The greatest threat to Israel

The greatest threat to Israel
A people whose entire existence depends solely on military power is not threatened by Iran or Hamas, but by its own hubris.

Looking at Israel, one can be amazed at how infallible and confident of victory this country considers itself to be. Time and again, it attacks its neighbors and then uses their hostility as an excuse to attack them again. It seems almost delusional how far the Israeli government is willing to go, how risky it acts, as if nothing could happen to it, as if it were not logical that this kind of policy would eventually backfire. In accordance with the principle of a self-fulfilling prophecy, Israel is thus moving ever closer to its greatest fear: the threat to its own existence.

by Manova's World Editorial Team

by Orly Noy

[This article posted on 6/18/2025 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.manova.news/artikel/die-grosste-bedrohung-fur-israel.]


It has now been more than 46 years since I left Iran with my family at the age of nine. I have spent most of my life in Israel, where we started a family and raised our daughters, but Iran has always remained my home. Since October 2023, I have seen countless images of men, women, and children standing next to the ruins of their homes, and their cries are etched into my memory. But when I see the images from Iran after the Israeli attacks and hear the cries in my mother tongue, Persian, the feeling of collapse feels different inside me. The thought that this destruction is being caused by the country of which I am a citizen is unbearable.

Over the years, the Israeli public has come to believe that it can exist in this region while deeply despising its neighbors — by allowing its government to carry out murderous rampages against anyone, anytime, any way it pleases, relying solely on brute force.

For nearly 80 years, “total victory” has been just around the corner: all that remains is to defeat the Palestinians, eliminate Hamas, crush Lebanon, destroy Iran's nuclear capabilities — and paradise will be ours.

But for nearly 80 years, these so-called victories have proven to be Pyrrhic victories; each one drives Israel deeper into isolation, threat, and hatred. The Nakba of 1948 created the refugee crisis that persists to this day and laid the foundation for the apartheid regime. The victory of 1967 led to an occupation that continues to fuel Palestinian resistance. The war of October 2023 escalated into a genocide that turned Israel into a global pariah.

The Israeli military—which has played a central role in this entire process—has become a senseless weapon of mass destruction. It maintains its high status in a numb public through spectacular actions: pagers explode in the pockets of men in a Lebanese market, or a drone base is built in the heart of an enemy state. And under the command of a genocidal government, it is becoming increasingly entangled in wars from which it sees no way out.

Under the spell of this supposedly all-powerful army, Israeli society has convinced itself for so many years that it is invulnerable.

The total worship of the military on the one hand and the arrogant contempt for its neighbors in the region on the other have fueled the belief that we would never have to pay a price. Then came October 7, 2023, and destroyed — if only for a moment — the illusion of invincibility. But instead of grappling with the significance of that moment, the public indulged in a campaign of revenge. For only through carnage did the world make sense again: Israel kills, Palestinians die. Order was restored.

That is why the images of bombed buildings in Ramat Gan, Rishon LeZion, Bat Yam, Tel Aviv, and Tamra, an Arab town in Galilee, were so shocking. They were eerily similar to those we are used to seeing from Gaza: charred concrete skeletons, clouds of dust, streets covered in rubble and ash, children's toys collected by rescue workers. These images briefly shattered our collective illusion that we were immune to everything. The civilian casualties on both sides — 13 Israelis and at least 128 Iranians — highlight the human cost of this new front, even if the scale is nowhere near the devastation that Gaza regularly suffers.
The army as doctrine

There was a time when some Jewish leaders in Israel understood that our existence in this region could not be sustained by the illusion of complete immunity. They may not have been free of a sense of superiority, but they understood this fundamental truth.

The late left-wing politician Yossi Sarid once recalled how Yitzhak Rabin said to him: “A people that flexes its muscles for fifty years will eventually tire.”

Rabin understood that living forever by the sword, contrary to Netanyahu's horror-ridden promise, is not a viable option.

Today, there are no Jewish politicians of this kind left in Israel. When the Zionist left cheers a reckless attack on Iran, it reveals its stubborn attachment to the fantasy that the army will always protect us, no matter what we do or how much we alienate ourselves from the region we live in.

"A strong people, a determined army, and a resilient home front. That's how we've always won, and that's how we'll win today,“ wrote Yair Golan, chairman of the Democratic Party — a fusion of the Zionist left-wing parties Meretz and the Labor Party — in a post on X after Friday's attack. His party colleague, MK Naama Lazimi, echoed him, thanking ”the advanced intelligence systems and the superiority of the secret services. The IDF and all security systems. The heroic pilots and the air force. Israel's defense systems."

In this sense, the fantasy of immunity granted by the army is even more deeply rooted in the Zionist left than in the right. The right's response to its security fears is annihilation and ethnic cleansing — that is its ultimate goal. The center-left parties, on the other hand, place their trust almost exclusively in the supposedly unlimited capabilities of the army. Without question, the Jewish center-left movement in Israel reveres the military far more passionately than the right, which sees it merely as a tool for implementing its vision of annihilation and ethnic cleansing.

We Israelis must understand that we are not immune. A people whose entire existence depends solely on military power is doomed to end up in the darkest corners of destruction and ultimately be defeated. If we have not learned this fundamental lesson from the past two years, let alone the past eighty years, then we are truly lost. Not because of Iran's nuclear program or Palestinian resistance, but because of the blind, arrogant hubris that has gripped an entire nation.

Orly Noy is an editor at the Israeli online magazine Local Call, a political activist, and a translator of Persian poetry and prose. She is chair of the board of the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem and an activist in the political party Balad. In her writing, she explores the intersections and definitions of her identity as a Mizrahi, a left-wing woman, a woman, a temporary migrant in the midst of a permanent immigrant society, and the constant dialogue between these identities.

Editorial note: This article first appeared under the title “Israel's greatest threat isn't Iran or Hamas, but its own hubris” on +972Magazine