It has been a difficult couple of weeks for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Just as the US and Iran reached a ceasefire agreement – after six weeks of thousands of strikes across Iran that failed to achieve the war’s objectives – the New York Times published an article portraying Netanyahu as the figure who drew the Americans into what he falsely claimed would be a short and swift campaign.
European powers are now distancing themselves from Israel. Tel Aviv’s most significant failure, however, remains its confrontation with Hezbollah.
Hezbollah entered the fight in the early days of the war, proving – contrary to Israeli assessments – that it had managed to rebuild its capabilities, retaining the capacity to strike northern Israeli cities intensively, while complicating the Israeli army’s advances into Lebanon.
To make things worse, US President Donald Trump then imposed a ceasefire between Lebanon and Israel.
Now, after Israeli society embraced a violent rhetoric centred on military power, propaganda and promises of total victory, the reality has proven far more complex than many had hoped.
To put matters into perspective: during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, it took the Israeli army a week to reach Beirut. Today, the military is struggling to reach the Litani River, managing to advance up to eight kilometres from the border, despite the ceasefire signed in November 2024.
Israel has continued intensive attacks on what it claimed to be Hezbollah’s military infrastructure – and when Hezbollah entered the fighting, Israeli commentators boasted that the group had fallen into a trap set by the army, giving Israel legitimacy to “finish the job”.
Yet those same commentators quickly realised it was the army that had fallen into the trap. Despite the freedom of action granted to it in Lebanon, it has failed to eliminate Hezbollah’s military capabilities.
Growing exhaustion
Worse still, according to military intelligence reports – contrary to early claims that Hezbollah was operating through isolated guerrilla cells – it became clear that there were command and control centres, and even coordination with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards in attacks.
For Netanyahu, this represents a profound failure. After two and a half years of promises of total victory, and after the initial euphoria surrounding the war on Iran, which was presented as a short campaign that would end with regime change and the severing of Iranian support for Hamas and Hezbollah, the opposite reality has emerged.
The clearest expression of this failure came from the Israeli army itself, which stated that to disarm Hezbollah, it would need to occupy all of Lebanon in an operation that could take years, at a time when there is a serious shortage of reserve soldiers and growing exhaustion after prolonged fighting.
Meanwhile, the military budget is placing an enormous burden on the Israeli economy, having more than doubled since the start of the Gaza war.
From this difficult position, Netanyahu has now agreed to negotiate with the Lebanese government after previously rejecting such talks. This agreement appears tied to a strategic shift in Lebanon based on the Palestinian model in the occupied West Bank: more than three decades of negotiations whose main purpose became the negotiations themselves, while Israel continued seizing land and changing realities on the ground.
Within the current Israeli government, two complementary trends have emerged. On one hand, Defence Minister Israel Katz promotes the occupation of Lebanon up to the Litani River under a security pretext. On the other hand, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich advocates for making this area Israel’s northern border, openly calling for settlement in southern Lebanon.
All of this is happening alongside the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people from their homes, and Israeli threats to implement methods of destruction in Lebanon similar to those used in Khan Younis. According to a report in Haaretz, based on testimonies from Israeli soldiers, the newly established military outposts resemble those built in Gaza – and they do not appear to be temporary positions.
As international pressure intensifies, Netanyahu is trying to create a diplomatic track through which he can convince the international community that negotiations are underway between Israel and Lebanon. But negotiations under fire will still provide the Israeli public with images of destruction in Lebanon, a country that remains an open wound in the Israeli consciousness.
‘Super Sparta’ mindset
Almost every Israeli who has served in the army in recent decades has, in one way or another, lived through Lebanon as a formative military front. After 18 years of occupation from 1982-2000, followed by the 2006 war, Lebanon came to symbolise failure, while Hezbollah came to be seen as the main military force that Israel has failed to defeat over four decades.
Netanyahu is now attempting to create a new reality by turning Lebanon into a satellite state. Israel aims not only to neutralise Iranian influence and separate Lebanon from US-Iran negotiations, but also to counter French influence, viewed as an obstacle to its own regional hegemony – all while cynically exploiting Lebanon’s sectarian tensions.
During a recent primetime broadcast, journalist Raviv Drucker described how Israeli actions could lead to civil war in Lebanon, suggesting such an outcome could be good strategically for Israel.
The arrogance of Netanyahu and the Israeli security establishment has created a major challenge for Israel itself. The “Super Sparta” mindset, which abandons diplomacy and asserts that every problem can be solved through military force, is proving costly. The war with Iran forced millions of Israelis into bomb shelters, while the economy and education system were disrupted, and Israel’s position only worsened.
The ball is now in the Lebanese government’s court, and the question is to what extent it will be willing to cooperate with Israel – especially on the issue of disarming Hezbollah. This could potentially be achieved by integrating the group into the state’s security institutions, or through cooperation with Israel, the latter of which would risk pulling the country into a spiral of sectarian conflict.
For the second time in a year, the US president has imposed a ceasefire agreement on Israel – both times under international pressure that forced Washington to restrain itself. Yet Trump is also known to be unpredictable; during the Gaza “ceasefire”, the US administration has ignored daily Israeli violations and killings.
Amid this backdrop, reality has once again become clear: power has limits. Fantasies of “Greater Israel” depend on Arab surrender without resistance. The latest war once again demonstrated the importance of geography and demography, despite Israeli air superiority.
Military power is far more complex than simply bombing from above, and the world is not rushing towards a lawless order based solely on force. Diplomacy and rational dialogue still matter.
Despite the dangers facing billions of people because of the Israeli-American aggression against Iran – and despite global pressure for a ceasefire to prevent unprecedented economic turmoil – all that seems to matter to Israel is the pursuit of total victory. It has now become clear that such a victory is impossible.
