Israel has the power to dominate, but not to lead the region

Domination, according to philosopher Antonio Gramsci, is the capacity to coerce, to compel obedience through force. Hegemony is leadership secured through consent - an order that feels natural to those who live under it, so minds acquiesce before bodies are made to obey. 

Domination can prohibit and destroy; it cannot persuade, build or lead. This is the standard against which Israel’s supposed “hegemony” should be judged in light of its continuous war, which has extended from 2023 to the present day.

Israel appears to have reached the height of its military power, dismantling Hamas’s military infrastructure, killing Hezbollah’s leadership, occupying parts of Gaza, Lebanon and Syria, and gutting Iran’s missile and nuclear programmes while killing its supreme leader.

These tactical victories, however, have not resulted in the construction of hegemony, but its erosion. They have exposed the fact that genuine hegemony never existed - only naked domination, sustained by an American strategic umbrella.

Size is not power, superiority is not leadership, and presence is not integration. Measured across three dimensions - the global economy, the region’s rules and regional networks - Israeli hegemony is either steadily eroding or never existed at all.

Israel’s high-tech sector is roughly 17 percent of the country’s GDP, with its export share reaching a record 57 percent in the first four months of last year, and the country boasts the highest civilian research and development (R&D) spending relative to GDP. 

But one cannot confuse the size of a sector with the power to write the rules that govern it. Mastering a game whose rules were written by someone else is excellence, not power.

The picture is also less rosy than it appears: Israel’s own Innovation Authority warns of stagnating employment, a decline in R&D staff and a shrinking number of startups. 

Paradox exposed

The one field where Israel genuinely sets global rules is cybersecurity: it hosts R&D centres for seven of the world’s top 10 companies in the field, and its cloud security firm Wiz was recently acquired by Google for $32bn. In another major recent deal, Palo Alto Networks acquired Israeli information security company CyberArk for $25bn.

But these deals expose a paradox: the pinnacle of Israeli tech success is its absorption into the American ecosystem - excellence within one room of a vast palace, not ownership of it. Step outside cybersecurity and the claim fades.

The shekel is not a reserve currency, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange orbits Nasdaq, and Israel’s security dependence on Washington is close to existential, with more than $130bn in American assistance since 1948.

Military dominance remains. Hegemony does not, and the gap between the two keeps widening

The Iran war tested this: Ben Gurion Airport shut down for 40 days, yet markets stayed resilient. The Google-Wiz deal closed during an active regional conflict, reflecting dependent integration rather than self-sufficiency.

This is the resilience of a patient on life support, not of healthy lungs. But the greater danger is the erosion of Israel’s most important asset: human capital.

Roughly 90,000 Israelis left the country in 2025 for three or more consecutive months, and Israeli tech firms are increasingly employing people abroad.

Tellingly, this shift began with the domestic judicial-reform crisis in early 2023, before a single Hamas rocket was fired in the Gaza war - a vote with people’s feet, by the professionals who generate Israel’s only genuine structural advantage.

Israel’s position is neither “startup nation” nor collapse, but rather a deeply integrated, subordinate economy whose niche is gradually eroding.

Shifting perceptions

Hegemony’s second dimension - legitimacy, the acceptance of power rather than merely its possession - cannot be measured in budgets. Does Israel lead the region, or merely possess the capacity to disrupt it?

Its military superiority is not entirely its own. During the Iran war, US forces fired hundreds of interceptors in Israel’s defence, drawing down nearly half of the Pentagon’s Thaad stockpile. Roughly 80 percent of Israel’s own Arrow inventory was depleted within weeks, underscoring that it is a highly capable deterrent inside a costly American security architecture - not an invincible, self-sufficient power.

If Israel’s military position reveals dependence, its legitimacy reveals open erosion: an International Court of Justice genocide case, International Criminal Court warrants against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, a UN inquiry finding that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, and 157 states now recognising Palestine.

The deepest shift, though, is in public consciousness: a 2025 Pew survey of 24 countries found 62 percent held unfavourable views of Israel, against 29 percent favourable. This trend holds even with Israel’s principal ally, as around 60 percent of US adults now have an unfavourable view of Israel.

Across the Arab world, 87 percent oppose recognising Israel, while more than a quarter name it the greatest regional threat.

So who is writing the rules of the emerging order? Saudi Arabia still rejects normalisation, absent an irreversible path to Palestinian statehood. The Gaza ceasefire was imposed on Israel, not brokered by it, and the Iran-US nuclear deal is being negotiated without Tel Aviv.

Regional diplomacy is driven instead by Egypt, Qatar, Jordan, Oman, Turkey and Pakistan - none dependent on Israel, which can obstruct but not impose its own vision. It retains the power to veto, not to lead.

Here lies the deeper paradox: each of Israel’s military victories has generated a corresponding loss of legitimacy. Has Israel become a hub around which the Middle East is reorganising, or the obstacle around which new networks are built? 

Regional air defences intercepted thousands of drones and missiles during the Iran war, seemingly showing integration - but this is an American-led architecture, not a network linking Israel to its neighbours. Arab states cooperate with Washington, and Washington cooperates with Israel; the bridge is the US, not Israel. 

Widening gap

The same pattern holds in energy and trade. Gas exports to Egypt are cited as proof of Israel’s indispensable role - yet this collapsed at the first real test, when Israel shut its biggest gas field for roughly 33 days amid the Iran war, leaving Egypt with electricity shortages and costly LNG imports.

Similarly, the proposed India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor names Haifa as its gateway, yet Haifa’s capacity is dwarfed by regional rivals, and routes bypassing Israel are multiplying.

Across all three dimensions, the same pattern recurs: Israel displays power without legitimacy and presence without integration, while maintaining a core dependency on the American strategic umbrella. Israel does not anchor networks through its own gravitational pull, but rather hangs from a single supporting thread; if that thread weakens, the structure becomes unstable.

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This is what the erosion, or absence, of hegemony means. Israel is not becoming militarily weaker - its superiority remains formidable - but that superiority has failed to convert into authority that sets the region’s rules, commands legitimacy, or draws neighbouring states to organise their interests around it willingly.

Military dominance remains. Hegemony does not, and the gap between the two keeps widening.

One trend deserves attention: the gradual effort of Arab and regional states to organise themselves around Israel as little as possible. Over time, Israel risks shifting from an indispensable node to a function that can increasingly be assumed by Gulf, European, Indian, Turkish and Egyptian actors - especially if Washington’s commitment wanes, and alternative corridors multiply.

Yet this should not be mistaken for a prediction of imminent collapse. Domination without hegemony can endure for decades before unravelling; a crisis of legitimacy is necessary for decline, but not sufficient, and naked power can survive so long as its patron bears the costs.

The erosion described here will only constrain Israeli power if the region remains capable of collective political action.

Should resistance disappear, and neighbouring societies fragment into competing enclaves, Israel’s failure to integrate could become an advantage rather than a liability - and when the American umbrella eventually weakens, as every imperial guarantee does, the underlying landscape may become clearer: not a region organised around Israel, but one built despite it. 

Networks, like water, find a way around an obstacle - but only where a channel has first been carved.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.