India, particularly under the present regime, has fetishized ‘muscularity’, and in this it has often focused on Israel as a model to emulate. Indeed, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s statement in the wake of the Baisaran massacre, echoed past Israeli proclamations, as he declared, “India will identify, track, and punish every terrorist and their backers. We will pursue them to the ends of the earth.” Operation Sindoor, we are told moreover, is now the “new normal”, and every act of terrorism traced back to Pakistan will provoke comparable reaction. Actual Indian responses, of course, suggest that this is substantially rhetoric, unlikely to be backed with corresponding action. Nevertheless, there have been, in the relatively recent past, clumsy attempts at imitation that have borne dubious fruit.
Of course, Israeli actions against enemies have long had a dramatic impact, perhaps unmatched by any other nation. Most recently, the assassination of high-profile military, political and intellectual leaders in Iran, the earlier and coordinated ‘pager and walkie-talkie explosions’ targeting the leadership as well as the rank and file of the Hezbollah in Lebanon, as well as an unending series of targeted assassinations and theatrical operations over 75 years of Mossad’s extravagant history, are undeniable evidence of tactical brilliance and success. These successes do, however, obscure a significant history of botched operations and of strategic failure. In his book, Rise and Kill First, Ronen Bergmen argues that Israel’s campaign of assassinations constitutes “a long string of impressive tactical successes, but also disastrous strategic failures,” and further, that Israel paid a “high moral price for the use of such power.” Within the context of a rising global Right, questions of morality are seen as increasingly irrelevant to the choice of violence to secure desired ends. But questions of morality are often intertwined with issues of efficacy. Crucially, 75 years of Mossad operations, as well as successive—and, in the past, immensely successful—wars, have failed to bring Palestinian terrorism to an end.
Crucially, more than 21 months of relentless devastation visited on the tiny 365 sq km Gaza Strip—originally intended to ‘eliminate’ Hamas—still sees Israeli Defence Force (IDF) personnel falling to Hamas bullets and bombs. In the interim, according to a United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs report of June 2025, 70 per cent of all structures in Gaza have been destroyed; 88 per cent of all entities in the commercial and industrial sector have been destroyed; 81 per cent of classified road networks have been destroyed, and a colossal humanitarian crisis has been engineered. With 92 per cent of all housing units destroyed or damaged, virtually the entire population of over two million Palestinians has been displaced.
In the initial phases of the Israeli response to the massacre of October 7, 2023, in Southern Israel, there was certain justification of Israeli targeting of ‘civilian’ locations, since Hamas located its ‘military’ assets and units in densely populated, often sensitive, locations, including schools and hospitals, using civilians as ‘human shields’. Any such justification has long lost legitimacy, with Israeli objectives now going well beyond the neutralisation of Hamas, to comprehend a complete expulsion of the Palestinian population and the transformation of the Gaza Strip into a joint US-Israeli fantasy of a “Riviera of the Middle East”.
Hubris and overreach, moreover, inspired the joint Israeli-US misadventure into Iran, which ended up exposing Israel’s own vulnerabilities. For those tempted to imitate these models of the ‘use of force’, it is useful to recall that Israel is uniquely positioned to act unilaterally and without limits, without attracting the collective penalties that the international system would inflict on most other states adopting comparable tactics. Unqualified and evidently limitless US support underpins Israeli impunity.
Crucially, there are limits even to Israeli impunity, and these appear to have been reached in the present conflagration. Western rhetoric of the ‘rules-based order’ notwithstanding, Israel and the US have openly sought to re-establish the law of the jungle over the past years. But the world is changing, and US primacy is now, everywhere, being challenged.
For decades, despite divergent assessments, Israel enjoyed widespread legitimacy in the fight against ‘Arab-Palestinian’ terrorism. That moral high-ground has now been lost, with Israeli excesses in Gaza. At the very height of its displays of military ‘muscularity’, Israel is now at its weakest, with massive opposition to the Gaza campaign and Benjamin Netanyahu’s military adventurism, both within Israel and internationally.
War and the use of military force are uncertain instrumentalities—as the US, pitted unsuccessfully against vastly ‘inferior’ powers in country after country, should have taught us. An excessive reliance on ‘muscularity’ is likely to cramp national power.
