The Daily Populous Thursday June 18th, 2026 morning edition
Authored by jpost.com and submitted by thejerusalempost

That's the phrase heard over and over since October 7.

When you dissect what it truly entails, it would involve getting rid of Hamas and the conditions that created it and keep it thriving. Zooming out, it would involve doing the same about Hezbollah, the Houthis, and, of course, the Iranian regime behind all of them.

Asking how Israel has ended up where it is now, hands seemingly shackled, unable to continue what may be seen as defensive actions, leaves a simple question: Were the wars that raged since October 7, 2023, actually defensive?

They certainly had defensive features. The pager operation in Lebanon was certainly defensive. Striking nuclear facilities in Iran was too.

Israeli soldiers are seen along the Israeli border with Lebanon in northern Israel, June 8, 2026. (credit: AYAL MARGOLIN/FLASH90)

So hold onto that question. I'll come back to it.

When I first worked at The Jerusalem Post, I would regularly work the night shift on the Breaking News Desk on Friday nights. Week after week in 2019, I wrote the same article.

"Red alert sirens sounded in Gaza border communities."

"X landed in an open area."

It went on. And the reason it went on so long, the same reason Israel built an enormous reinforced fence around Gaza, has a name. The term coined to describe it is "mowing the grass."

The predictability was not the policy failing. The predictability was the policy. The deaths were in the template too, and they still read as routine. That is what a doctrine of management produces. You cut the threat back to a manageable height and you wait for it to grow again.

Basically no other country does this. It is enormously expensive and, truly, a little crazy. Say what you want about Donald Trump, and there is plenty to say, but even he, the closest thing Israel has to a friend in the world, looked at an endless, economy-cratering war and had no stomach for it. That was not weakness, per se. That was the one ally Israel actually leans on pricing a doctrine the rest of the world would find insane.

Because Israel only ever worked on one half of the problem.

Pre-October 7, there were no deep plans to engage countries diplomatically and drain the extremism from Palestinian society. No deep plans to work on resolving the terrorism emanating from the West Bank. The deeper you look, the more surface-level every Israeli strategy has been for decades.

Bandages on wounds, but never medication for the oozing infection underneath.

Take Iran. If Israel truly wanted to be rid of the head of the snake, it was never going to do it the way it deals with Gaza. You do not set a nuclear program back with a few strikes and wait for it to grow back. It needed strategy, real diplomatic strategy.

And the way to do it properly was sitting right there. The Iranian regime has spent decades making enemies. Terrorism in one country, drug trafficking in another, proxies and gangs funded in places most people would never trace back to Tehran. All of them, for their own reasons, would have wanted this finished. That is a coalition. And had Israel been engaged in real diplomacy, rather than the pseudo version it has run for years, it could have built that coalition and wielded it.

But a coalition like that needs something Israel has never wanted to do. You would have to go to countries it treats as permanent enemies, often for nothing more than their objection to policies, and ask them in. Israel does not do this. It keeps most of the world at arm's length. You cannot build an alliance from there.

And building it is diplomatic work, the work Israel had spent years starving itself of the ability to do. In those same years its foreign ministry was reportedly so short of money it could not afford pens. The military instrument was fed for decades. The diplomatic one could not buy stationery.

So Israel did the thing it knows how to do. It struck the facilities, set the program back, and left hanging the question of when it would all have to happen again. The biggest war it could fight, fought as another lawn to mow. You could argue that is all the Israeli military knows how to do anymore. Cut the grass often enough and you forget you're not meant to be a gardener.

Netanyahu will point to the Abraham Accords. But look at who signed them. States that already crush extremism inside their own borders. They were the willing. The accords did nothing about the unwilling, and they were never pointed at Gaza or the West Bank, where they might have done some good. Those same countries could have been the guarantors and the funders of a reshaped Palestinian reality, concessions traded for real, verified change. The objection is always the same. Israel cannot give concessions without a guarantee of security. True. But no one has ever tried to build the structure which would produce that guarantee.

And not all of what feeds this is Israel's to fix, or Israel's fault. Pay-for-slay is the Palestinian Authority's. The incitement is not written in Jerusalem. The Qatari money came in with everyone watching, year after year, alongside the weapons that kept reaching Gaza and the West Bank that keeps producing its lone wolves, often out of nothing more than the absence of anything to lose. Plenty of actors keep all of this running. The point is that none of it, not the parts Israel owns and not the parts it does not, was ever the target of a real strategy with real partners.

Did Netanyahu invent the doctrine? No. Mowing the grass predates him. The belief that there is no partner began to solidify across governments long before his longest tenure began.

But he is its longest-serving steward, and the one handed the most political capital, after the worst day in the country's history, to finally break the cycle. He chose the bigger lawn. He did not build the trap, but he starved every way out of it, until force was the only tool left in the drawer. And when force is all you have built, of course the answer to every crisis is more of it.

There's no partner, he said, for years. But you do not get a partner by waiting for one to appear. You build the conditions that produce one. The absence he kept describing was not something he found. It was something he kept.

So when we hear "finish the job," chanted loudest by the people who most want it finished, it is worth asking what was ever built to finish it with.

Israel has a more competent foreign ministry now. It can buy its pens. But the rest is much the same. Building the coalition that could actually end this would mean going to the countries it treats as enemies and admitting it needs them. That takes humility. It takes wanting to solve the thing, rather than manage it for another decade.

Tall_Pressure7042 on June 17th, 2026 at 16:31 UTC »

Israel believes military methods can address the problems. And now they screwed themselves.

VladtheShirtless on June 17th, 2026 at 15:46 UTC »

Doesn’t matter how pro Israel you are, you’re not going to satisfy Israel’s need for security. Israel needs to stop being treated like it’s a rational actor, they have no plans to turn down the temperature. Like ffs Netanyahu is the most moderate you’re going to get and he’s under fire for listening to the US

thejerusalempost on June 17th, 2026 at 14:51 UTC »

The argument here is that Israel has spent decades perfecting the military instrument while starving the diplomatic one. The foreign ministry reportedly couldn't afford pens while the IDF was funded for every contingency. The piece asks whether 'finish the job' was ever actually possible without the coalition and diplomatic architecture Israel never bothered to build, and whether Netanyahu found the absence of a partner or kept it.