America’s Gaza Policy Is a Bipartisan Catastrophe

Meanwhile, Israel behaves with impunity, launching strikes on the capitals of Iran, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen, and has become a liability to the United States, sapping not only its power and bandwidth but also its costly, rare missile defense systems. If the United States should find itself in conflict with Russia, China, or another foe, it will do so with a reduced stockpile of expensive equipment. Above all, Israel has shown the world that, at least in its relationship with the United States, the tail is wagging the dog.

Some analysts now assert that Israel is in the strongest position in the Middle East that it’s ever been in. As evidence, they cite its assassinations of Hamas’s and Hezbollah’s leadership, the airstrikes on Iran, and the fall of Syria’s Bashar Al Assad. But whether such aggressive moves harm or help the cause of Middle East peace in the long run is open to question. As Emma Ashford, author of First Among Equals: U.S. Foreign Policy in a Multipolar World, summed it up, “Israel’s wars are potentially setting up the Middle East for further destructive conflict. Is this really good for the U.S.?”

Indeed, despite battlefield wins and the weakening of Hamas and Hezbollah, Israel appears to lack any sense of how to translate those victories into actual statecraft that will help promote eventual stability in the region. Instead, the country lurches from crisis to crisis: The strangulation of Gaza is why ragtag rebels in Yemen launched missile strikes on Israel that led to such severe shipping disruptions that the port of Eilat in Israel is now bankrupt, and why the Iranian government launched missile strikes that were likely much more damaging to Israel than has been publicly acknowledged—and have led the United States to use up about a quarter of its expensive and not easily replenishable THAAD missiles protecting Israel. None of this has brought an end to the conflict, nor even returned any of the remaining 50 or so hostages taken by Hamas on October 7. Israeli civil society is increasingly gripped by instability, with calls from the far right to seize all Palestinian lands, protests demanding Netanyahu and military leaders do more to bring the hostages home, and the prime minister’s approval rating falling as the public questions his handling of the war.