by SUSAN WATKINS
In a matter of months, Israel has struck at four states, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran, exploiting its present aerial supremacy over the region. In September 2024 it wiped out much of Hezbollah’s command structure, dropped eighty bombs on Nasrallah’s home, blasted Beirut and the Bekaa Valley, then reoccupied southern Lebanon. In October it destroyed Iran’s main air defences, after Khamenei responded to Nasrallah’s death with a token missile shower. In December it greeted the capture of Damascus by al-Nusra insurgents with extensive bombing of Syria’s undefended infrastructure. In March 2025 it ripped up Trump’s Gaza ceasefire to continue the shelling of homes, hospitals, refugee camps and food queues, expanded its torture centres and blocked food aid, imposing widespread starvation. In the West Bank, it has driven thousands from their homes and authorized twenty-two new Jewish settlements. On 13 June 2025 it launched an attack on Iran, supposedly aimed at setting back Tehran’s nuclear programme on grounds of Israel’s ‘right to self-defence’, but actually targeting the regime itself—the military high command, irgc leaders, intelligence chiefs, Basij, energy and broadcasting infrastructure. Finally, it succeeded in drawing Washington into its war on Iran. On 22 June, American B2s dropped their 30,000-pound payloads on Fordow and Natanz, while a us submarine launched 30-plus cruise missiles at the sites.
There have been few such explosive bids for regional dominance since the upsurge of Imperial Japan, annexing Korea, Taiwan and southern Manchuria—or, perhaps, South Africa’s ‘total strategy’ in the 1970s and 80s, targeting Angola, Namibia and Mozambique. Israel’s is different in many key respects. First, though Japan had London and Washington’s backing through to the 1920s, it acted alone. It possessed, a British diplomat noted, ‘both the desire and the capabilities’ to do so. footnote1 Israel’s desires still outstrip its capabilities. Early Zionist leaders had no doubt about the need for imperial backing. The infant statelet could not have survived the 1938 Arab Revolt without British arms, nor got away with the Nakba if British troops had not stood back to allow it, nor achieved international recognition without Washington to promote it at the un. Israel has fought tenaciously for operational autonomy, building up a $200 billion war chest to cover any blips in America’s annual $3.5 billion assistance, but an irreducible minimum of diplomatic and material dependency remains; it still needs Washington to keep Egypt chained. footnote2
Second, Japan had a long pre-history of relatively peaceful urban development before the arrival of us warships in the 1850s; it entered a world stage already divided between great imperial powers and set out to carve a place among them, if only to avoid becoming a colony itself. Israel was founded as an ethno-confessional settler statelet, mentally and materially surrounded by a ‘wall of bayonets’, in Jabotinsky’s term: ‘Zionism is a colonizing venture and therefore it stands or falls on the question of armed force.’ No native population would willingly accept an alien majority; if a Jewish home in Palestine was the aim, it would have to be imposed. footnote3 Though Labour Zionism liked to claim it had no conflict of interest with Arab workers, only with effendis and landowners, its military practice—the Nakba, 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973—followed the same logic. In the Zionist narrative, Jewish ownership of the land is a realization of God’s promise, in a direct line from the golden age chronicled in the Pentateuch, while the armed forces are the core ideological state apparatus, the social instrument that transformed European—and Arab, African, Soviet—Jewry into Israelis: ‘the nation is the creation of the army, which is in turn the crowning glory of the nation.’ footnote4
A third difference: Imperial Japan set about a far-reaching programme of industrial and infrastructural development in the lands it conquered, mobilizing forced labour to build ports, railways, plants and mines. In its half-century rule over the West Bank and Gaza, Israel has reduced much of the Palestinian population to mendicancy, while its favoured contractors have become hyper-rich. De-development and ‘regime degradation’ have been its aim in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq. Rather than annexation it aims at the fragmentation of surrounding states, with the iaf as their aerial overseer. Here it is closer to apartheid South Africa’s pattern of pre-emptive strikes, targeted killings and cash for local proxy forces. But South Africa’s goal was political: it was fighting broadly Soviet-aligned liberation movements as a Cold War ally of the us; absent that condition, the whole apartheid structure collapsed. Israel’s goals are ethno-nationalist and its relationship to us foreign policy has been more intimate, if objectively more fraught.
The third front
Comparison serves to underline Israel’s unique character as an ethno-confessional settler state, politically autonomous but existentially dependent upon a distant superpower in which its co-religionists occupy a significant but not dominant position.
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