Don't Fall for the Regime Change Talk. Israel Is 'Mowing the Lawn' in…

In the early 2010s, Israeli military officials began to describe the army's periodic offensives in Gaza, typically conducted through airstrikes and artillery barrages, as "mowing the lawn."

The grim euphemism named the paradigm of perpetual conflict management that successive Netanyahu governments chose over pursuing a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians. Every few years, Israel would, in the jargon of the defense establishment, "degrade" Hamas' military capabilities and "deter" the Islamist group from launching future attacks. In practice, this meant routinely bombarding the Gaza Strip, already crushed under years of blockade.

Israel's turn toward "mowing the lawn" was also the product of geopolitical shifts following the Arab Spring. For the first time, the Jewish state no longer faced serious threats from states in its immediate surroundings; it had long since signed peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, while Syria had collapsed into civil war. But there were other adversaries: non-state actors like Hamas and Hezbollah, ideologically committed to Israel's destruction and, at the same time, unlikely to be defeated decisively by conventional military means.

Over time, Israel grew to consider the resulting perpetual yet low-grade conflict with Islamist groups a comfortable one. Israel's technological and military superiority enabled it to regularly carry out aerial campaigns while generally avoiding ground incursions that would not only risk high Israeli casualties, but also require a definitive political resolution to bring hostilities to a final close.

For Netanyahu, especially, this situation proved ideal. Ever the cautious politician, he preferred to avoid full-scale wars when possible while rejecting outright both a two-state solution and, until very recently, the formal annexation of the occupied territories.

In this respect, Israel's military doctrine has shifted much less than it seems since October 7. Although Israeli forces unleashed an unprecedented level of destruction on Gaza, the fundamental structure of Israel's domination over the Palestinians has changed little. Israel failed to eliminate Hamas militarily, while Netanyahu rejected any political arrangement that would have led to Hamas' displacement by the Palestinian Authority.

Gaza, in other words, was not a break with "mowing the lawn": it was its most devastating execution.

Now Israel is transposing the strategy of "mowing the lawn" to Iran – a geographically expansive country of more than 90 million, very different from its smaller proxy militias. Unlike with the Palestinians, however, Israel's reliance on airpower in Iran is not primarily a product of Netanyahu's rejection of politics, but first and foremost because Israel cannot fight such a large and distant country by other means.

The extent to which the logic of Israel's current war mirrors that of its previous wars against Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon is striking. Contrary to the overheated rhetoric of regime change emanating from Netanyahu and his ministers, Israel's military did not embark on this war with the objective of toppling the Islamic Republic. Israeli Air Force strategists know all too well that no modern regime has been overthrown by airpower alone. Israel cannot actually achieve the "total victory" of which its most delusional propagandists have begun to dream.

Instead, Israel seeks to "degrade" and "deter" Iran and its military capabilities so that Iran cannot threaten Israel in the future. Everything else – regime change, democratization – is, as the Hebrew expression goes, a bonus. Or as Danny Citrinowitz, a senior researcher for the Institute for National Security Studies, described Israel's approach in a much-cited Financial Times interview: "If we can have a coup, great. If we can have people on the streets, great. If we can have a civil war, great. Israel couldn't care less about the future…[or] the stability of Iran."

The ongoing U.S.-Israel war in Iran is the third aerial campaign Israel has conducted since April 2024. The repetitive, bloody, cycle has already begun. Israel's air superiority, combined with the overwhelming might of the U.S. military, has enabled Israeli jets to fly sorties over Tehran of the kind it long conducted over Gaza City and Beirut without losing a single plane. And if striking Iran had previously been imagined as an impossibly risky endeavor, in the span of less than two years, it has come to seem to many Israelis as almost mundane, as has the reality of unceasing war. That makes future Israeli strikes in Iran more likely, even after the current fighting ends.

Deterrence of the kind at which Israel is aiming is almost always temporary, setting the stage for more violence to come. Already Israeli defense commentators on TV are warning that this war won't be the last round, using the same term they have for past wars in Gaza and Lebanon.

Eventually, they say, Iran will attempt to rebuild its missile arsenal and refurbish its centrifuges. And Israel will set out to strike again, to mow the lawn – this time 1,500 kilometers away. When asked during his press conference Thursday night, Netanyahu did not rule out the possibility that, after the war ends, Israel would find it necessary to do so.

Israel's perpetual conflict management is possible because of its power – its raw military might and, no less important, the immense support it enjoys from the United States. Yet Israel's reliance on "mowing the lawn" is, perhaps counterintuitively, also a marker of its weakness: its inability to defeat and dismantle with finality the forces that antagonize it, whether Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon or, now, the Islamic Republic of Iran.

A strategy born of perhaps understandable pessimism, perpetual conflict management dooms Israelis to live forever by the sword and civilians across the region to live in fear of yet another round of war. There are alternatives: namely, diplomacy. But without a radical change in Israel's geostrategic orientation – and in the determination of Israel's adversaries to fight it no matter the cost – the third Gulf War, as it has come to be known, is unlikely to be the last.

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