For more than a decade, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned the world of Iran’s nuclear ambitions. He repeatedly accused Tehran of being on the cusp of acquiring a bomb, condemned diplomatic overtures as capitulation, and vowed Israel would never allow Iran to become a nuclear power. Yet despite the endless threats, leaked war plans, and political theater at the United Nations and the U.S. Congress, Israel never pulled the trigger on military force beyond clandestine operations.
That changed on June 13, 2025, as Iranian and American negotiators were preparing to meet in Oman the following day for the sixth round of talks to revive a nuclear agreement, Israeli jets carried out a coordinated strike on Iranian territory.
The ongoing Israeli assault is not merely a reaction to Iran’s nuclear progress or a potential diplomatic agreement with the United States. It is the logical endpoint of a broader strategic shift that began on October 7, 2023. That day marked Hamas’s devastating cross-border raid, which shattered Israel’s security doctrine and catalyzed a political transformation. In response, Israel embarked on a maximalist campaign in Gaza—completely dismissive of international norms and strategic restraint—and pursued expansionist policies in Lebanon and Syria. Netanyahu’s government redefined existential threats—and redrew the map of acceptable force.
In short, the country has transitioned back from being a status quo actor into a revisionist power—as it was in earlier moments of its history. This has wrought dire consequences for the entire Middle East, which now teeters on the brink of total war.
Israel as a Status Quo Power
There are many competing definitions of “grand strategy” but arguably the most effective is Barry Posen’s formulation of “a nation-state’s theory for how to create security for itself.”
This does not mean that a state has or needs a preformulated plan that determines its response to every event. Instead, grand strategy is a product of enduring perceptions, biases and historical experience; a heuristic that produces a reflex action. In this way, “grand” is not synonymous with “good.” Just because a state responds to external stimuli in the same way, does not mean that its grand strategy is effective. Path dependency is a powerful thing; theories are often wrong.
After the “Six Day War” of 1967, Israel became a regional hegemon with a military edge over all its neighbors. It expanded its territorial control four-fold. It is therefore unsurprising that Israel sought to perpetuate this reality by becoming a status quo power.
Israel briefly flirted with revisionism when it invaded Lebanon in 1982, as part of a hubristic plan to induce a radical regional re-ordering. But it ended in disaster. On paper, its settlement strategy appears revisionist in that it seeks to fundamentally alter the West Bank’s demographics. Yet this is actually a status quo policy in that it seeks to perpetuate that territory’s ambiguous current reality: what looks less and less like a temporary occupation and more like a de facto if not de jure institutionalization of annexation and apartheid.
Netanyahu’s return to power in 2009 represented the apex of Israel’s shift to a status quo grand strategy. Israel ended its short-lived experiment in limited territorial withdrawals. Netanyahu kept the Palestinian Authority (PA) in place in the West Bank but stopped it from becoming more powerful in the territory itself. Similarly, he facilitated the transfer of fuel and funds to keep Hamas in power in Gaza. This created an artificial hurdle of a Palestine divided that ostensibly stopped Israel from pursuing a two-state solution.
It also kept the two competing Palestinian movements exactly where Israel wanted them: too weak and illegitimate to be a state-in-waiting, but strong enough to do everything that Israel did not want to do, such as policing and providing services for each territory’s Palestinian inhabitants. In both Gaza and the West Bank, Israel’s status quo grand strategy contracted out the territory’s governance to someone else, while retaining control from afar.
This grand strategy was terrible for Palestinians in the occupied territories. But it did mean that Israel was unlikely to instigate a regional war, which did not appear to be in its national interests. Instead, Israel employed its military to “mow the lawn”—chopping down but not uprooting any threats to the status quo. This is why Netanyahu denounced a broad spectrum of rivals, from the Iranian regime and Assad’s Syria, to Hamas and Hezbollah, without taking action to remove them: Israel could apparently have its cake and eat it.
The Shift Towards Revisionism
This worked for Israel until it no longer did. The Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023, illustrated just how badly Israel had under-estimated the group and over-estimated its own ability to coerce rivals into accepting a status quo that did not serve their interests.
Grand strategies rarely change. It takes a shocking external stimulus like the October 7 attacks to make a critical mass of public and elite opinion question the heuristics and received knowledge that promote path dependency. Just as the 9/11 attacks steered the George W. Bush administration away from an envisioned grand strategy of retrenchment, it is defining national moments like this that cause mainstream actors to think the previously unthinkable.
The problem is that all ideas are not created equal. From their positions of privilege, far-right ministers such as Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Minister for Internal Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, have not missed an opportunity to fill a grand strategic vacuum with their transformative regional vision. This is why Israeli ministers’ calls to ethnically cleanse and commit genocide in Gaza, while formally annexing the West Bank and parts of Lebanon and Syria are not mere bluster. The people advocating these things are no longer fringe voices.
In the West Bank, Israel has approved 22 new settlements which, in Smotrich’s words, will strengthen Israel’s “de facto sovereignty” there. Barely a week after October 7, 2023, then-Foreign Minister Eli Cohen claimed that “the territory of Gaza will decrease.” Syria’s new president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, proclaimed that his administration has no hostile intent toward Israel. Israel responded by occupying more Syrian territory, expelling Syrian civilians and launching an unprecedented number of airstrikes.
Israel has replaced its status quo grand strategy with a revisionist one. Its outlook and actions today more closely mirror the disruptive behavior it alleges of Iran. Instead of “mowing the lawn” it is using military force for a different end: creating a new regional balance of power.
It is this grand strategic shift that explains Israel’s recent strikes on Iran. Israel and Iran share no border. Smotrich and his fellow travelers have no designs over Iranian territory. But Israel’s government is applying its revisionist, force-centric grand strategy to “the Iranian threat.” This was hiding in plain sight, for instance, when Defense Minister Yisrael Katz claimed that Israel would soon “turn Tehran into Beirut.”
Israel’s advocates defended its actions by claiming it had launched a “preventive” strike. This is true, but not in the way that they claim. Israel struck when it did not to pre-empt an attack, but to subvert a nuclear agreement between Iran and the U.S. Netanyahu employed diplomacy to scupper the JCPOA in 2018. He is now using unilateral military force to achieve the same goal.
Netanyahu Chases a 1967 moment
Netanyahu has historically been one of Israel’s most war-averse leaders. It is difficult to believe that he shares his cabinet colleagues’ outlook. But whether he truly does so or not matters little, because October 7 caused a convergence in interests between Netanyahu and his pyromaniac partners. Once the guns fall silent, a commission of enquiry is inevitable. It will likely hold Netanyahu responsible for failing to predict or mitigate the attacks.
To pre-empt that reckoning, Netanyahu may have calculated that he needs to present the public with an historic win akin to Israel’s victory in the “Six Day War.” Netanyahu is chasing his very own “1967 moment” that will vindicate him in the court of public opinion. Not coincidentally, the war has repeatedly delayed his ongoing corruption trial. This is why he has transformed overnight from Netanyahu the risk-adverse, into Netanyahu the gambler.
The pursuit of a “1967 moment” explains Netanyahu’s pledge to create a “new Middle East,” where Israel eliminates its Gaza problem and bludgeons Iran into submission or regime change—removing the final obstacle to its regional hegemony—before normalizing relations with its neighbors. This would actually outdo Israel’s victory in 1967, in that it would combine military success with an optimal political outcome. This utopian vision is as improbable as it sounds. But Netanyahu is trying to convince his public that Israel can have both a forever war and regional integration. To secure his political survival, Netanyahu has ditched the status quo to become a radical revisionist of the worst kind. By attacking Iran, he has set the region further on a course toward indefinite confrontation with no clear off-ramp.
