How Powerful Is Israel After October 7?
2024-07-16416 view
The events of October 7 dealt a heavy blow to Israel’s status, shaking its position in the regional power structure and its role in the strategic balance of the Middle East.
Prior to that date, Israel had been a major regional power, with strong institutional, military, and economic assets, a strategic mindset, and a relatively cohesive political will around a common goal. But the attack by Palestinian factions on October 7 placed all this in doubt, raising the question: Is Israel still as powerful as it was?
Assessing Israel’s Power Before October 7
Israel has long been a medium-strength regional state, with a palpable influence on the regional balance of power. This status stemmed the fact it had the strength and capacity to ensure its own security without needing to resort to regional alliances, as is the case of most medium-strength states.
Evidence of this power could clearly be seen in its maneuvers and operations near its northern border—pre-emptive moves against the expansion of Iranian influence in Syria and Lebanon—as well as in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Its power extended into the Red Sea; Israel has a direct military presence at a base on the Eritrean archipelago of Dahlak from which it has periodically intercepted ships or thwarted Iranian attempts to transfer weapons to Gaza. It also carried out strikes against weapons factories in Sudan in 2012 and again in 2015, and has for decades conducted security and intelligence operations across the world.
To maintain its position as an active, influential medium-power state in the Middle East and the international order, Israel has spared no effort in consolidating its domestic economic stability, achieving a GDP of $525 billion in 2022. It also maintains a military that in 2023 ranked as the 18th most-powerful in the world, according to the website Global Firepower. The evaluation took into account the country’s 2022 military budget of some $24 billion dollars, as well as its domestic and external military capabilities—including those of its ally the United States, which are essentially inexhaustible.
Even immediately prior to October 7, Israel’s regional maneuvers provided plentiful evidence of its status as an active regional power. First and foremost was its role in an American-backed regional scramble to normalize its relations with Arab countries and mount a concerted pushback against non-Western powers—primarily Iran, China, and Russia. The U.S. administration of President Joe Biden took comfort from the fact that some Arab states welcomed this process, in which Israel acted as the agent of the U.S. and the Western camp in the region.
In this context, the expansion of Israeli influence—with Arab support—are clearly apparent in the Hebrew state’s intelligence cooperation with the UAE over the Yemeni island of Socotra, as well as Israel’s invitation to the foreign ministers of Bahrain, Egypt, and the UAE at the Negev summit in March 2022, along with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken. That meeting led to the establishment of the Negev Forum, led by Israel on behalf of Washington, which aimed to strengthen regional security and military coordination in order to contain Iranian influence, as well as bolstering cooperation to contain Palestinian factions in Gaza through economic incentives.
This cooperation also included Saudi Arabia’s establishment of commercial relations with Israel in mid-2022, part of a trend towards Saudi normalization that could result in close economic integration in the form of a land trade corridor stretching from India to the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel, and onwards to Europe, a parallel and rival to the Chinese Belt and Road project.
Washington also attempted to pave the way for greater Israeli-Turkish cooperation by informing Tel Aviv in early 2022 that it was withdrawing its support for the “Eastmed” gas pipeline, which had been set to transport Israeli gas to Europe, in cooperation with Greece and Cyprus.
These developments demonstrated that Washington had delegated the responsibility of establishing a regional axis of cooperation to Israel, raising the latter’s status as a key player in the Middle East. This was designed to ease diplomatic burdens on Washington and reduce the costs of preserving a direct American military presence in the region, allowing the U.S. to focus instead on the war in Ukraine and other areas where it is engaged in a showdown with Russia. American officials hoped this strategy would also give Washington greater room for maneuver against Beijing in the South China Sea.
Israel’s Power since October 7
It seems clear that Israel is determined to maintain a direct military presence in the Netzarim and Philadelphia corridors even after the end of its war on Gaza. This point is one indication of Israel’s transformation from a regional power into a minor, inward-looking state, seeking to address the gravest threats to its security. While Israel had been keen to sit at the pinnacle of a regional security architecture aimed at encircling and countering Iranian, Chinese, and Russian influence on behalf of Washington, it has now returned to a deep preoccupation with its own domestic security.
Several other developments since October 7 have highlighted the decline of Israel’s power in the Middle East. They include Washington’s return to the region and the fact that certain regional powers—namely Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Jordan—have opted for a strategy of falling in line behind the U.S. through direct military cooperation and direct joint defense agreements, rather than relying on cooperation with Israel.
This means that Israel cannot ensure its own security without perennial support from Washington, which has been making strenuous efforts to confront the Houthis in Yemen—notwithstanding Israel’s own military presence in the Red Sea—and other militias active in Syria and Iraq. Israeli reliance on the U.S. and other powers imply that it must accept the conditions of its backer, whose calculations that may not be entirely consistent with its own desires.
Other actors are also maneuvering to take on greater roles in the region. Russia is on the verge of establishing a strong presence in the Red Sea by providing military support to the Sudanese army. This will doubtless have an impact on Washington’s calculations and increase U.S. pressure on Israel to refrain from expanding the Gaza war into a regional conflict. This alone denotes Israel as a minor power, as it is reduced to defending its sovereignty and has little capacity to influence regional power relations and the international system at large.
Indeed, Israel is fundamentally a small power in terms of measures such as geography and population. It is only through a combination of official and unofficial American and Western support that Israel has been able to become a “variable power” with economic, military, and technological capabilities sustained by a strategic institutional mentality, a strategic project—Zionism—and a relatively cohesive political will, the features that allowed Israel to rise to become a regional power.
All this was shaken by the October 7 attacks and Israel’s subsequent preoccupation with the conflict on both its southern and northern fronts. Almost overnight, it became a minor power dependent on external backers rather than its own capacities. Its military repeatedly fell short when it came to standing along against regional threats, as was starkly seen in the concerted efforts of other countries to confront Iran’s April 13 drone and rocket attack.
Israel’s strategic and institutional cohesion has also been thrown into doubt by the rise of extremists within Israel who eschew strategic thinking in favor of an ideological drive to attack the army and state institutions, accusing them of negligence. This hinders these institutions’ ability to plan and strategize. Rather, they appear to be sinking into the mire of building more settlements and clashing diplomatically with powers near and far, from international institutions to the U.S. itself.
This is likely to further isolate Israel internationally and prompt it to make moves that run counter to any strategic logic, acting as a minor power whose regional influence is undermined by domestic institutional chaos.
In its 2024 ranking, the Global Firepower report placed the Israeli army 17th in the world, based on its high levels of defense spending and the number of active soldiers. Indeed, Israel is unlikely to entirely lose its ability to maneuver in the region, including by tackling the dangers surrounding it—especially Iran’s influence in Syria and elsewhere. However, it will be forced to keep its focus on efforts on restoring its standing in the region and the influence it enjoyed prior to October 7, especially repairing the damage to its deterrent capacity.
Since the collapse of the balance of threats through which Israel had long managed its conflicts, the security equation it faces today is that of a minor state: a long-term preoccupation with undermining and wiping out the capacities of its adversaries, Hamas and then Hezbollah. This chips away at its ability to play a significant role on the regional arena, essentially turning it into a minor power.
Conclusion
Prior to October 7, Israel had played the role of an regional or middle power capable of protecting itself alone. It was on the way to becoming an active regional state involved in managing Western influence, with an open mandate from Washington to integrate with other states in the region.
The events of October 7 exposed the weakness of its intelligence apparatus and military’s ability to counter such a threat, sending its status in the regional balance of power into a tailspin. Today, it is mainly preoccupied with recovering what it lost on that day. This means it is unlikely to play an active role on the regional level for some time, leaving an opening for other regional states to expand their own roles.
