Yossi Alpher is an independent security analyst. He is the former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, a former senior official with the Mossad, and a former IDF intelligence officer. Views and positions expressed here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily represent APN's views and policy positions.

Q. Isn’t this war about the Palestinians?

A. It is fair to say that it is about a lot more but that the Palestinian issue remains at its core. Iran and its seven proxies want to destroy Israel for the sake of Islam and not just for the Palestinians. But without the Palestinian cause as embodied in the Gaza War, Iran and its proxies would not currently be fighting. Indeed, if in the days ahead a ceasefire is reached between Israel and Lebanese Hezbollah, the Palestinian issue in Gaza and the West Bank will return exclusively to center stage of the conflict.

That is why it was stunning to watch, last Monday, the opening ceremony of the Knesset’s fall session. Prime Minister Netanyahu spoke and Opposition leader Lapid responded. They talked a lot about the war. Neither mentioned the Palestinians; not a word. As both Netanyahu and Lapid apparently see it, the Palestinian issue is currently not, nor should it be, on the Israeli public’s agenda.

Q. Netanyahu stated at one point that he would reply to all those critics who argue that his government ‘has no strategy’ for this war...

A. He proceeded to present his ‘strategies’: defeating Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and all of Iran’s additional proxies as well as Iran itself. Iran, he claimed, was a danger not just to the Middle East but to humanity. And Israel alone is confronting it. The outcome, according to the Israeli prime minister, must be normalized relations with the entire Arab world.

Nowhere did Netanyahu suggest how Israel should deal with the Gaza Strip and, by extension, the Palestinian issue after ‘total victory’ in Gaza--even assuming a total victory against a determined Islamist terrorist/guerilla movement is possible. Recall that it was a strategy of ignoring Palestinian goals and aspirations, both extreme and moderate, that got us into this war in the first place!

Note that Lapid, too, apparently has no strategy for Gaza. And that Netanyahu’s “strategies” are in reality little more than war aims--not strategies for achieving them.

Q. Iran is according to Netanyahu a danger to humanity? Is this the prospect of ‘global war’ you are referring to?

A. Iranian Shiite Islamists, like all Islamists, preach a messianic message for all the world. But Iran is hardly at present a danger even to most of the Middle East, particularly after Israel last weekend struck a very telling blow to its ambitions.

Rather, there is a global dimension here: as the world gets more involved in the Iran conflict, Iran is becoming involved in other global conflicts. There are disturbing indications that the Iran-Israel conflict and the Ukraine-Russia conflict are, if not merging, at least interacting. In the words of NYTimes columnist Bret Stephens, “the Middle East and Ukraine are, at bottom, different fronts in the same war.”

Q. Iran supplies UAVs and missiles to Russia’s war effort . . .

A. Or at least supplied, in the past tense, until the Israel Air Force targeted Iran’s advanced weapons industries in a retaliatory strike some ten days ago. Israel also struck advanced Russian air defense systems that Moscow had supplied to Iran. Recently, Russia and Iran have reportedly upgraded their strategic cooperation agreements, just as Russia has begun to supply arms to the Houthis in Yemen.

In short, the Iran-led Axis of Resistance, which extends as far afield as the Houthis, appears to be moving toward some sort of alliance with Russia. With Iran at least temporarily hobbled as an arms system supplier to Russia, Moscow is likely to depend more on North Korea, which not incidentally has deployed thousands of its troops against Ukraine on the Kursk front, and has apparently even deployed a few to bolster or train Hezbollah in South Lebanon in recent years.

Q. And opposing this Russian-Iranian-North Korean alliance (some would include China, as well)?

A. The United States has deployed THAAD air defense units to Israel and is reinforcing its air and naval presence. Sunni Arab states--Jordan and possibly Saudi Arabia and the UAE--quietly opened their air space to the IAF when it attacked Iran ten days ago. If it looks, smells and walks like an alliance . . .

Q. Yet Jordan publicly turns a cold shoulder to Israel...

A. If any aspect of Arab-Israel peace could be a genuine long-term liability of this war, it is the Jordan-Israel peace. Jordan and Israel signed a peace treaty in late October 1994--exactly thirty years ago. Not surprisingly, there was no noticeable ‘peace anniversary’ celebration anywhere during the past two weeks. Israel has not had an ambassador in Amman since the war began. King Abdullah II refuses to speak with Netanyahu. Barely 10 percent of Jordanians support relations with Israel, contrasting with 80 percent in 1994.

At issue is the fate of West Bank, Gazan and East Jerusalem Palestinians--even before the war. Abdullah understood the 2020 Abraham Accords, which completely ignored Jordan, as an Israeli-American-Gulf Arab attempt to bypass the Palestinian issue without even trying seriously to reach a two-state solution that would respect Jordan’s Hashemite nature. The current Netanyahu government has permitted growing Jewish-extremist incitement at the Haram a-Sharif/Temple Mount in East Jerusalem, where Jordan is nominally in charge on behalf of all Muslims. And the Gaza war has generated rising Islamist sentiments among Jordan’s large Palestinian population, along with Iran-sponsored subversion and Jordan Valley border incidents.

Unlike the population at large, Abdullah’s security services have remained loyal to the peace with Israel, as expressed in the two countries’ security cooperation. The IAF apparently overflies Jordan on its way to Iran, and the two countries coordinate efforts to rein in growing Islamist terrorism against both Amman and Jerusalem. Israel still shares vital water resources with Jordan. But how long can the King hold the fort against militant Islam, particularly when he is suspicious even of the hegemonic designs of moderate neighbors like the Saudis?

It is impossible to overestimate the strategic importance for the security of both Jordan and Israel  . . . of one another. Will the next US administration understand this? Does Netanyahu?

Q. On a separate issue, you put Israel’s ultra-Orthodox Haredim in your title. What is their connection to the war and the Palestinians?

A. None, and therein lies a growing problem for the Netanyahu government. The Haredim, well over one million strong, take pains to demonstrate that there is and will be no connection between them and the war. At a time when Israel is bleeding from its war with the Islamists, the Haredim by and large do not serve in the IDF and insist they will continue to refuse to serve. They are fundamentalist freeloaders, detached from the dominant themes of today’s Israeli strategic reality.

As the Haredis’ Knesset leader, Housing and Construction Minister Itzhak Goldknopf, famously asked last February, “What’s the connection between the government and the war? Who has it bad here?”

The Haredim, then, offer a glaring contrast to Israel’s involvement in this globalizing war. At a time of growing Russian and North Korean involvement and tantalizing ordnance links between the Ukraine War and the Gaza-Hezbollah War, there is in Israel a major Jewish religious and demographic cohort that will have nothing to do with any of this. Just give it huge budgetary allotments for its Torah study and large families and leave it alone.

Strikingly, while Israel’s shrinking secular and traditional majority has long shrugged at this parasitic behavior, it is the country’s growing National Religious West Bank settler sector that is increasingly angry at its fellow fervent Jews. The National Religious, who hold the Finance, National Security (police) and (within the Defense Ministry) settlement portfolio in Netanyahu’s government, have also in recent years radically increased their level of service in IDF combat units.

The National Religious proportion of combat losses has grown accordingly. So has their resentment at the Haredim. Yet for ideological reasons (holding onto the Gaza Strip, preventing emergence of a Palestinian state) they broadly seek to bolster the Netanyahu government and to continue the war even as the IDF, with 12,000 wounded and nearly 800 dead, is starved for combat manpower.

Q. Is this the ultimate irony of this war: one ultra-religious cohort, the Haredim, sacrificing the other, the National Orthodox settlers?

A. At the domestic political level, without a doubt. Here we have a political-religious rift between Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jews in the governing coalition. Both groups are hawks. Both are increasingly messianic, at times fascistic. With their uniquely high birthrates, both are the demographic engines of an increasingly religious Israel.

In the rest of the Middle East and the world at large, too, complex coalitions are squaring off against one another. It is hardly surprising that one of them, led by Iran, is also religious extremist.