Can Israel Survive?

"Israel is at the peak of its power," Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said triumphally on Holocaust Remembrance Day in April.

Those words look increasingly prophetic in a way he did not intend, as the limits of the power he trumpeted become evident.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s deal to end what began as a joint war with Iran has left Israel on the sidelines and its security concerns ignored. Personal strains are showing between Netanyahuand an irritated Trump, who had previously been hailed as the most Israel-friendly president yet, and Israel's armed forces are stretched from Lebanon to Syria to Gaza and the West Bank.



Meanwhile, anti-Israel sentiment is growing not only in Europe but in the United States, which has been the bedrock of Israel's support. Add in the demographic and political strains in the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, and Israel has rarely looked more alone and vulnerable despite its vaunted strength.

It raises questions about the long-term survival of a state founded in 1948, the idea of which sounded “mad,” Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, wrote in his diary in the late 1800s.

"We are at an existential moment," former Israeli prime minister and Netanyahu opponent Naftali Bennett told The Times of Israel this week.

"It's never been Israel's doctrine to have an ongoing war, which exhausts Israeli society, exhausts the reservists, exhausts the economy, and dramatically hurts our international standing."

Newsweek reached out to the Israeli government for comment.

Setback for Iran’s Nuclear Program

The war Israel launched with the United States on February 28 has undoubtedly set back Iran's nuclear program, and Trump's deal may restrain it for a while. But Iran did not agree to conditions that are important for Israel: curbing its missile force and dropping its support for an “Axis of Resistance” of proxy armies fighting to destroy Israel.

Trump's deal also appears to give a financial lifeline to Iran's rulers, whom Israel had sought to undermine, if not see ousted. In time, they will be able to revive nuclear weapons ambitions-which they had always denied-to counter Israel's own presumed nuclear arsenal and change the region’s strategic balance.

With frictions growing between Trump and Netanyahu, the U.S. president made clear he thought Israel should be grateful for what it got and criticized Israeli operations in Lebanon, which have not stopped Hezbollah from firing drones despite massive destruction.

"Without me, there would be no Israel," Trump said at a G7 summit in France on Tuesday. “Israel would have been blown up a long time ago, had I not gotten involved."

Israel's survival has been threatened from the moment of its founding, when it was attacked by neighboring Arab states. Other wars followed, culminating with the current regional conflict ignited on October 7, 2023, when the Iranian-backed Palestinian Hamas group attacked Israel from Gaza.

"There are enemies, yes, and we have some serious problems at home, but you know, I think we should be balanced and not go into hysteria," Efraim Inbar, the president of the Jerusalem Institute for Security and Strategy, told Newsweek.

"We have a strong country, you know. Our survival is not at stake this moment. If Iran will get the bomb, it will be different, but I think we prevented probably nuclear tests, so we still have some options.

"We were lucky to have Trump join us for a while, and we gained some time, so now we’ll have to go back to covert operations, which attract less attention."

Israeli Forces Stretched

Since the war began, Israel's forces have been operating over a much wider front. Established in combat as the region's most powerful, they nonetheless show signs of overstretch. They have advanced deep into southern Lebanon in an occupation to counter Iran's Hezbollah force.

They are in a swath of Syria and continue to hold much of the Gaza Strip, where Hamas still holds sway despite a different Trump-brokered deal. Military operations continue in the West Bank, seized with Gaza in the 1967 war, where violence by a band of militant Jewish settlers has also stoked the violence.

Israel's traditional security policy of “mowing the grass” in response to sporadic threats in Gaza, the West Bank and sometimes Lebanon now extends as far as Iran and Yemen, making it an altogether bigger challenge and drawing international anger over casualties whose number inevitably includes civilians.

"Israel is endangering itself by taking such a hubristic and exaggerated approach, which makes it an increasingly indigestible and unabsorbable element in the region," said Daniel Levy of the U.S. Middle East project, which seeks an Israeli-Palestinian peace that has looked increasingly doubtful in recent years.

"Israel has plenty of opportunity to survive if it could dial that down and desist from taking a zero-sum approach and desist from pursuing the eradication of the Palestinians, but it is moving further away from those things and the debate around Israel’s longevity is increasingly a very real one," Levy told Newsweek.

The fate of the Palestinians remains uncertain: Netanyahu's answer is that there would never be a Palestinian state on his watch because of the security threat it would pose. Since 2023, most Israelis agree, according to opinion polls. A poll late last year showed most Palestinians also opposed a two-state solution because they believe it is no longer possible.

That plays to the Hamas message of a war to destroy Israel that could take centuries and countless “martyrs.” The Hamas founding charter makes multiple comparisons between Israel and the Crusader states that persisted for nearly two centuries in the region before their destruction by Islamic forces.

"The State of Israel is not a crumbling Crusader Empire. Israel is a strong and resolute state that has proven its capacity to defend itself against any threat," Defense Minister Israel Katz said in a recent response to comments from a Turkish minister.

Israel Faces Regional Rivals

Turkey's growing regional ambitions over the former Ottoman Empire are one long-term danger for Israel in a regional dynamic that is far from being in its favor.

Some countries, such as the United Arab Emirates, happily signed up for Trump's 2020 Abraham Accords with Israel. But the war with Iran has not brought regional power Saudi Arabia closer despite the fact that it also came under Iranian attack. If anything, the Saudis and Qataris have sought accommodation with Iran. They have so far been dismissive of Trump’s suggestion that they should join the Abraham Accords, too.

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Further afield, support for Israel has nose-dived, at least in part due to the horrific images of human destruction and tens of thousands killed in Gaza and Lebanon.

For Israel, the plunge in positive opinion in the United States is worrisome. Six in 10 Americans have a negative view of Israel, according to a recent Pew Research survey. That compares to only 42 percent in 2022. Israel saw a sharp drop in immigration in 2025 to 21,900 from nearly 30,000 the year before, although there was a rise in the number of Jews relocating from Western countries.

One foreign spot of hope for Israel is rising power India, with its desire for tech cooperation and shared sense of being in a battle against radical Islamist forces. Israel also has the advantage of a strong economy, with economic growth of some 3.3 percent expected by the OECD this year and set to accelerate further next year, in part thanks to tech and defense industries buoyed by the war. The World Happiness Report ranked Israel the world's eighth-happiest country last year.

But there are also the internal tensions, set to come to a head with an election due later this year, in which the grim mood over the Iran deal and the constant call-ups of reservists for different battlefronts will not help Netanyahu.

Israel’s Demographic Strains

One of the biggest long-term challenges is Israel's demographics.

There is the long-term issue of the growth of the Arab population and what that means for the balance with Jewish Israelis. The Arab population currently adds up to a little over seven million people, including Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, plus the Israeli Arabs who make up around a fifth of the state's population. In total, that's already not far off the number of Jews who live in the same area, including those in Israel and the hundreds of thousands in West Bank Jewish settlements that the World Court has ruled illegal-an opinion rejected by Israel.

A bigger demographic challenge for Israel right now is the fastest-growing part of the Jewish population: the large families of the ultra-Orthodox Haredi religious community. They receive heavy state subsidies but had traditionally avoided otherwise compulsory military service until a 2024 court ruling. Resistance to conscription continues, with police using stun grenades to break up Haredi protests over the arrest of draft dodgers this week. Parliament is torn over a bill that would ultimately increase conscription of Haredim, but allow exemptions for full-time religious students. That is also imperiling Netanyahu’s coalition, which relies on ultra-Orthodox parties.

The question of the Haredim and their role will be as much of an issue in the coming elections as the foreign battlefields. Whether a different government could calm the various domestic and foreign fronts is another question.

"We survived many existential moments," said Inbar. "We should be, of course, doing our best not to make mistakes. We are a small nation and we have to behave with prudence."

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This story was originally published June 17, 2026 at 9:57 AM.