Israel’s ‘strong horse’ status key to peace

In the Middle East, bluster can be an expression of fear, but it can also reflect the culture of honour and shame present in both political and social interactions. Leaders may use threatening rhetoric to project strength and resolve, both to allies and adversaries. An oscillation between bluster and misleading “moderation” characterise the Iranian regime and its terror proxies’ rhetoric.

Israel’s 26 October 2024 massive airstrike against Iran neutralised its air defences and decimated other strategic sites across the country. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s muted response noted that “Israel erred in its strategic calculations.” He ratcheted up his rhetoric after the damage was assessed, threatening on 2 November that, “The enemies, whether the Zionist regime or the United States of America, will definitely receive a crushing response to what they are doing to Iran and the Iranian nation and to the resistance front.”

This mix of rhetorical threat and kinetic caution, reflect an awareness of Israel’s massive military capabilities. In psychological warfare, Iran projects a strong image to maintain its honour and avoid being perceived as weak by Middle East friends and foes alike.

At the same time, bluster also masks underlying fear and insecurity. In the Middle East, signs of vulnerability will be exploited by enemies and adversaries.

Hamas and Hezbollah leaders have issued hundreds of declarations expressing genocidal intent towards Israel and the Jewish people, as documented by the MEMRI (Middle East Media Research Institute) watchdog organisation and the mainstream press.

Israel has come to understand Middle Eastern bluster and the lessons of political culture. It has also come to understand something about itself: its renewed status as the Middle East strong horse. In a 2001 interview, Osama bin Laden said, “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse.” The strong horse is an ancient Middle Eastern axiom set down in writing by the fourteenth century Arab Muslim historian and political theorist Ibn Khaldun, who assessed that history is a cycle of violence in which strong horses – in Arabic, “al–faras al-asil” – replace weak horses.

“Bin Ladenism isn’t drawn from the extremist fringe, but represents the political and social norm,” writes Middle East analyst Lee Smith in his 2010 book, The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations. Smith argues that violent power is central to the politics, society, and culture of the Middle East, and that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict only serves as a distraction from the larger, endemic, and ongoing power struggle in the Arab and Muslim world.

Hamas’s 7 October massacre made Israel, by necessity, the Middle East’s strong horse against the Iranian regime, and its terror proxies – Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and various militias in Iraq and Syria – the “weak horses” of their own Shiite fantasy apocalypse.

The Arab world is well aware of the new configuration of power after witnessing the Israel Defense Force’s lightning destruction of Hamas and Hezbollah’s command structure, leadership, and much of their weaponry and ammunition stockpiles. Israel’s air force decimation of Iran’s entire anti-aircraft defences, in three hours, covering 20 separate attacks over the vast Islamic Republic air space, has also not gone unnoticed.

Israel’s renewed strong horse status has generated fear and awe across the Arab world. It has also created cognitive dissonance. Arab League members denounced Israel’s counterassault against Iran, which contradicts the Saudis’ decades-long enmity for its regime neighbours, notwithstanding recent diplomatic agreements and reports of security co-operation.

This dissonance is expressed by an important Middle Eastern principle of political culture: “Watch what I do, not what I say.” The proof of the principle is evident: Abraham Accords diplomats from Bahrain, Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have remained in Tel Aviv, as have ambassadors from Jordan and Egypt, as have Israeli ambassadors in those respective Arab countries. In addition, Jordan, Egypt, the UAE, and Bahrain opened their air space, and even assisted Israel during Iranian regime missile and killer drone attacks on it in April and October 2024.

Israel’s strong horse status is a key to winning peace and moderation in the Middle East, but is misunderstood in the West. The Biden administration urged and demanded that Israel refrain from attacking Hamas in Rafah and northern Gaza, and controlling the Philadelphi Corridor. Yet, Israel has done the opposite, reasserting its strong horse status opposite a weakened adversary. Israel’s attacks on Iran, America’s nightmare scenario, has changed the strategic balance, enhancing Israel’s profile in the Middle East.

Victory cannot be achieved against radical Islamic terrorism using the principles and methods of compromise, ceasefire, diplomacy, and territorial concession appropriate to democratic states. In the Middle East compromise signals weakness, and ceasefire – “hudna” – is a cessation of hostilities to rearm and resupply. Territorial concession is the fate of the vanquished.

Israel’s strong horse status is a reversal of past missteps that proved lethal. When Israel applied Western rules, such as its unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, it invited four years of Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Hamas suicide bombings, murder, and mayhem, costing thousands of lives. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah referred to Israel as “weaker than a spider’s web” following Israel’s May 2000 withdrawal from southern Lebanon.

Arafat and his Fatah and PLO colleagues were encouraged by Israel’s overnight retreat from Lebanon, observing that for Hezbollah and the Palestinians alike, “resistance” – meaning terror – was an effective weapon against Israel. The withdrawal was a prelude to the Palestinian “Al-Aqsa intifada” that resulted in more than 1 000 Israelis killed and thousands more wounded. The unilateral territorial concession of Gaza in 2005 led to five Hamas wars, climaxing in the 7 October “Al-Aqsa Flood” of Hamas atrocities. The massacre of 7 October proved conclusively that “goodwill diplomacy” and territorial compromise opposite jihad, as demanded by the United States and Europe, was a strategic disaster and existential threat to Israel.

Having paid an enormously high human price, Israel has embodied the lesson of the strong horse in a chaotic, unstable, and unforgiving Middle East. Israel’s evolving self-awareness as an indigenous ethnic minority understands today that, as Smith notes, “He who punishes enemies and rewards friends, forbids evil, and enjoins good, is entitled to rule. There’s no alternative, not yet anyway, to the strong horse.”

• Dr Dan Diker is the president of the Jerusalem Centre for Security and Foreign Affairs.