The Jubilation in Israel Is Premature

In Israel, the war is over, and not over at all. In the two weeks since the cease-fire with Iran, praise for the Israeli military has been nearly unanimous within the country. Opposition politicians spoke of “clear” and “stunning” accomplishments by the Israel Defense Forces and the Mossad intelligence agency. That some Iranian missiles evaded Israel’s defenses has largely faded from the news.

Operationally, the Israeli campaign was indeed impressive. For 12 days, the Israeli air force ruled Iranian skies without losing a single plane. Any euphoria, however, is premature and discordant. Iran has not vanished as an enemy. And the routine state of affairs to which Israel has returned is not peacetime, but continuing war in Gaza.

One reason to avoid triumphalism is that the war’s effect is still not clear and could in the long run be the opposite of what Israel seeks. Precisely how much damage Iranian nuclear installations sustained from the Israeli bombing and the brief, fierce U.S. attack remains the subject of conflicting assessments. Meir Litvak, of Tel Aviv University’s Alliance Center for Iranian Studies, told me that “if Israel’s goal was to completely destroy the entire nuclear project, it has not succeeded.” As a result, Litvak stressed, “the danger now is redoubled”: Iran will most likely rebuild its facilities, and its motivation to develop a nuclear weapon will have increased.

This fits a historical pattern: Israeli words and deeds have played a role in the long cycle of escalation and counter-escalation with Iran. Anti-Semitism runs deep within the Iranian regime’s ideology, and opposition to Israel’s existence is among the Islamic Republic’s core principles. But how that principle translates into policy has varied over time and in response to regional events.

Raz Zimmt, an Iranian-studies specialist also at Tel Aviv University, wrote late last year that Israeli attacks on Iranian proxies and covert operations inside Iran had led some in Tehran to view Israel “not only as an illegitimate entity that must be wiped off the map, but also as a growing menace” to Iran’s national security. Zimmt cited the 2020 assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a prominent Iranian nuclear scientist, and an explosion at the Natanz nuclear facility the following year as having possibly “triggered Tehran’s decision to increase its uranium enrichment,” first to 20 percent, then to 60 percent.

Indeed, one reason conflicts escalate is that each side sees its actions as unavoidable responses to the other’s aggression. From an Israeli perspective, the clandestine efforts over many years to keep Iran from creating a bomb were reasonably understood as defensive moves against an extreme danger. The risk that Israel’s actions could actually push Iran’s leaders to accelerate its nuclear program has been strikingly absent from Israeli public debate.

What Iran will do now that Israel and the United States have unleashed their firepower on its nuclear sites remains to be seen. But here is one clue: President Masoud Pezeshkian has approved a law that ends cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency and bars United Nations inspectors from Iran’s nuclear facilities. This move suggests the possibility that Iran will push past threshold status and become an overt nuclear power. If that happens, the June war may well be remembered as another escalatory step.  

[From the August 2025 issue: The nuclear club may soon double]

That danger is all the greater because Iran’s conventional deterrents against Israel failed. The presence of heavily armed Iranian proxies did not dissuade Israel from striking: Lebanese Hezbollah stayed on the sidelines when Israel launched its attack on Iran. Nor did Iran’s ballistic-missile arsenal prevent the Israeli onslaught.  

Iranian missiles did exact a price: 28 Israelis were killed, the last four just before the cease-fire took effect on June 24. Some 15,000 have been evacuated from their homes. For much of the public, the full extent of the destruction does not yet seem to have sunk in, partly because the military censor has prohibited publishing the location of direct hits. In one case, the censor banned a Haaretz culture columnist’s piece about strolling through smashed Tel Aviv streets. Friends told me of arriving at a familiar spot for the first time after the cease-fire and being stunned by the sight of buildings ripped open by a blast. U.S. researchers used satellite data to determine that five Israeli military bases had been damaged by direct hits; this assessment could be cited in the Hebrew media only because it appeared first in The Telegraph in Britain.

Still, neither the missiles nor any other Iranian capability effectively discouraged the Israeli campaign—further reason that Iran’s leader may seek a nuclear deterrent instead.

Perhaps the most salient reason that celebration feels out of place is that the war with Hamas has now lasted more than 50 times longer than the war with Iran did.

Israel’s successes in Iran throw its Gaza policy into sharp relief. Israel’s intelligence services were able to penetrate Iran deeply. Its air force precisely struck missile sites. Mossad agents reportedly launched drones and missiles from inside the country. Israeli intelligence claimed to have solid information that Iran intended to complete the process of building a nuclear bomb. On October 7, 2023, by contrast, Israel was caught unaware by an enemy of small numbers, with unsophisticated weapons.

Since the start of the Gaza war, a majority of Israelis have demanded an investigation into what went wrong. But one obvious answer is that attention is a limited resource, and its apportionment to Iran and Hezbollah, in preference to Hamas and the Palestinian issue near at hand, mirrored Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s worldview.

More than 30 years ago, as he began his ascent to power, Netanyahu published a book called A Place Among the Nations. In it, he dismissed what he called the “theory of Palestinian centrality.” Palestinian claims, in his description, were a propaganda tool of Arab nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism. Criticism of Israeli rule of the West Bank and Gaza was based on the false “myth of ‘Israeli expansionism.’”

Aside from minor adjustments, Netanyahu has remained consistent in this worldview, and he has led Israel for most of the past 16 years. One implication of his vision has been that Israel could safely manage its conflict with the Palestinians in part by maintaining the split between Hamas rule in Gaza and Fatah control of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Another corollary was that the greatest danger to the nation lay farther away.

[Read: The war Israel was ready to fight]

Had Israel been as prepared for Hamas as it was for Iran, the Israeli army and air force could have struck Hamas’s Nukhba commandos at their assembly points on October 7 before they entered Israel. In all likelihood, the conflict would have been much shorter. Not only would the loss of life on the Israeli side and the taking of hostages have been prevented, but the death toll in Gaza would likely be far less.

The war with Iran allowed Netanyahu to focus national attention again on the distant enemy, but only briefly. Gaza will not go away. The extent to which Israeli civilians pay attention to the death of Palestinians and the damage or destruction of most of the buildings there depends largely on what news sources they choose. But the names and faces of Israeli soldiers killed in the fighting are impossible to avoid. Early Tuesday in Israel—Monday night in Washington—the top headline on Israeli news sites was not Netanyahu’s meeting with Trump, or his sycophantic nomination of the president for the Nobel Peace Prize. It was the death of another five soldiers, in Beit Hanoun, at the northern end of the Gaza Strip.   

The “root of our problems in the Middle East is the Israeli-Palestinian issue,” the retired general Shlomo Brom, the former head of strategic planning for the Israeli general staff, told me. The Gaza war has put that back at the top of the Israeli and world agenda, whether or not the Netanyahu government acknowledges it.

In strictly military terms, Brom told me, the war “passed the point of diminishing returns” for Israel many months ago. “The main reason that the war continues,” he said, is the “question of the day after, of who will rule Gaza, which our government refuses to address.”

The deal now being discussed between Israel and Hamas will not settle that issue, according to most reports. It would inaugurate a 60-day cease-fire and secure the release of half of the 20 living Israeli hostages Hamas is believed to still hold.

In the most optimistic case, those two months would allow for negotiations that could finally bring an end to the war. That would mean allowing some form of Palestinian or other Arab government to administer Gaza and begin reconstruction. And then, just possibly, the long-postponed conversation in Israel about the moral and human cost of the war might begin.

Until that time, the moment will not have come to break out the champagne, or even to sigh in relief.