Israel is now the Middle East Strong Horse - opinion

Osama bin Laden said, “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse,” in a 2001 interview, expressing a Middle Eastern axiom unchallenged for millennia. Bin Laden was alluding to the fourteenth-century Arab Muslim historian and political theorist Ibn Khaldoun, who assessed that history is a cycle of violence in which strong horses – in Arabic, “al-faras al-asil” - replace weak horses. 

Middle East analyst Lee Smith’s 2010 book, The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations, argues that violent power is central to the politics, society, and culture of the Middle East.

He writes, “Bin Ladenism is not drawn from the extremist fringe but represents the political and social norm.” The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is merely a distraction from the larger, endemic, and ongoing power struggles in the Arab Muslim majority Middle East.

After Hamas’s October 7 massacre, Israel, by necessity, has become the Middle East’s strong horse in its ongoing battle against the Iranian regime and its terror proxies – the current “weak horses” of its own apocalypse - Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and various militias in Iraq and Syria. 

The Arab world knows this. They witnessed the IDF’s lightning destruction of both Hamas and Hezbollah’s command structure, the elimination of their leaderships, and the detonation of much of their weaponry and ammunition stockpiles. They then watched as Israel’s air force decimated Iran’s entire anti-aircraft defenses, and dominated Iranian air space for three hours, executing 20 separate attacks across the vast Islamic Republic. 

The assault shocked the Iranian regime to its core. Iran’s cultural institute Tebyan, under the aegis of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, admitted being mystified as to how Israel succeeded in attacking the IRGC’s intercontinental ballistic missile testing center in the northeastern city of Shahroud, hundreds of kilometers from other targeted sites in Iran.

It will take years for the regime to recover, if at all. Israel’s ongoing offensive ground operations in Lebanon and Gaza have hastened the enemy’s desertion of the battle zone. Israel’s renewed strong horse status has generated fear and awe across the Arab world. At the same time, the Arab powers suffer from cognitive dissonance.

Arab League members widely denounced Israel’s counterassault against the Iranian regime, which contradicts the Saudis’ decades-long enmity for their Iranian regime neighbors, notwithstanding recent diplomatic agreements and reports of security cooperation.

This cognitive dissonance underscores an important principle in understanding the political culture of the Middle East, which can be summed up as: “Watch what I do, not what I say.” The evidence is overwhelming: Abraham Accords diplomats from Bahrain, Morocco and the UAE have remained in Tel Aviv, as have ambassadors from Jordan and Egypt.

Similarly, Israeli ambassadors have remained in those respective Arab countries. Beyond this, Jordan, Egypt, the UAE, and Bahrain opened their air spaces and even assisted Israel during Iranian regime missile and killer drone attacks on Israel in April and October 2024.

Israel’s strong horse status is a key to winning peace and moderation in the Middle East but has been misunderstood in the West. The Biden administration had urged and even demanded that Israel refrain from attacking Hamas in Rafah, controlling the Philadelphi Corridor, and recently, in Northern Gaza.

Israel has done the opposite, reasserting its strong horse status opposite a bleeding and nearly defeated adversary. Israel’s recent attacks on Iran, America’s nightmare scenario, have changed the strategic balance, enhancing Israel’s profile among its Middle Eastern neighbors.

America’s mistaken mirroring of Israel as a small version of itself has constrained the Jewish and democratic state from defeating radical Middle Eastern enemies. Victory cannot be achieved against radical Islamic terrorism using Western principles and methods of compromise, ceasefire, diplomacy, and territorial concession.

The Middle East does not work that way. Different rules apply: Compromise signals weakness. A ceasefire is merely a cessation of hostilities to rearm and resupply. Territorial concession is the fate of the vanquished.Israel’s strong horse status is a reversal of past missteps that proved lethal.

When Israel applied Western rules, such as its unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, it invited four years of PLO and Hamas suicide bombings, murder, and mayhem, costing thousands of lives. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah referred to Israel as “weaker than a spider’s web” following Israel’s May 2000 withdrawal from Southern Lebanon. 

Arafat and his Fatah and PLO colleagues were encouraged by Israel’s overnight retreat from Lebanon, observing that for Hezbollah and the Palestinians alike, “resistance,” meaning terror, was an effective weapon against Israel. The withdrawal was a prelude to the  Palestinian “Al Aqsa Intifada,” which resulted in more than 1000 Israelis killed and thousands more wounded.

The unilateral territorial concession of Gaza in 2005 led to five Hamas wars, climaxing in the October 7 “Al Aqsa Flood” of Hamas atrocities. October 7 proved conclusively that “goodwill diplomacy” and territorial compromise opposite jihad, as demanded by the United States and Europe, was a strategic disaster and existential threat to Israel.

Having paid an enormously high human price, Israel has embodied the lesson of the strong horse in a chaotic, unstable, and unforgiving Middle East. Israel’s evolving self-awareness as an indigenous ethnic minority today understands that, as Smith notes, “He who punishes enemies and rewards friends, forbids evil and enjoins good, is entitled to rule. There’s no alternative, not yet anyway, to the strong horse.”

Dan Diker is president of the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs.