Man carrying child’s body in Gaza. Fars Media Corporation. Attribution 4.0 International license.
The Israeli regime has lost its multi-front war in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen. Yes, really. It may not look like it, but the defeat is real and baked into Israel’s future.
Let me first make the case for Israeli “victory”:
Since its 2023 invasion of Gaza, the Israeli Defence Forces report fewer than 800 troops killed, while in turn killing tens — maybe hundreds — of thousands of mostly civilian Palestinian Arabs (and 250 or more inconvenient journalists).
Since the beginning, they’ve established their ability to attack any point in Gaza at will, driving a displaced, hungry population back and forth over piles of bodies, while seizing more land in the West Bank and Syria, liquidating Hezbollah’s Lebanese strongholds, trading missile strikes with Yemen’s Houthis, and even emerging relatively unscathed, if not particularly successful, in an intermittent war with Iran.
Top Israeli regime officials confidently assert that the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and annexation of the West Bank are inevitable.
Yes, that sounds rather like multiple “victories,” accomplished and pending.
But those victories didn’t come from nowhere. They were enabled by decades of massive financial, military, and diplomatic support from the United States.
Yes, other regimes too, but most of those “allies” are moving in the other direction already — cutting off arms sales, recognizing a Palestinian state, and sanctioning Israeli war criminals.
It’s quickly coming down to the “no daylight between us” US/Israel relationship under which the former annually shovels billions of dollars, and when requested direct military assistance, at the latter, no questions asked (US law “guarantees” Israel a “Qualitative Military Edge”), while using its own sanctions power and veto on the UN Security Council to protect Benjamin Netanyahu and Friends from the consequences of their actions.
That relationship is nearing its end.
In late August, a Quinnipiac poll found that 50% of Americans now classify Israel’s operations in Gaza as genocidal, and that 60% — 37% of Republicans, 75% of Democrats, and 66% of independents — oppose continued military aid to Israel, at least while the genocide continues.
The effects of changing American attitudes toward Israel may not make themselves felt immediately, but the outcome is more “inevitable” than the fantasies of expansionist Israeli politicians.
In domestic politics, Social Security is sometimes called a political “third rail” — you touch it, you die.
The “special relationship” with Israel enjoyed the same status in foreign affairs for decades due to a well-funded lobby. American politicians who didn’t want to lose their re-election primaries to lobby-funded opponents dutifully voted for every Israeli aid demand (usually after ritual photo opportunities at occupied Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall).
That third rail is losing voltage, fast. President Donald Trump may remain bought off by the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on his behalf by Israeli interests, but sitting and future members of Congress are beginning to grok that a loyalty oath to a foreign power is no longer the absolute requirement it used to be.
And without Big Bully unquestioningly backing its every play, Little Bully’s expansionist plans will quickly come to naught.
Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.
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