Netanyahu wants Israel to become the hegemonic force in the Middle East. This is the strategic significance of the “Greater Israel” project, which is then shrouded in religious rhetoric. The rapprochement between Iran and its Arab and Muslim-majority neighbours preceding the war and the rising Sunni military bloc was the most significant obstacle. A key purpose of the war launched against Iran was to break it.
Israel’s project has been expansionist since its founding—as seen in Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon—and its survival as a state depends on being able to maintain this project. It is uncertain where it ends, but it is clear that the goal is to become the regional hegemon. It is not just land that Israel is after, but control of resources, new alliances, and energy flows.
This is the significance of the Greater Israel project that Netanyahu says he feels “connected” to. He has stated that he is on a “historic and spiritual mission,” but he is not a religious man; he is a “secular Jew.” Therefore, we should probably view that statement more as historical than spiritual. He is a politician, and is very good at that, so he courts interests and shapes the narrative to suit his goals.
The Greater Israel project is effectively a way to pursue a “change in the face of the Middle East.” A policy paper published by the IDF argues that the military —and by extension Israel, since the military is the basis of the state— has to change from a “defensive” force to an “offensive” one capable of shaping a new balance of power and creating new security agreements.
The title of the IDF paper explicitly states the purpose of this shift: “Queen of the Jungle? On the Role of Israel’s Military Power in Establishing a New Regional Order in the Middle East.” ‘The Jungle’ is a common term used in Israeli circles to refer to the region where they are located. This speaks volumes about how Israelis perceive their neighbours.
This shift, which would allow Israel to continue its expansionist projects, has three concrete objectives. The first, as per the paper, is to achieve military supremacy. The second is to create a new web of alliances that Netanyahu has described as a “hexagon,” which, he says, would include Israel, India, Greece and Cyprus, along with other unnamed Arab, African, and Asian states.
The third is to redirect energy and trade flows to the West through Israel. When Israel targeted Iranian energy infrastructure and Iran responded in kind against the Gulf, Netanyahu took the opportunity to call for “alternative routes instead of the chokepoints of the Hormuz Strait and the Bab-al-Mandab Strait,” anticipating “oil pipelines and gas pipelines going west through the Arabian Peninsula right up to Israel, right up to our Mediterranean ports.”
These routes are part of the IMEC corridor that Netanyahu actively promotes. This corridor would link India to Europe, passing through the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan, and arriving at Israel as the point of connection with Greece and Europe. The corridor would bypass critical choke points, such as the Strait of Hormuz, and would also establish a financial architecture in the region that would place Israel in the middle.
Iran alone was not a threat to this project. Iran and its proxies could be managed, degraded, or even used. The real threat to this project was the normalization of relations between Iran and its Arab and Sunni-majority neighbours. This alliance would be solidified if the Türkiye-led Road Development Project —which connects the Persian Gulf with Europe through Iraq, Türkiye, and Bulgaria— and China’s Belt and Road Initiative —which connects China with Europe through Iran and Türkiye— were completed. A third Turkish-led project, the Hejaz Railway project, which connects Türkiye with Saudi Arabia through Syria and Jordan, also carries religious significance beyond being a trade route. The centrality of Türkiye in these three routes helps explain Israel’s increasing rhetoric against Türkiye.
The change brought about by this scenario presented a critical threat to Israel’s hegemonic project.
This is the central argument of a paper published by the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security (JISS) and written by two influential former Israeli security figures. The article, published days before the war, proposes that the cooperation between Iran and Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar represented an obstacle to Israel’s goals.
The authors argue that this cooperation was based on the fear that U.S. and Israeli “victories” in the region were shifting the balance of power towards Israel. The authors argue that these nations feared that defeating Iran would create a pro-Western, pro-Israel “new Iran,” expand the Abraham Accords, cement Israel as the dominant regional power, and undermine their influence.
Hence, the paper proposes “peace through strength,” repeating the U.S. current administration’s infamous statement. Israel and the U.S. should use power to create deterrence, then engage in dialogue from a position of strength. In other words, the U.S. and Israel should attack Iran—despite the pressure of other countries in the region—to break the emergent rapprochement between Iran and its neighbours, halt the development of trade and energy routes, and make Israel indispensable to the West in the region.
The spillover from the war to Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states – Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates – was not an unfortunate consequence. From the standpoint of Israel, it was a predictable and desirable consequence in order to make them dependent on Israel for security and energy export routes, and to drive a deep wedge between them and Iran.
Netanyahu correctly assessed that he could pressure the U.S. to join a strike against Iran and try to turn the tide. However, the attack is not yielding the intended results. Iran has proven to be far more resilient than expected by Israel and the U.S. and, if it continues to hold its ground, could actually have the opposite effect: strengthening Iran’s position vis-à-vis its neighbours and further isolating and weakening Israel.
There are several reasons for the current U.S. and Israeli failure. Israel has underestimated the capacity of Iran and its allies. The JISS paper states that from 2023 to 2025 Israel degraded Iran’s capabilities and those of its allies, judging that the country was at its “weakest point.” However true that statement might have been, Iran’s resistance and counteroffensive against the U.S. and Israel, and Hezbollah’s operations in Lebanon—which are confronting the Israeli military—show that Iran was far from the “collapsing” narrative promoted by Israel.
The paper also mentions Assad’s fall in Syria. Although this would seem like a significant step against the Iranian axis, it has proven to be much more unpredictable. There are reports that the current Syrian government is allowing help to reach Hezbollah in even larger quantities than during Assad’s final stages. Israel has not managed either to push the Syrian government to join its effort against Hezbollah or to take the bait to fight against them. This might or might not be true, but it points to an understanding of events in the region that is generally ignored.
Whichever opinion you hold of the current Syrian administration, I believe it should be much more nuanced than what is usually presented in either the mainstream media or the alternative one. Al-Sharaa has proven to be a much more adept actor than a simple Western puppet. His trajectory, even acknowledging that he was part of Al-Qaeda, is that of a man with agency while dealing with all sorts of external influence. He turned against Al-Qaeda when pushed to join ISIS. He managed to unite different factions fighting against Assad and take control of Idlib. He gained the trust of Türkiye and, through it, other Western powers. When Assad fell, he had the guts to go to Russia to dialogue with Putin.
I am not trying to make an apology; there is much to criticize as well. What I’m trying to point out is that he can’t be understood only as a CIA/Mossad puppet. As far as I know, he is the only leader of a country right now that has been in battle himself—except for, perhaps, Hibatullah Akhundzada, the Emir of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. You may very well despise both men and think that they are “terrorists.” But if you are serious about understanding what is happening in those regions, you can’t afford that simplistic view.
This is the critical failure of the Israel-U.S. project in the Middle East: a lack of recognition of the agency of local actors and a lack of acknowledgment of their history and that of their people. The countries in this region share thousands of years of history, languages, religions, and cultures. The current emergence of regional trade and military blocs is not a foreign mandate but its opposite. It is the region’s awakening to the end of post-Sykes-Picot Western control and the end of U.S. hegemony, with all the upheaval it might bring.
For Israel and the U.S., the narrative of the Middle East starts in 1948. But for others, it has been thousands of years.
