How Israel is dominating West Asian dynamics

On July 7, a beaming Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, entered the White House as a victorious warrior, not as a mere US supplicant. Welcomed by President Donald Trump, who lavished praise on Israel as America’s “closest and most reliable ally in the Middle East”. Netanyahu immediately announced that he had nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. Just over a year and a half since the horrific October 2023 Hamas terror attacks, Israel has changed its strategic pathway, dismembered local enemies, and emerged as the core of West Asia.

Experts had been forecasting the Gulf monarchies, awash with petrodollars and soft power façades, as the new stars of the Middle East in the last decade or more. But many global capitals now see Israel at the top of the game, not by virtue of wealth, but through belligerent and unmistakable exercise of hard power, paired with hi-tech war and unmatched American support. Israel hasn’t just restored deterrence but has rearranged the balance of power in the region demonstrably in its favour.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas carried out the deadliest attack ever by Israelis, killing 1,200 and taking hundreds as hostages. Then came the response, which wasn’t merely vengeance but a controlled, planned operation to eliminate threats along the entire long strategic sweep of Israel. Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and eventually Iran—these were all drawn into a war fought with increasing fury and strategic precision by Israel.

In the Gaza Strip, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) conducted the longest-running land-and-air campaign the strip had ever experienced. Through early 2025, Hamas’s military machine had been completely eradicated: tunnel installations collapsed, command centres struck, and wide swaths of its leadership neutralised. As the international pressure mounted, the war cabinet of the nation remained steadfast. There was a strong message: going back to the status quo ante was non-negotiable.

In the north, the Hezbollah, once considered Israel’s most formidable non-state threat, had suffered massive losses. After months of border aggressions, Israel had initiated a coordinated campaign late in 2024. By airpower, cyberattack, and targeted assassinations, the IDF wiped out large sections of the missile supplies of Hezbollah and killed thousands of fighters. The assassination of Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah by an Israeli airstrike was the symbolic shattering of the chain of command of the group. By early 2025, however, the group was not a strategic actor anymore but a bleeding militia trying to recover.

These twin actions had a domino effect. As the Lebanese Shia group, Hezbollah, was weakened and its own credibility compromised, the Syrian regime of Bashar Assad collapsed in December 2024 through pressure imposed by rebel forces and mass desertions among the Syrian Arab Army. Iranian control over the west of the Euphrates collapsed within weeks. For Israel, the drubbing of Damascus removed the last buffer securing Tehran.

What followed was unthinkable in ambition and scale. In June of 2025, the Israeli military launched Operation Rising Lion, a multi-domain preemptive attack against the nuclear and missile capabilities of Iran. Backed by a decade-long series of advances in technology, the Israelis used drones, F-35s, cyber soldiers, and special operatives to target over 100 sites within Iran over a 72-hour window. The US participation across the strategic as well as the tactical spectrum, from logistics to airpower, established a new gold standard of alliance military cooperation. It was a catastrophe for Tehran. Iran’s command-and-control system had been taken out. Senior Revolutionary Guard commanders, including the chiefs of the nuclear and ballistic missile units, had been killed. Enrichment facilities at Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan had been blasted to the ground.

Washington’s engagement throughout the operational arc has been unprecedented. While the Joe Biden administration had desired to freeze the relationship with Iran through talks, the second Trump administration sanctioned escalation by the Israelis as part of a wider counter-proliferation strategy. US drones, satellite intelligence, and even stealth bombers were engaged with Rising Lion. Bibi’s summit with Trump laid bare again the institutionalisation of Israel as America’s principal ally in West Asia.

This intensified partnership is now shaping regional realignments. Even the Gulf states, which had been averse to embracing the Jewish state openly, have started reassessing. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain—after having navigated the war in Gaza without cutting Abraham Accords-era ties—are now having secret talks about normalising. As Iranian influence has waned and Hezbollah has been defanged, these states now believe Israeli deterrence to be the foundation of a new regional order. Even Egypt and Jordan, which had been trapped for years between local pressures and security cooperation, have intensified intelligence sharing.

Israel’s re-entry heralds the return, since the early 1970s, of a raw realist logic to West Asia. A region that long danced to the tunes of ideologies and asymmetric wars, the Jewish nation has demonstrated that security does not lie in rhetorical strength but capabilities: drones, cyber war, air domination, and cooperative strategy. But now, Israel emerges as a very capable power. The IDF has become the most powerful fighting army of West Asia. Its intelligence system appears unbeatable. Its cooperation with Washington has never been better. And their fierce adversaries—Hamas and Hezbollah, Assad and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—stay crushed or silent.

The West Asian strategic landscape, for generations, meant a balance-of-power game between affluent Gulf states, revolutionary Iran, and an isolated Israel. That arithmetic doesn’t work anymore. Israel, through a steely resolve and strategic manoeuvre, has turned the worst attack in its modern history into the foundation of a new regional order—one in which it is not merely navigating but dominating.

Manish Dabhade is an Associate Professor of Diplomacy in the School of International Studies, JNU & Founder of The Indian Futures, an independent think tank based in New Delhi. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.