One year on from the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on southern Israel, Israeli forces are waging at least two “forever wars”—in Gaza and Lebanon; more, if intensifying settler violence in the occupied Palestinian West Bank is viewed as the next distinct battlefield, and if Israeli military operations against Iranian allies in Yemen, Syria, and Iraq—not to mention against Iran itself—are also included.
What makes these “forever wars” is the absence of clear prospects, let alone definite plans, for a politically viable “day after,” especially in Gaza and Lebanon. For all the triumphal rhetoric from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about “total victory” against Hamas and Hezbollah, and his grandiose visions of regime change in Iran and a new regional order in the Middle East, a more sober reading suggests that, without a day after for Gaza and Lebanon, there can be no day after for Israel either.
Something subtle has taken place. Israel has joined the unenviable club of Arab countries trapped in forever wars of their own: Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Lebanon, Palestine, and Sudan. This is not merely a measure of the level of active conflict—most severe in Sudan, partial in Syria—nor even of unresolvable conflict dynamics that have left de facto truces and negotiated stalemates perpetually fragile and reversible in Yemen, Libya, and Iraq; and, prior to October 7, 2023, in Lebanon and Palestine. It is also a measure of disintegrating links between state and society.
https://carnegieendowment.org/middle-east/diwan/2024/10/what-day-after-for-israel?lang=en