The images​ from Iran since 28 February have been dismayingly familiar. The Islamic Republic’s leaders are being killed off. US military officers are using AI to pick their targets. Government buildings, police stations and other public institutions have been destroyed; an air strike hit a primary school during morning classes, killing 168, almost all of them schoolgirls. Israeli leaders cheer on the offensive with messianic zeal. The war ‘allows us to do what I have yearned to do for forty years’, Benjamin Netanyahu said on 1 March, ‘smite the terror regime hip and thigh’. The aim isn’t merely to weaken Iran’s rulers, but to bring about the collapse of the Iranian state.

It’s no surprise that Operation Roaring Lion (Israel’s name for its campaign) and Operation Epic Fury (as the US calls its own) bear the hallmarks of Israel’s offensives on the Gaza Strip. For more than two years, Israel has radically reshaped its policy of managing conflict by what it calls ‘mowing the lawn’. Since 7 October 2023, its political and military leaders have embraced a much more ambitious and devastating approach, which has been tested in Gaza, then replicated in Lebanon and to some extent in Yemen. Palestinians and their supporters have long likened the occupied territories to a ‘laboratory’ where Israel experiments with military tactics, surveillance technologies and methods of population control, before applying them elsewhere. War with Iran is a long-held ambition of Netanyahu’s, but Gaza is where he and his generals designed the playbook that is now being followed in that war.

The ‘mowing the lawn’ doctrine held that Israeli leaders, locked as they were in multiple armed conflicts with non-state groups, had little choice but to contain security threats by force, with the expectation that they would not be conclusively destroyed. In one well-known essay in 2013, the academics Efraim Inbar and Eitan Shamir explained that Israel was ‘not aiming for victory or for ending the conflict’, but was instead focused on weakening and indefinitely deterring its foes. ‘It is not clear whether Israeli military actions affect the learning curves [of Hamas] in Gaza or [of Hizbullah in] Lebanon. In any case, the immediate effect is some tranquillity,’ Inbar and Shamir concluded. At a security conference in 2018, the right-wing Israeli politician Naftali Bennett put it more succinctly: ‘In our neighbourhood, those who don’t mow the lawn, are mowed by the grass.’

Before 2023, Israel was careful to balance this military strategy with diplomacy and PR. At the same time, it slowly increased the limits on what it could get away with. Military incursions into Palestinian cities and refugee camps in the West Bank became more frequent and more brutal, eroding the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority, which under the Oslo Accords was meant to have responsibility for security in urban centres. In the summer of 2023, Israel began carrying out air strikes – its method of choice in Gaza – in the West Bank for the first time since the second intifada in the early 2000s. Its tolerance for inflicting civilian casualties in Gaza also rose: Operation Cast Lead of 2008-9 killed 1383 people; Operation Protective Edge killed 2251 in 2014. Between 2018 and 2019, during the Great March of Return, Israeli snipers fired repeatedly at largely unarmed Palestinians who were demonstrating near the Gaza border fence, killing more than 200 and wounding 34,000, many of whom were permanently disabled.

Hamas’s attack on 7 October changed all that. Reeling from the massacres in southern Israel and the security blunders that enabled them, many Israelis felt that their previous methods had amounted to half-measures. Israeli politicians and commentators went into a frenzy, calling on the army to destroy all of Gaza and expel its population. Palestinians were described as a plague and likened to the Amalek, the biblical enemies of the Israelites. Security officials and analysts justified retribution as a strategic necessity. Shamir, co-author of the essay on ‘mowing the lawn’, declared that the policy had failed. It was now ‘an urgent necessity – indeed, a survival imperative’ to uproot the enemy completely. ‘If Israel can defeat Hamas and dismantle its military capabilities, it will prove its ability to deliver the only punishment possible for the destruction of deterrence,’ he wrote. ‘The cost of such an operation [like 7 October] against Israel must be clear to everyone: the destruction of the organisation or regime that committed the attack … There is no room in the Middle East for weakness.’

Gaza thus became the testing ground for a far more severe approach. ‘From the air you can mow the lawn,’ Netanyahu said to the Wall Street Journal in 2024. ‘You can’t pull out the weeds. We’re here to uproot Hamas – not to deliver deterrent blows, but to destroy it.’ Not content with hitting Hamas’s military infrastructure and personnel, Israel’s ‘war of redemption’, as Netanyahu calls it, razed Gaza’s cities and carved up the territory. It assassinated Hamas political leaders and ceasefire negotiators, pragmatists and hardliners alike. It shattered Gaza’s governing apparatus and targeted civil service workers. It used AI to generate thousands of bombing targets. It wreaked havoc on essential infrastructure: hospitals, food supplies, electricity lines, desalination plants. To undercut Hamas’s control, the IDF collaborated with local armed gangs, which hijacked and profiteered from aid deliveries. Gaza’s social fabric frayed under the strain of bombardment, displacement and starvation. By the time a truce came into effect last October, Gaza was unrecognisable: 2.1 million people had been squeezed into less than half of the strip, and the rest had been flattened. The Israeli government wasn’t concerned with settling a political arrangement that would emerge on the ‘day after’ – the lawn had to be burned to its roots.

The campaign to bring down the Iranian regime is a natural extension of this recalibrated strategy. Israel’s twelve-day Operation Rising Lion last June – which focused on weakening Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities – could be seen as ‘mowing the lawn’, but Roaring Lion is markedly different. Invoking the assassinations of the Hamas chief, Yahya Sinwar, and Hizbullah’s Hassan Nasrallah, as well as the downfall of Bashar al-Assad, Netanyahu told Israelis in a video address last month that ‘we have an organised plan with many surprises to destabilise the [Iranian] regime and enable change.’ As in Gaza, the absence of a clear blueprint for after the conflict seems to be a goal in itself. Israeli decision-makers have become adept at turning anarchic conditions to their advantage. Chaos is acceptable so long as it’s kept on the other side of the wall.

Evidence of this approach can also be found on Israel’s northern border. Since the fall of Assad, Israel has maintained a troop presence in southern Syria, supported separatist Druze factions and lobbied against sanctions relief for Ahmed al-Sharaa’s government. Since Hizbullah started firing rockets at Israel on 2 March, the Israeli army has issued sweeping orders for up to one million people to evacuate southern Lebanon and the Beirut suburb of Dahiya (the area provided the name for another Israeli security doctrine, first applied in the 2006 Lebanon war and later in Gaza, based on targeting civilian infrastructure in order to generate enough public pressure that the enemy is forced to surrender). Israel is now pummelling the country from the air and has begun a ground invasion that could reach as far as the Litani river, perhaps even as far north as the Zahrani river. Israeli forces have also sprayed farmland in southern Lebanon with what Lebanese authorities describe as dangerously high levels of the herbicide glyphosate, which Israel has also used in fields along the Gaza border fence, preventing farmers from accessing their land.

Israeli officials are open about the inspiration for these campaigns. The defence minister, Israel Katz, said that the army was ordered to operate in southern Lebanon, ‘just as was done against Hamas in Rafah, Beit Hanoun and the terror tunnels in Gaza’. On a visit to the northern border on 6 March, Bezalel Smotrich, the far-right finance minister and deputy defence minister, told the Lebanese: ‘You wanted to bring hell on us, you brought hell on yourselves … Dahiya will look like Khan Younis.’ On Israeli television the same day, Yair Lapid, the centrist opposition leader and former prime minister, claimed that

in the end we will have no choice but to try to create some kind of sterile zone in southern Lebanon – not huge, but something somewhat similar to the Yellow Line in Gaza. That is to say, an area with no Lebanese villages in it, but rather a completely clean strip of land between the last Lebanese village and the first Israeli settlement … Yes, it might be unaesthetic perhaps, or unpleasant, to scrape away two or three Lebanese villages, but they brought it upon themselves, it’s their problem. No one told them they had to become the host state of a terrorist organisation.

The Israeli public is overwhelmingly in agreement with these views. Polls indicate that more than 90 per cent of Jewish Israelis support the war with Iran, even as they sprint to bomb shelters; most say they are indifferent to the suffering of Iranian civilians. The troops and commanders in the army are more right-wing, nationalist and religious than in the past, with growing numbers from the West Bank settlements. Generals often distrust and clash with government ministers, but in the end execute their orders. Despite Israelis’ many domestic political disputes, they generally manage to unify to inflict violence on others, ignoring any whispers of dissent from within.

Dissent from outside Israel, meanwhile, has been toothless. Arab and European capitals may have been angry at Israel’s bombings in Gaza and condemned its policy of starvation, yet their concrete actions amounted to little more than very restricted sanctions. Trade and travel between Israel and Europe have continued freely, as has the flow of most arms. No Arab state has suspended its normalisation agreement with Israel. The mercurial Trump administration, like its Democratic predecessor, has had its differences with Netanyahu, but continues to supply heavy weapons and has pressured its allies not to take tougher measures against Israel. The ceasefire plan in Gaza looks nothing like a route to peace. The Trump-led Board of Peace has touted dystopian, AI-generated visions of a ‘new Gaza’. Meanwhile, the Israeli army attacks at will, killing more than 650 Palestinians since the truce began and restricting the supply of desperately needed aid. Echoing other officials’ statements, the IDF chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, referred to the Yellow Line, which under the ceasefire agreement cuts off nearly 60 per cent of the strip, as Israel’s new border. In the West Bank, attacks by settlers and the military have driven thousands off their lands. Some rural villages and refugee camps now lie in ruins. The Netanyahu government is hastening the annexation of the territory with almost no protest from the opposition. Even the Palestinian Authority, which has long been an asset to the occupation, is now regarded as a nuisance that can be dispensed with.

Though most Arab and European states are privately outraged by the Israeli-US offensive in Iran, fearful of angering Washington, they have reserved public condemnation for Iran’s retaliatory acts (there are exceptions: the Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, described the campaign as ‘unjustified and dangerous’; Trump responded by threatening to ‘cut off all trade’ with the country). Israelis believe that they have even more freedom to act than they imagined, and seem unperturbed by what the world thinks of their actions. The country no longer prioritises normalising relations with Middle Eastern states such as Saudi Arabia, which has in any case rejected such a prospect until Palestinian statehood is on the table. It takes its peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan for granted, and assumes that the alliance with the United Arab Emirates – one of Israel’s most fruitful partnerships in years – is solid. Israel is now less interested in achieving a balanced security architecture with its neighbours than in solidifying its supremacy in the region, alongside the US. It wants a clear line of vision from Rafah to Tehran, and is scorching the earth between them to achieve this.

But Iran’s Revolutionary Guards are responding in kind, extending fighting across the region and obstructing vital trade routes like the Strait of Hormuz in order to make everyone pay the price for the war. The US has provided a muddled and inconsistent account of its war goals, and Trump’s apparent desire for a quick and decisive campaign has so far been denied. American public opinion, including parts of Trump’s Republican base, is mostly against the war. However hostile they may be towards Iran, Arab and Muslim states are also furious at Israel and the US. Israel’s enemies haven’t disappeared altogether: Hamas retains control over parts of Gaza, Hizbullah continues to play a role in Lebanese politics, the Houthis are ensconced in Yemen, and a repressive and vengeful Islamic Republic will not collapse so easily.

Whether any of this will come back to haunt Israel remains to be seen. Two and a half years of non-stop warfare has twisted its sense of normality. Unresolved political, economic and social tensions are still bubbling away, ahead of elections due by October. Israel’s methods are viewed around the world as affronts to the global order, while the International Criminal Court is still considering claims that it committed crimes against humanity. As missiles rain down from Iran and Lebanon once again, Israelis may yet begin to question whether their military doctrines are really guaranteeing them security. So far, however, the response has been to strike even harder. If Palestine is a laboratory for the new regional order, the world should be very worried.