Sovereignty or submission: Can the Middle East resist Israel’s new order?

The humiliation inflicted on Israel and its army during the October 7 attack has driven its leadership to revisit the very foundations of its security doctrine, laid down in the 1950s by its first prime minister David Ben-Gurion. That doctrine rested on a single powerful pillar: deterrence through overwhelming military superiority.

Ben-Gurion’s doctrine unfolded in clear stages. First, Israel would amass such extraordinary military capabilities that no adversary would dare launch a war. Second, it would build an intelligence machine capable of early warning should deterrence fail. And finally, if war did break out, Israel would swiftly transfer the battle to enemy territory and secure victory as rapidly as possible.

For decades, this formula held. It was tested and found effective—until the Al-Aqsa Flood in 2023. And what a deluge it proved to be. The blow struck not just at Israel’s borders but at the very core of a state increasingly dominated, in recent decades, by a Zionist right-wing elite.

So profound was the shock that these same leaders began to question the tenets of “classical deterrence,” replacing them with a new creed: total elimination. The new mantra? Victory through annihilation—what they now call “decisive victory”. In the zero-sum worldview of today’s ruling coalition, it’s either us or them.

Gone is any tolerance for living alongside enemies—or even rivals—who might one day pose a threat. The scorched-earth war unfolding in Gaza, the ethnic cleansing, the devastation of southern Lebanon, and now the attacks on Iran, all reflect this strategic shift. Israel’s goal is no longer to intimidate its foes but to eliminate them—to compel surrender, to fold them into the blueprint of a “New Middle East” drawn in Tel Aviv.

But this ambition is not limited to Hamas, or Hezbollah, or the Houthis—or even to Iran. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, both before and after the Al-Aqsa Flood, has made it abundantly clear: Israel’s vision of the new Middle East is a theater entirely under its command. A stage on which every actor performs according to Israel’s interests, or is silenced.

This is no longer about the annexation of historic Palestine alone. It’s not even about the old American-European aspiration to normalize Israel’s place in the region, to render it a “natural” state with trade ties and security pacts. That vision has been eclipsed. In its place is a new order—total Israeli tutelage over the region.

Netanyahu no longer seems concerned with integrating Israel as a normal state among others. His ambition is for Israel to be the regional overlord, the architect, and arbiter of Middle Eastern fate.

Since the war on Gaza began, Israel has pursued a campaign of cognitive re-engineering. The carpet-bombing, the mass graves, the annihilation of daily life in Gaza and southern Lebanon are not merely military tactics—they are psychological warfare. The goal: to strip the Arab citizen of any lingering faith in resistance. To instill despair. Even the air raids on Iran, unprecedented in their reach, are intended to nudge the Iranian people towards rebellion—against a regime portrayed as having dragged them into this unwinnable conflict.

“As we achieve our objective,” Netanyahu declared to the Iranian people while his jets struck inside their territory, “we are also clearing the path for you to achieve your freedom.” And then the kicker: “The regime does not know what hit them, or what will hit them. It has never been weaker… This is your opportunity to stand up and let your voices be heard.”

Until recently, Israel’s state institutions pursued a different dream—stability, legitimacy, peaceful coexistence. That was the vision outlined by former president Shimon Peres in his book The New Middle East. But under the ideological colonization of the far right, those notions have been cast aside.

To entrench this new policy of subjugation, it is no longer enough to crush the resistance movements—their very spirit must be destroyed. Iran’s military and nuclear capacities must be dismantled, for Tehran is seen not just as an adversary, but as the beating heart and bankroll of defiance.

And so unfolds Netanyahu’s doctrine of “changing the strategic reality of the Middle East.” It’s a phrase he coined—and it is being carried out with mathematical precision.

Just weeks before the Al-Aqsa Flood, Netanyahu stood at the podium of the UN General Assembly during its 78th session, holding up a map. It was his vision of the new Middle East: a region without a Palestinian state. A region made up entirely of states eager to normalize ties with the occupation.

In that speech, he brushed aside the Palestinians as an obstacle to broader diplomatic engagement. His government’s ambition was to complete the Abraham Accords—adding Saudi Arabia and the remaining Arab states to the parade already joined by the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco.

Now, nearly two years into the war, with Hezbollah and Syria effectively neutralized, Netanyahu has discarded all pretensions of normalcy. He no longer wants Israel to be a country among others. He wants it to be the country—the central power that controls the Middle East’s decisions, resources, and future.

To achieve this, Israel must prove its capacity to “crush” its enemies, or force them to kneel. The strikes on Iran, the effort to derail its nuclear program, even the whispers of regime change—these are not tactics. They are the advanced stages of a strategy rooted in domination.

If Israel succeeds in Iran, the ramifications will not end there. The very balance of power in the region would be upended. And it would send a message—a brutal, unmistakable message—to all: that Israel’s long arm can reach anywhere.

“You know it now,” Netanyahu boasted in September, when his government claimed responsibility for the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. “We’ve reached a historic turning point,” he said.

Unless the Arab regimes grasp the gravity of this shift, unless they awaken to the monster that Israel’s new doctrine is creating—no one will be spared the consequences. Israel’s ambitions are boundless. Its madness has reached terminal velocity.

No party will escape this fate—unless the region’s decision-makers act swiftly to craft a unified Arab strategy capable of resisting, even derailing, the US-backed Israeli project. For despite their weakness and fragmentation, the Arab states still hold cards—cards that could disrupt the machinery of subjugation.