From the iron wall to the iron fist: Israeli power and perpetual conflict

Anthony Elghossain is a lawyer and writer. He advises organizations on geopolitics, U.S. foreign policy and the rule of law.Israeli leaders have turned their preponderant power into a trigger of perpetual conflict and crisis — and not, as their predecessors once imagined, an instrument of peace. Tilting toward one extreme of an old duality in Zionist (and Israeli) thought, these self-styled successors of Revisionist Zionists have refused to secure peace from a position of strength, instead turning that strength into a source of insecurity in hearts and minds and instability in the Levant.Presiding over a polity that has never been as powerful, prosperous, or secure as it is today, Israeli leaders dream of dominance on the ground, at sea, and in the sky. They quest for monsters to destroy — even if those monsters are, wholly or in part,...