Perpetual conflict management, not regime change, defines Israel's approach to Iran — and guarantees more wars to come.
Israel's ongoing aerial bombardment of Iran follows the same strategic logic that has guided its military campaigns against Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon for over a decade, according to a sweeping analysis published in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. Writer Joshua Leifer argues that despite fiery regime-change rhetoric from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ministers, Israel is not pursuing the overthrow of the Islamic Republic but rather engaging in its well-established doctrine of perpetual conflict management — a strategy Israeli military officials once grimly dubbed "mowing the lawn."
In his March 13 article for Haaretz, Leifer traces the origins of this approach to the early 2010s, when Israeli defense officials began describing periodic offensives in Gaza — typically conducted through airstrikes and artillery — as efforts to "degrade" Hamas's military capabilities and "deter" future attacks. Rather than pursuing a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians, successive Netanyahu governments chose a cycle of routine bombardment, treating low-grade conflict as a manageable status quo.
Leifer contends that October 7 did not fundamentally alter this doctrine. Although the destruction unleashed on Gaza reached unprecedented levels, "the fundamental structure of Israel's domination over the Palestinians has changed little," he writes. Israel failed to eliminate Hamas militarily, and Netanyahu rejected political arrangements that could have displaced the group through the Palestinian Authority. "Gaza was not a break with 'mowing the lawn': it was its most devastating execution," Leifer argues in Haaretz.
Now, according to Leifer, Israel has transposed this same framework onto Iran — a country of over 90 million people and 1,500 kilometers away. He notes that Israel's reliance on airpower against Iran stems not primarily from political avoidance, as with the Palestinians, but from the practical reality that Israel "cannot fight such a large and distant country by other means."
Leifer points out that Israeli Air Force strategists understand that no modern regime has been toppled by airpower alone, making the regime-change talk largely performative. He cites a widely referenced *Financial Times* interview with Danny Citrinowitz, a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies, who described Israel's posture bluntly: "If we can have a coup, great. If we can have people on the streets, great... Israel couldn't care less about the future…or the stability of Iran."
The Haaretz analysis highlights that the current U.S.-Israel campaign against Iran marks the third aerial operation since April 2024. What was once considered an impossibly risky endeavor has become, in the eyes of many Israelis, "almost mundane," Leifer writes — a normalization that makes future strikes more likely. Israeli defense commentators are already warning on television that this war will not be the last, employing the same language used for past rounds in Gaza and Lebanon.
Leifer acknowledges that Israel's strategy is made possible by its overwhelming military superiority and unwavering American support. Yet he frames the reliance on perpetual conflict management as paradoxically a sign of weakness — reflecting Israel's inability to decisively defeat the forces that oppose it, from Hamas to Hezbollah to the Islamic Republic itself.
The article concludes with a stark warning: without a fundamental shift in Israel's geostrategic orientation — and in the willingness of its adversaries to absorb devastating costs — "the third Gulf War, as it has come to be known, is unlikely to be the last." Leifer suggests diplomacy as the only real alternative, but offers little optimism that either side is prepared to embrace it.