Alwaght- The Israeli occupation settlers are passing their most bitter days after 31 months of a conflict that has included wars with Hamas, Hezbollah, Yemen, and Iran. These wars have fully grabbed calm and security from the settlers and left them in mental and behaviorial perplexity. This situation prompts three essential and unavoidable questions from the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu:
What have you achieved from you wars? What damage have you inflicted on us? Why are you sending our soldiers to their death?
These three questions concern three key points:
The first question concerns the serious challenge of the Israeli society, namely society which has always been a matter of their concern. Aware of this persistent concern and his own fundamental inability to resolve it, Netanyahu, by claiming to be the superman who establishes security, managed to seize power in the occupied territories. The October 7, 2023 operation by resistance groups of Palestine shattered the very foundations of Netanyahu’s security claims and bravado. After this major event, which was an unprecedented turning point in the history of the Israeli regime’s conflicts with the Palestinian people, Netanyahu mobilized every material, spiritual, domestic, and foreign asset of the regime. His goal was to refresh his image by updating the repertoire of atrocities, offering the Israelis a mere sip of security. This strategy, shaped by events over the past 31 months, has seen ups and downs, and is now in a downward phase, as the central question looms larger than ever: Netanyahu has failed in his claim.
The second question concerns the situation that relentless, successive wars over these 31 months have created for the Israelis. Setting aside Netanyahu’s repeated claims about destroying Hamas, disarming Hezbollah, and a string of shattered fantasies about Iran, this question compares his rhetoric with the grim reality. It finds no trace of a single fulfilled claim within Netanyahu’s circle of promises. Meanwhile, Israeli society has lost everything it had for a normal life and now struggles in the misery Netanyahu has built. This is the predicament he has brought upon this society.
The third question concerns the rising number of army casualties in the recent clashes with Lebanon’s Hezbollah. The military policy of Israel since the beginning rested on meager human casualties. This policy has driven Tel Aviv to constantly boost air force for lesser reliance on the ground forces. It developed armored units of the ground forces for less casualties in case use of infantry is unavailable.
In many past Israeli wars with Palestinians and Arab states, even limited military casualties on the Israeli side have often been a key factor accelerating ceasefires and ending conflicts. But what we are seeing these days in the south Lebanon clashes is a sharp departure from Israeli military doctrine. Hezbollah’s use of fiber-optic drones, immune to detection, has inflicted heavy losses on the Israeli army in terms of equipment, infrastructure, and, more critically, manpower. The rising death and injury toll inside Israeli society has even spawned a new phrase: “duck hunting.” The growing sense of futility has given rise to a searing public question: Why are you sending our soldiers to their deaths?
Faced with these three fundamental questions, and his inability to provide any convincing answers, Netanyahu is now also staring down the threat of early elections. A motion to dissolve the cabinet has already passed its first reading decisively. With two more Knesset votes likely to follow under the law, Netanyahu’s political fate hangs by a thread: either ousted or hobbled by an unmanageable crisis. Trapped between relentless pressure and a wave of criticism that even his opponents are riding, he is desperately hunting for a victory. So, he doubled down on Lebanon, pivoting to territorial expansion. He accepted heavy costs, crossed the Litani River, and pushed all the way to the famous Beaufort Castle. But when he realized no one at home recognized it as any real achievement, he set his next target: Beirut’s Dahieh (suburb). Striking Dahieh and Beirut meant crossing the red line established under the Iran-US ceasefire framework, of which the Lebanon truce was a major part. However, serious warnings from Iranian political and military officials, threatening to halt talks and rain missiles on the northern occupied territories if Dahieh and Beirut were attacked, quickly forced Trump to call Netanyahu and stop him in his tracks.
In this development, the important issue was the working of Iranian threat whose reasons are open for debate. The most precise debate is credibility and effectiveness of this threat. On the one hand, the satellite imagery reported Iran's ready-for-launch missiles and on the other hand is Iran's record of threats that have materialized using force when its demands went ignored. Having been in the worst and toughest conditions and having worked hard to manage to persuade Iran to agree to the truce, Trump was well aware that if Israel attacked Dahieh and Beirut, Iran will not hesitate to strike the occupied territories, dealing heavy blows and imposing a fresh war of attrition on the Israelis. Meanwhile, though Netanyahu could feign achievement from his military campaign as part of his plans, this could shatter Trump's ceasefire. Actually, this could either push the US president to a new, which is he currently avoiding for a set of reasons, or watch massive and devastating blows landed on his ally. So, he forced Netanyahu to withdraw his planned attack.
Forcing Netanyahu to stop his plans for attacking Beirut turned into yet another negative mark against him. Israeli society, especially the settlers in the northern occupied territories, hold an even more extreme view of south Lebanon than Netanyahu does. They genuinely want south Lebanon destroyed. So Netanyahu’s pullback from targeting Dahieh and Beirut, combined with Hezbollah’s strong battlefield presence and continued rocket barrages on northern settlements, has only made things harder for him. His record is now piling up with repeated defeats woven into daily clashes in south Lebanon. And as the clock ticks faster, a growing sense of despair, failure, impending removal from power, and even possible destruction has become both real and palpable for him.
