Israel has been exposed as a dependent colony that relies on the West for its military adventures. And even still, it has failed to turn this advantage over Iran into strategic success. The Israel doctrine appears to be meeting its limits.
Abdaljawad Omar
June 24, 2025
Much of the current crop of commentary on Israel’s war of aggression on Iran has adopted the familiar tone of breathless admiration: praise for its targeting precision, the elegance of its intelligence-gathering, and the almost clinical efficiency with which it eliminates not only combatants but scientists, technicians, and — under the now-naturalized euphemism — “sites and infrastructure.”
Israel’s opening salvo in the war was, by most conventional metrics, effective. The Iranians, caught off guard, scrambled to recalibrate. Though they gradually recovered some measure of initiative, their response bore the marks of persistence and attrition rather than dominance.
Even as they regrouped, they remained beleaguered, under the pressure of drones, sustained airpower, and the lingering anticipation of the next strike. In the process, they lost a significant tranche of military leadership and suffered considerable damage to their nuclear infrastructure following direct American involvement. Meanwhile, the global economy remained intact; oil prices did not spike, and escalation was contained.
From this vantage, Israel and America’s war reads as an operational success, and so it will be described in the pages of The New York Times, The Economist, and The Financial Times — outlets that are fluent in the grammar of “agility,” “precision,” and the celebration of Israeli military power. But this is a flattened reading, conflating tactical effectiveness with strategic consequence. What it misses, perhaps deliberately, is the history of how such victories age: not as resolution, but as preamble.
Historians will no doubt begin charting the trajectory of how Israel got here — tracing how Israel, chastened by the relative defeats of 2000 and 2006 during its confrontations with Hezbollah, recalibrated its military doctrine, retooled its strategic posture, and fashioned a new doctrine of force.
For all the domestic celebration of prowess and revenge, the war revealed Israel’s limits. The first, and perhaps most fundamental limit, is that Israel remains, in material terms, a dependent colony — though one that has perfected the appearance of autonomy. Its ability to launch and sustain military campaigns is predicated almost entirely on Western largesse: financial, technological, and political. Lacking an indigenous industrial base capable of supporting prolonged warfare, it leans heavily on supply chains rooted not in Tel Aviv but in Washington, London, Paris, and Berlin.
Its much-lauded operational agility — its air superiority, missile inventory, and intelligence capacities — is inseparable from the uninterrupted provision of arms, the continual delivery of aircraft, and, above all, the sustained political will in Western capitals to underwrite its projection of force.
That this remains an unresolvable structural dependency is rarely acknowledged; it is, in fact, a persistent fragility masquerading as strength.
A dependent colony
In this war, the contradictions between Israeli ambition and American constraint emerged early and visibly. The first came in the form of Israel’s inability to strike some of Iran’s most sensitive nuclear sites, and the political fissures that this failure exposed, particularly within the ideological spectrum in the United States. The second contradiction lay in Israel’s insistence on regime change, or at the very least, regime weakening, as a central objective. Israel quietly abandoned this ambition as the war settled, instead accepting (for now) a narrower result: the delay or degradation of Iran’s known nuclear infrastructure. What was declared as regime change ended, predictably, in calibration.
The second limit to Israeli power lies in Israel’s ongoing refinemen t of methods for the governance and mass killing of Palestinians. This is no incidental consequence of war, but a strategy pursued with consistency and increasing technical sophistication. Under a government shaped as much by religious zealotry as by ethno-nationalist ambition, Gaza has become the principal laboratory: a zone of erasure where infrastructure is annihilated, civic life is extinguished, and entire populations are rendered both hyper-visible and disposable. What is unfolding there can only be described — without recourse to exaggeration — as a genocide.
For Israel, the stain is now as historical as it is political. Operational success may still earn applause from Western strategists, political elites, and the circle of Zionist intellectuals long committed to the mythology of existential necessity, but elsewhere, the terrain is shifting.
Not only the contours of discourse but also the material scaffolding of support have begun to fracture, albeit quietly and unevenly. In the United States, this is evident in the hesitations of some lawmakers, in the split-screen spectacle of right-wing pundits sparring with ideological hardliners, in the rise of a progressive flank less beholden to the Israel mythos, and in the gradual erosion of antisemitism as a catch-all veto against critique.
Structural symptoms
Meanwhile, the imperial center turns inward, absorbed by its own resentments, its trade and culture wars, and its reluctance to bankroll open-ended conflicts in distant theaters. The appetite for perpetual war — the very basis of Israel’s strategic indispensability — has waned.
These are structural symptoms. While Israel may continue to position itself as irreplaceable — and its military aid may remain secure in the near term — the slow war of attrition has already begun.
This attrition is not only reflected on the battlefield, but in the symbolic realm: without a total, declarative victory, Israel remains locked in the cycle it claims to master.
For now, Iran remains. Whatever fissures Israel hoped to widen with this war may in fact have the opposite effect: consolidating Iran’s resolve to deter, fortify, and adapt. It did not surrender or lay down arms. And while its losses are real — measured in commanders killed, infrastructure degraded, and strategic ambiguity pierced — the regime has emerged intact, if chastened.
The trajectory ahead remains open. Will the Islamic Republic rebuild its regional networks? Will it accelerate its path toward nuclear deterrence and deepen its entanglements with China and Russia? Or might it strike a rapprochement with the U.S. empire?
The Israeli doctrine constrained
Israel’s operational advantage has not, as of yet, translated into strategic success. Iran’s cold, measured demeanour — its habitual aversion to risk and preference for the long game — both exposed it to the initial assault and, paradoxically, shielded it from full-scale confrontation. The very posture that rendered it vulnerable also enabled it to absorb the strikes, shorten the war’s duration, and contain its escalation. Restraint, in this context, was less a virtue than a tactic: a way to manage exposure while preserving future options. That doctrine will no doubt be revisited.
Still, Iran emerged not only bruised but intact — and crucially, without having played its most consequential cards: the Strait of Hormuz remains open, American bases across the Gulf are untouched, and the region’s oil infrastructure, always the shadow theater of war, is still functional. In holding back, Iran preserved both its arsenal and its ambiguity.
This posture runs counter to the Israeli grain. Where Iran traffics in delay, Israel prefers immediacy: shock and awe, rapid domination, and the swift choreography of surrender. Its doctrine is animated not by patience but by the desire to overwhelm, rendering resistance unthinkable through sheer velocity and force.
It is a strategy of visibility, spectacle, and risk, underwritten by the belief that deterrence is best secured through the demonstrative performance of unrestrained violence. Such tactics serve not only regional aims but imperial optics: Israel’s ability to wield American-made weapons with precision and theatrical flair functions, too, as a kind of alms to the empire, doing the dirty work on behalf of Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States.
Its battlefield choreography doubles as political currency — proof of reliability, discipline, and usefulness. It earns credit in Washington not merely through outcomes but through performance. That credit, Israel knows, is much needed at a time when its costs, assumptions, and relationship with empire come under new scrutiny.
But this doctrine has its limits. While it satisfies the Israeli gaze, offering a sense of mastery, reprieve, and even grandeur, it also risks producing the conditions for its own disillusionment. The performance of total control, rehearsed so often for domestic consumption, cannot always account for the stubbornness of political reality. When the edifice begins to buckle — when deterrence fails and the enemy survives — the spectacle no longer reassures, but unsettles. The very public it was meant to comfort begins, however faintly, to glimpse the limits of force.
Can Israel ethnically cleanse the Palestinians, or must it continue to live with them — visible, unassimilable, and unremoved? Can it assume Hezbollah will remain quiet for decades? Will it trust that Iran will remain neutralized by diplomacy or trade? Or will the game continue, under new disguises, each round promising resolution but delivering only deferral?
Iran’s moment of reckoning
This logic, of course, applies not only to Israel but to Iran and its Axis of Resistance. Its long-favored strategy of calibrated restraint, limited engagement, strategic ambiguity, and shadowboxing in place of confrontation met its reckoning on October 7. What followed rendered the old playbook insufficient. The space for ambiguity has narrowed, and the luxury of avoidance has grown too costly.
Whether the axis adapts, retreats, or doubles down remains to be seen. But something structural has shifted: the language of confrontation has changed, and with it, the horizon of what can be indefinitely postponed. Hezbollah and Iran sought to maintain restraint. Israel, by contrast, sought escalation, risk, spectacle, and American entanglement. In that encounter, it was not moderation that prevailed, but provocation. And the costs of holding back may, in time, rival those of charging ahead.
The future, as ever, remains uncertain. This may yet prove to be the final confrontation between these forces — or simply another episode in a war without end, another mutation in a conflict that refuses to resolve. What is clearer, however, is that Israel’s conduct — its callous killing of Palestinians, the catastrophe in Gaza, and the unsettling gap between military success and political irresolution — will not easily fade.
Already on the day that the ceasefire entered into effect, Israel was ordered by Trump not to respond to a rocket attack by Iran through a tweet, and had to scavenge through ruined buildings for the bodies of those killed by Iran’s deadly missiles. The architecture of impunity is never permanent. What is repressed has a tendency to return, and wars waged without ends have a habit of circling back, demanding answers from those who thought they had already won.
mondoweiss.net
Abdaljawad Omar
June 24, 2025
Much of the current crop of commentary on Israel’s war of aggression on Iran has adopted the familiar tone of breathless admiration: praise for its targeting precision, the elegance of its intelligence-gathering, and the almost clinical efficiency with which it eliminates not only combatants but scientists, technicians, and — under the now-naturalized euphemism — “sites and infrastructure.”
Israel’s opening salvo in the war was, by most conventional metrics, effective. The Iranians, caught off guard, scrambled to recalibrate. Though they gradually recovered some measure of initiative, their response bore the marks of persistence and attrition rather than dominance.
Even as they regrouped, they remained beleaguered, under the pressure of drones, sustained airpower, and the lingering anticipation of the next strike. In the process, they lost a significant tranche of military leadership and suffered considerable damage to their nuclear infrastructure following direct American involvement. Meanwhile, the global economy remained intact; oil prices did not spike, and escalation was contained.
From this vantage, Israel and America’s war reads as an operational success, and so it will be described in the pages of The New York Times, The Economist, and The Financial Times — outlets that are fluent in the grammar of “agility,” “precision,” and the celebration of Israeli military power. But this is a flattened reading, conflating tactical effectiveness with strategic consequence. What it misses, perhaps deliberately, is the history of how such victories age: not as resolution, but as preamble.
Historians will no doubt begin charting the trajectory of how Israel got here — tracing how Israel, chastened by the relative defeats of 2000 and 2006 during its confrontations with Hezbollah, recalibrated its military doctrine, retooled its strategic posture, and fashioned a new doctrine of force.
Israel’s ability to launch and sustain military campaigns is predicated almost entirely on Western largesse. Lacking an indigenous industrial base capable of supporting prolonged warfare, it leans heavily on supply chains rooted in the U.S. and Europe.
The technologists will follow, marveling at the state’s intelligence apparatus: its networks within Iran, its infiltration of clandestine organizations, and its deft manipulation of secrecy in an age that renders covert operations more difficult. The result will be a familiar kind of praise of Israel’s cunning, preparation, and resolve. Israel will be hailed not simply for what it destroyed, but for how it did so.For all the domestic celebration of prowess and revenge, the war revealed Israel’s limits. The first, and perhaps most fundamental limit, is that Israel remains, in material terms, a dependent colony — though one that has perfected the appearance of autonomy. Its ability to launch and sustain military campaigns is predicated almost entirely on Western largesse: financial, technological, and political. Lacking an indigenous industrial base capable of supporting prolonged warfare, it leans heavily on supply chains rooted not in Tel Aviv but in Washington, London, Paris, and Berlin.
Its much-lauded operational agility — its air superiority, missile inventory, and intelligence capacities — is inseparable from the uninterrupted provision of arms, the continual delivery of aircraft, and, above all, the sustained political will in Western capitals to underwrite its projection of force.
That this remains an unresolvable structural dependency is rarely acknowledged; it is, in fact, a persistent fragility masquerading as strength.
A dependent colony
In this war, the contradictions between Israeli ambition and American constraint emerged early and visibly. The first came in the form of Israel’s inability to strike some of Iran’s most sensitive nuclear sites, and the political fissures that this failure exposed, particularly within the ideological spectrum in the United States. The second contradiction lay in Israel’s insistence on regime change, or at the very least, regime weakening, as a central objective. Israel quietly abandoned this ambition as the war settled, instead accepting (for now) a narrower result: the delay or degradation of Iran’s known nuclear infrastructure. What was declared as regime change ended, predictably, in calibration.
The second limit to Israeli power lies in Israel’s ongoing refinemen t of methods for the governance and mass killing of Palestinians. This is no incidental consequence of war, but a strategy pursued with consistency and increasing technical sophistication. Under a government shaped as much by religious zealotry as by ethno-nationalist ambition, Gaza has become the principal laboratory: a zone of erasure where infrastructure is annihilated, civic life is extinguished, and entire populations are rendered both hyper-visible and disposable. What is unfolding there can only be described — without recourse to exaggeration — as a genocide.
For Israel, the stain is now as historical as it is political. Operational success may still earn applause from Western strategists, political elites, and the circle of Zionist intellectuals long committed to the mythology of existential necessity, but elsewhere, the terrain is shifting.
Not only the contours of discourse but also the material scaffolding of support have begun to fracture, albeit quietly and unevenly. In the United States, this is evident in the hesitations of some lawmakers, in the split-screen spectacle of right-wing pundits sparring with ideological hardliners, in the rise of a progressive flank less beholden to the Israel mythos, and in the gradual erosion of antisemitism as a catch-all veto against critique.
Structural symptoms
Meanwhile, the imperial center turns inward, absorbed by its own resentments, its trade and culture wars, and its reluctance to bankroll open-ended conflicts in distant theaters. The appetite for perpetual war — the very basis of Israel’s strategic indispensability — has waned.
These are structural symptoms. While Israel may continue to position itself as irreplaceable — and its military aid may remain secure in the near term — the slow war of attrition has already begun.
This attrition is not only reflected on the battlefield, but in the symbolic realm: without a total, declarative victory, Israel remains locked in the cycle it claims to master.
For now, Iran remains. Whatever fissures Israel hoped to widen with this war may in fact have the opposite effect: consolidating Iran’s resolve to deter, fortify, and adapt. It did not surrender or lay down arms. And while its losses are real — measured in commanders killed, infrastructure degraded, and strategic ambiguity pierced — the regime has emerged intact, if chastened.
The trajectory ahead remains open. Will the Islamic Republic rebuild its regional networks? Will it accelerate its path toward nuclear deterrence and deepen its entanglements with China and Russia? Or might it strike a rapprochement with the U.S. empire?
The Israeli doctrine constrained
Israel’s operational advantage has not, as of yet, translated into strategic success. Iran’s cold, measured demeanour — its habitual aversion to risk and preference for the long game — both exposed it to the initial assault and, paradoxically, shielded it from full-scale confrontation. The very posture that rendered it vulnerable also enabled it to absorb the strikes, shorten the war’s duration, and contain its escalation. Restraint, in this context, was less a virtue than a tactic: a way to manage exposure while preserving future options. That doctrine will no doubt be revisited.
Still, Iran emerged not only bruised but intact — and crucially, without having played its most consequential cards: the Strait of Hormuz remains open, American bases across the Gulf are untouched, and the region’s oil infrastructure, always the shadow theater of war, is still functional. In holding back, Iran preserved both its arsenal and its ambiguity.
This posture runs counter to the Israeli grain. Where Iran traffics in delay, Israel prefers immediacy: shock and awe, rapid domination, and the swift choreography of surrender. Its doctrine is animated not by patience but by the desire to overwhelm, rendering resistance unthinkable through sheer velocity and force.
It is a strategy of visibility, spectacle, and risk, underwritten by the belief that deterrence is best secured through the demonstrative performance of unrestrained violence. Such tactics serve not only regional aims but imperial optics: Israel’s ability to wield American-made weapons with precision and theatrical flair functions, too, as a kind of alms to the empire, doing the dirty work on behalf of Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States.
Its battlefield choreography doubles as political currency — proof of reliability, discipline, and usefulness. It earns credit in Washington not merely through outcomes but through performance. That credit, Israel knows, is much needed at a time when its costs, assumptions, and relationship with empire come under new scrutiny.
But this doctrine has its limits. While it satisfies the Israeli gaze, offering a sense of mastery, reprieve, and even grandeur, it also risks producing the conditions for its own disillusionment. The performance of total control, rehearsed so often for domestic consumption, cannot always account for the stubbornness of political reality. When the edifice begins to buckle — when deterrence fails and the enemy survives — the spectacle no longer reassures, but unsettles. The very public it was meant to comfort begins, however faintly, to glimpse the limits of force.
Can Israel ethnically cleanse the Palestinians, or must it continue to live with them — visible, unassimilable, and unremoved? Can it assume Hezbollah will remain quiet for decades? Will it trust that Iran will remain neutralized by diplomacy or trade? Or will the game continue, under new disguises, each round promising resolution but delivering only deferral?
Iran’s moment of reckoning
This logic, of course, applies not only to Israel but to Iran and its Axis of Resistance. Its long-favored strategy of calibrated restraint, limited engagement, strategic ambiguity, and shadowboxing in place of confrontation met its reckoning on October 7. What followed rendered the old playbook insufficient. The space for ambiguity has narrowed, and the luxury of avoidance has grown too costly.
Whether the axis adapts, retreats, or doubles down remains to be seen. But something structural has shifted: the language of confrontation has changed, and with it, the horizon of what can be indefinitely postponed. Hezbollah and Iran sought to maintain restraint. Israel, by contrast, sought escalation, risk, spectacle, and American entanglement. In that encounter, it was not moderation that prevailed, but provocation. And the costs of holding back may, in time, rival those of charging ahead.
The future, as ever, remains uncertain. This may yet prove to be the final confrontation between these forces — or simply another episode in a war without end, another mutation in a conflict that refuses to resolve. What is clearer, however, is that Israel’s conduct — its callous killing of Palestinians, the catastrophe in Gaza, and the unsettling gap between military success and political irresolution — will not easily fade.
Already on the day that the ceasefire entered into effect, Israel was ordered by Trump not to respond to a rocket attack by Iran through a tweet, and had to scavenge through ruined buildings for the bodies of those killed by Iran’s deadly missiles. The architecture of impunity is never permanent. What is repressed has a tendency to return, and wars waged without ends have a habit of circling back, demanding answers from those who thought they had already won.
The ceasefire with Iran reveals the limits of Israel’s power — and its dependence on the U.S.
Israel has been exposed as a dependent colony that relies on the West for its military adventures. And even still, it has failed to turn this advantage over Iran into strategic success. The Israel doctrine appears to be meeting its limits.
mondoweiss.net
