happened in the past with the rest of Palestine, the Syrian Golan, Egypt’s Sinai, and Lebanon’s Shebaa Farms and Kfar Shouba Hills. It may also take other forms, as later envisioned in Israeli strategy. Following that period of occupation, Israel managed to penetrate several Arab states through normalization policies. This process did not stop at political or security dimensions. It also expanded into the economic sphere. Israel continues to pursue its expansion and formalization with other Arab states, despite maintaining its grip over Palestine and denying legitimate Palestinian rights. Israel’s strategies toward Iran, Gaza, and Lebanon intersect within an integrated framework. These strategies remain tied to its long-standing objectives. Through them, Israel continues efforts to neutralize any remaining opposition or resistance in the region.

U.S. and Israeli strategies toward the three fronts; Iran, Palestine, and Lebanon, show clear similarities. They pursue a single objective: eliminating any remaining political opposition to Israel in the region and preventing the emergence of any future material force that could challenge it. While a truce exists with Iran, economic and political pressure continues. Negotiations are also being used to secure gains under pressure, mainly related to Iran’s weapons capabilities and its future power. Likewise, despite the ceasefire reached in Gaza, the targeting, killing, and blockade of Gazans by the Israeli occupation continue. At the same time, pressure on Hamas persists through negotiations aimed at achieving its full disarmament. The same pattern appears in Lebanon. Although Israel and Lebanon reached a ceasefire agreement, it has largely remained nominal, much like in Gaza. The Israeli military continues targeting civilians, villages, and towns in southern Lebanon, while negotiations with the Lebanese government are used to pressure it toward the disarmament of Hezbollah.

Israel’s objectives in the region are not new, even if the strategies used to achieve them have changed according to shifting conditions and developments on the ground. When Israel occupied the rest of the Palestinian territories in 1967 and began drawing up plans to tighten its control over Palestinian land and subjugate its people, it moved in parallel on another front, to eliminate Palestinian power and resistance abroad, and to contain Arab opposition and rejection of its occupation and control over Palestine.

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After the 1967 occupation, Israel tried to strip the West Bank and Gaza Strip of sovereign status. It argued that, before the occupation, the two areas had been under Jordanian and Egyptian authority, not Palestinian rule. It also claimed that the 1949 borders were merely armistice lines, not final borders. On that basis, it refused to recognize its occupation of Palestine. Yet under a state of military occupation, recognized in both legal and international terms, Israel moved in practice to develop integrated plans for settlement expansion. These plans aimed to produce geographic change. They also involved transferring Jewish settlers into the settlements, creating a process of demographic change. At the first Camp David negotiations in 1978, Israel proposed a limited form of Palestinian self-rule, without sovereignty. This was to be done through an elected self-governing authority in the West Bank and Gaza during a transitional period. Taken together, these facts reveal Israel’s vision, objectives, and plans in the Palestinian territories. Its actions, strategies, and policies gave practical expression to that vision.

The 1993 Oslo Accords did not depart from that vision. They established a transitional Palestinian Authority to administer the West Bank and Gaza, while postponing all final-status issues and leaving unchanged the occupation policy of altering the geographic and demographic reality. Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza and parts of the northern West Bank in 2005 also remained within that same approach. The Israeli government described the move as an effort to “reduce friction with the Palestinian population.” The 1999–2000 Camp David II negotiations, which came as an obligation under the Oslo framework to address final-status issues, reflected the same limits. Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, stated that the Israeli proposals did not meet the minimum requirements for a viable Palestinian state. Since 2000, Israel has also introduced conditions that Palestinians viewed as prohibitive for continuing negotiations, most notably recognition of Israel as a Jewish state. Following the Second Intifada, Israel’s fourteen reservations to the 2003 Road Map further reinforced its security control approach. They reflected a vision of a temporary, demilitarized Palestinian state with limited sovereignty, alongside full Israeli control over borders, crossings, airspace, and maritime access.

After the 2007 Palestinian split, Israel used the division to question Palestinian representation and undermine the negotiating framework as a whole. This helped consolidate the transitional Palestinian reality and turn it into a permanent condition.

Israel appears determined to preserve that reality even after its recent war and the destruction of Gaza, including through efforts to establish a Palestinian government outside the Palestinian Authority framework.

At the same time, Israel sought to detach the states surrounding Palestine from the Palestinian cause and turned relations with those states into separate files. Israel chose to launch the 1982 war on Lebanon with the aim of ending Palestinian attacks and eliminating the armed Palestinian presence along Lebanon’s southern border. After its withdrawal, it maintained control over a security zone inside southern Lebanon. On the Syrian front, a long period of calm was established in 1974 through the Disengagement Agreement, buffer zones, and UN monitoring mechanisms. This remained in place despite Israel’s occupation of the Golan Heights since 1967 and its later annexation. On another front, Israel achieved major strategic gains through peace with Egypt in 1979. It removed the largest Arab army from the circle of conflict in exchange for ending its occupation of Sinai. The agreement also institutionalized security arrangements along the border and established the first formal Arab model of political and economic normalization, despite the continuation of the occupation of Palestine. The declared peace with Jordan in 1994, which came after the Oslo agreement between Palestinians and Israelis, further weakened the impact of the Arab boycott. It strengthened open official security and economic cooperation with Jordan and brought greater stability to the eastern front, Israel’s longest border line. In 2020, the U.S. administration under Donald Trump worked to expand formal Arab normalization and cooperation with Israel through the Abraham Accords. This was pursued through a mix of incentives, pressure, and political and economic rewards.

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Israel’s Strategy After October 7

After succeeding in an earlier phase in neutralizing the frontline states and expanding normalization beyond them, Israel is now moving toward neutralizing the remaining axes of threat in Iran, Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria. These fronts represent what Israel views as the last major regional obstacle still standing in its way, particularly after the significant advances it has achieved inside the occupied Palestinian territories.

In Iran, Israel is not seeking only to destroy Iranian nuclear capabilities. It is also seeking to keep Tehran under prolonged military, economic, and political pressure, or to bring about regime change. Israel views Iran as the center of threat production. Since the Iranian Revolution, Tehran has adopted the rhetoric of “exporting the revolution” and supporting the “oppressed.” This was translated in practice through support for its allies in Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen.

Israel therefore sees the Iranian threat as extending beyond the nuclear program itself. It also includes the regional structure through which Iran has consolidated the strength of its regional network.

Israel frames its objective as neutralizing what it describes as an imminent and existential threat represented by Iran’s nuclear program, its ballistic missile program, and Iran’s ability to project attacks through its proxies.

In Gaza, Israel is shifting its strategy from containment and deterrence toward reshaping the Strip. By maintaining a ceasefire that remains largely inactive, without escalating back into full-scale war, Israel preserves a state of blockade while weakening Hamas’ security and administrative structures, delaying reconstruction, and tying the future of Gaza to imposed arrangements and governance under Israeli security oversight. Netanyahu has stated that Israel will retain “overall security responsibility” in Gaza for an “indefinite period.” His plan for the “day after” has also been linked to establishing a local administration not connected to either the Palestinian Authority or Hamas. This is widely understood as an effort to redesign Gaza’s political and security environment in a way that prevents the return of an armed Hamas, or any other armed actor, while placing the Strip under complete security subordination.

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In Lebanon, Israel continues targeting Hezbollah while simultaneously pursuing a negotiation track aimed at disarming the group, as part of shaping its future relationship with Lebanon. Netanyahu has stated that Israel will not accept a return to the pre-war reality and that Hezbollah must be pushed completely away from the border. In practical terms, this means ending the group’s military presence south of the Litani River. Israel had previously failed to neutralize the Lebanese front after eliminating the armed Palestinian presence in Lebanon in 1982, as Hezbollah later emerged as an armed force in the south. The group remained Israel’s largest, and perhaps only, major security challenge among the former frontline states. For this reason,

Israel’s current strategy in Lebanon does not appear limited to weakening Hezbollah militarily or ensuring a demilitarized south. It also appears directed toward strengthening the Lebanese state at the central level in a way that makes it less tied to Iran and more open to integration into broader regional arrangements. From the Israeli perspective, these are two complementary objectives.

In Syria, Israel has not dealt with the country after the fall of the Assad regime simply as a traditional adversary. It has treated it as a strategic vacuum that must not be allowed to re-emerge as a northern front linked to Iran or Hezbollah. Israel moved to destroy both offensive and defensive conventional military capabilities. It also established positions deeper inside Syrian territory and created buffer zones without defining either the duration or the limits of that presence. Netanyahu explained this policy as part of a broader objective of demilitarizing the area stretching south of Damascus, from the Golan to Jabal al-Druze. He stated that Israel would not allow forces affiliated with the new Syrian government or any other armed group to be present there. Israel has also used the protection of Druze minorities as part of the justification for its involvement in southern Syria. Since 2011, and amid the weakening of the Syrian state, Israel had already worked to counter the entrenchment of Iran and Hezbollah in Syria and prevent weapons transfers to Lebanon under what became known as the “campaign between the wars” strategy. Despite this, Syria is increasingly turning into an arena of indirect Israeli-Turkish competition amid conflicting interests between the two sides. Turkey seeks a strong central Syrian government capable of controlling Kurdish dynamics, facilitating refugee returns, and reducing instability.

Israel, meanwhile, appears to favor a weaker government that would preserve a demilitarized southern Syria, maintain room for intervention when needed, and prevent the return of Iran and Hezbollah.

Israel’s current strategy appears to be a modified continuation of its post-1967 approach. It is based on dismantling fronts, preventing their interconnection, and turning each axis into a separate file that can be exhausted, contained, or subordinated. The broader objective remains separating the Palestinian issue from its Arab and regional context, neutralizing other fronts, and maintaining Israel as the region’s dominant power. Historical experience over many decades has shown that Israel has been a source of instability for the states and peoples of the region. Yet it has also achieved gradual and cumulative progress toward its objectives, even if it has not fully reached them. Today, the growing clarity of these Israeli objectives may itself become a driver for efforts to deter and counter them, particularly through an integrated regional framework capable of advancing shared interests, security, stability, and prosperity.

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