Hard to believe, perhaps, but this was Israel’s prime minister at the UN General Assembly on 22 September 2023. With the United States and Iran having just signed a highly contentious agreement to end the regional war, and with Israel more isolated than ever, a sobering question must be asked: how did Israel move from the brink of historic regional integration to profound diplomatic isolation?

Hamas was terrified of normalization

Israel’s Kan News reported earlier this week on documents seized in Gaza revealing that Hamas was terrified of what it saw as an impending normalization agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia, viewing it as a “strategic threat” to the organization and the Palestinian cause. Scholars have described the need to thwart the imminent prospect of normalization as a decisive factor in the decision to carry out the October 7 attacks, and Hamas leaders have admitted as much. The Islamic Republic of Iran shared Hamas’s alarm over the prospect of normalization, and was particularly worried about plans to launch an integrated air defence system involving Israel and the Gulf states.

While this is not the first report detailing Hamas’s panic over regional integration, the accumulating documentary evidence sheds a stark light on the extent to which the normalization issue loomed large in the strategic thinking of Iran’s Axis of Resistance. Hamas succeeded in blowing up the prospects for normalization with the attacks of October 7. That in itself is no surprise. Yet it is deeply troubling that Israel gave Hamas and its patron exactly what they wanted.

The coalition trap

A normalization agreement with Saudi Arabia would have required, at the very least, some minimal concessions on the Palestinian issue. However, Israel’s prime minister left himself absolutely no room for flexibility, shackled by his extreme coalition partners. By choosing to preserve his domestic alliance over regional grand strategy, Netanyahu effectively blocked his own diplomatic breakthrough. Israel’s subsequent excessive use of force in Gaza and its backing of West Bank annexation put paid to any possibility of widening the Abraham Accords. Netanyahu now talks of transforming the Middle East. The grim reality is that he may have succeeded — just not in the way he imagined.

The ensuing confrontation with Iran has only exacerbated the situation, driving the Gulf states to build a defensive rapprochement with Tehran. As Danny Citrinowicz, a longstanding expert on Iran at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) has pointed out, Israel is now the only state in the region which looks positively on the use of military force against Iran. This strategic shift applies even to the United Arab Emirates, which had previously gone out on a limb to strengthen ties with Israel.

Sir Alex Younger’s prescient warning

Days after the October 7 attacks, before Israel launched its heavy military response, former MI6 chief Sir Alex Younger gave an interview on BBC Today that Bermant says will “always stay with me.”

The limits of military force — and a failed opposition

There is a solid argument that the 12-day war of last June against Iran belonged in a defensive category because Tehran was on the threshold of obtaining a nuclear capability. But that short war had limited, clear objectives. Once they were achieved, Israel and the United States should have left well alone. Instead, the political and military establishment succumbed to the illusion that military force could solve all regional challenges.

To quote Citrinowicz: “Effective strategy requires distinguishing between threats that can be managed and threats that cannot be tolerated. Iran’s regional influence and missile capabilities belong to the first category; a nuclear-armed Iran belongs to the second.”

By treating manageable threats as intolerable existential crises, Jerusalem launched an open-ended war that has failed to meet a single one of its stated strategic objectives. The Islamic Republic of Iran is now stronger, not weaker; its nuclear programme has not been eradicated; its missile programme has not been destroyed; and Tehran continues to back its proxies robustly.

Where is Israel’s opposition?

Israel’s diaspora affairs minister Amichai Chikli, in a telling sign of the domestic narrative to come, has begun pointing to a “new alliance” threatening Israel — Pakistan, Turkey, and Syria — and declared that “it is a matter of time until Israel will be at war with Syria.” The Netanyahu government can now be expected to double down on the manipulative narrative that Israel stands entirely alone and must therefore do whatever it takes. It would be highly convenient for a desperate Netanyahu to encourage a siege mindset ahead of the upcoming election.

Yet Israel’s opposition leaders have done the public a profound disservice by reflexively supporting the government’s catastrophic war with Iran. They now have an urgent duty to tell the electorate the truth about the limitations of military force and these squandered normalization opportunities. They must stop playing political catch-up and finally articulate a viable, alternative path back toward regional cooperation and normalization.