We are a month into Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza. The ferocity of Israel’s response to the murder of more than 1,400 Israeli citizens has been such that international concern for the Palestinians of Gaza—half of whom, or more than 1 million, are children under the age of 15—has now largely eclipsed any sympathy that might have been felt for the victims of the crimes that precipitated the war in the first place.

Israel has a right to defend itself, and it has a right to seek to destroy, or at least severely degrade, the primary perpetrator of the attacks of October 7, Hamas. I am unconvinced, however, that Israel’s strategy is sound. Specifically, I am worried that Israel has staked out maximalist objectives, not for the first time, and will, as it did in 2006 against Hezbollah in Lebanon, fall far short of those objectives, allowing the enemy to claim a victory—a Pyrrhic victory, to be sure, but a victory nonetheless.

I spent a lot of time with the Israel Defense Forces while serving as deputy assistant secretary of defense for Middle East policy for two years. But much earlier in my life, I had gone to graduate school in Lebanon, then moved back there in an attempt to better understand how Hezbollah had evolved into Israel’s most capable foe. My research revealed as much about Israeli missteps and weaknesses as it did about Hezbollah’s strengths.

[Eliot A. Cohen: Think strategy, not tactics]

If Israel is going to have any strategic success against Hamas, it needs to do three things differently from conflicts past.

Strategic Humility

As noted earlier, Israel has an unfortunate tendency to lay out maximalist goals—very often for domestic consumption—that it then fails to meet. That deficiency inevitably dumbs down what “victory” means for Israel’s adversaries, the so-called axis of resistance. In 2006, for example, Israel’s then–prime minister, Ehud Olmert, told the country he was going to destroy Hezbollah, return the bodies of two Israeli prisoners, and end the rocket attacks on Israel.

Israel did none of the three. And although Lebanon was devastated, and Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, publicly apologized for the raid that started the conflict, most observers had little doubt about who had won the conflict. Hezbollah took everything Israel could throw at it for a month and was still standing.

As Eliot Cohen has pointed out, the other side also has maximalist goals. Hamas and Hezbollah want nothing less than the destruction of Israel. But they are in no rush. They believe that time is on their side, and that internal Israeli divisions will likely do most of their job for them.

Nasrallah addressed the Arabic-speaking world for the first time since the start of this conflict on Friday. Significantly, he declared that although fighting still rages, Hamas became the conflict’s winner as soon as Israel claimed that it would destroy the militant group, which he confidently predicted it would not.

Much to the annoyance of Hamas, Hezbollah clearly does not want to enter this conflict in any meaningful way. It knows that the pressure will grow to do so if Israel has any real success in Gaza, but for the moment, it doubts that Israel will accomplish any such thing.

Israel, for its part, needs to more carefully scope its own objectives. I have read countless Israeli senior national-security figures declaring, in the aftermath of the traumatic attacks on October 7, that Israel will destroy Hamas. That just isn’t going to happen, especially because no one has any idea who, or what, should replace Hamas in Gaza. So tell the world what will happen—and how it will make Israel and the region safer.

Communications Discipline

While we’re on the subject of what Israel needs to be telling the world, I once spent several months of my life combing through newspaper archives, reading every clipping I could find about Israel’s conflicts in Lebanon from 1978 to 2006.

One of the things that struck me was the almost profane way in which Israeli military spokespeople would often speak, to international audiences no less, about non-Israeli civilians. Here, for example, is how the commander of Israel’s artillery corps speaks about an intense period of fighting in 1993: “Now we are at the stage in which we are firing into the villages in order to cause damage to property … The aim is to create a situation in which the residents will leave the villages and go north.”

I read this as a veteran of the Iraq War who had only recently left active duty, and I could not believe what I was reading from a mere decade prior. The callousness with which Israeli spokespeople too often describe the human suffering on the other side of the conflict, the blunt way in which they described what many Americans would consider war crimes, never fails to offend international audiences not predisposed to have sympathy with Israeli war aims.

Israel has some gifted communicators. Mark Regev, recently recalled to national service, is one. My friend Richard Hecht, the IDF’s international spokesperson, is another.

But much like right-wing American politicians, who sometimes use inflammatory rhetoric about real or perceived U.S. enemies, Israeli officials often resort to language about adversaries and military operations that can be exceptionally difficult for their allies to defend on the international stage: One minister casually muses about using nuclear weapons on Gaza; another claims that the Palestinians are a fictional people. One can safely assume that people will continue accusing the Israeli government of including genocidal maniacs when they can point to officials in that government talking like, well, genocidal maniacs.

I know that officials who say these things embarrass my Israeli friends as much as they do Israel’s supporters in America, and I also know that trying to get every Israeli ambassador and member of the Knesset to sing from the same hymnal is something of a pipe dream. But Israel needs to develop a clear communications plan for its conflicts and to sharply police the kind of language that doesn’t go over as well in Johannesburg or Jordan as it does in Jerusalem.

Focus on Iran

I struggle the most with this recommendation because Washington, D.C., is home to an extremely well-funded group of think tanks and lobbyists who have consistently pushed for the United States to go to war with Iran by vehemently attacking any alternative. (Harassment of Iranian Americans in government is real: One American official was fired for little more than being of Iranian descent, and others have been made victims of a public smear campaign that came to nothing.)   

But no matter how loathsome we may find the besuited warmongers to be, we cannot escape the nature of this Iranian regime, nor can we ignore a clear pattern of behavior over the past 40 years: Iran funds and trains proxies and affiliates—Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and a host of militias in Iraq—to further its political aims while insulating the regime itself from any consequences.

Many Iranians do not approve of these activities. But neither public sentiment nor economic hardship seems to get in the way of Iran’s arming and training proxies such as Hamas. Indeed, right-wing complaints about the unfreezing of Iranian funds in exchange for concessions are weak precisely because the likes of the Quds Force have never been resource-constrained in any meaningful way. Iran has always found money to support Hamas, even as its own people struggle. (The biggest limitation on Iranian activities, in fact, seems to be a shortage of capable Arabic-speaking Iranians, not funding.)

Nor has Iran ever faced real consequences for its actions. It fought Israel with Lebanese proxies in the 1980s and ‘90s, correctly confident it could do so at little risk to its own regime. It has used Palestinians to fight Israel since the ‘90s, likewise confident that Israel would respond as it is now—by killing Palestinians in the Palestinian territories, not Iranians in Iran or abroad.

The United States has taken a slightly different approach: Washington killed Qassem Soleimani in Iraq, and when Iran-backed militias attacked U.S. troops, the United States responded, not really caring whether Iranians were killed in the process.

[Graeme Wood: The theory of Hamas’s catastrophic success]

Few people have any interest in a regional war. The economic consequences alone would be dire. But had I been in Israel’s position on October 8, I might have been sorely tempted to largely ignore Gaza—where even the best-trained military would struggle to dislodge Hamas without killing tens of thousands of innocent civilians—and focus my efforts much farther east. A full-scale war with Iran would be out of the question, not least because Israel lacks the capability to wage one. But Israel nevertheless needs to find a way to change Iran’s strategic calculus. Otherwise, Hamas and Hezbollah will only grow stronger.