The American-Israeli war against Iran launched in late February 2026 included an unusually ambitious objective. Beyond degrading Iran’s nuclear and missile capabilities, Israel and the United States devised a plan to topple the regime in Iran. According to media reports, this effort military pressure could lead to the collapse of the Islamic Republic, an influence operation aimed at the global Iranian public, an understanding of sorts the Kurds would create an internal threat to the regime, and an effort to recruit former Iranian President Ahmadinejad to take power.
This marked a significant departure from the traditional Israeli approach to the region. Israel has fought many wars since 1948, carried out countless covert operations, struck nuclear facilities, occupied territory and killed senior leaders of hostile organizations. Yet, for the most part, it did not seek to determine who governed its neighboring states. Israeli strategy was generally based on a more modest assumption: hostile regimes could be deterred, contained, weakened or forced to accept certain limits. Israel might destroy their military capabilities or kill individuals who posed a direct threat. Changing the political order of another state was something else.
There were a small number of exceptions, and they are revealing. In 1956, Israel joined Britain and France in a war that was connected, particularly for the Europeans, to the hope of removing Gamal Abdel Nasser. For Israel, this goal, it seems, was more of a hopeful aspiration than a concrete goal. Either way, the result was the opposite. American and Soviet pressure forced the attackers to withdraw, while Nasser emerged politically strengthened.
In 1982, Israel went considerably further. The invasion of Lebanon was intended not only to remove the PLO’s military presence from southern Lebanon, but also to reshape the Lebanese political order and facilitate a peace agreement with a friendly government in Beirut,. Indeed, according to various reports Israel was instrumental in making sure that there will be the required quorum to elect its ally Bashir Gemayel as President in August 1982. His assassination of Bashir Gemayel and the subsequent collapse of much of the Israeli political design demonstrated how difficult it was to translate military superiority into a desired political order.
A third, somewhat different case was the Israeli military plan to kill Saddam Hussein after the 1991 Gulf War. The plan, that was not fully approved by the cabinet, as far as we know, and was not carried out, was not an attempt at regime change in the full sense. Rather, it seems that Israel wanted to restore deterrence by assassinating the leader that fired 39 ballistic missiles at it, and possibly also altering the threat emanating from Iraq. The operation never took place. During a rehearsal at Tze’elim, a live missile was mistakenly fired, killing five Israeli soldiers. The disaster effectively ended the plan.
There were good reasons for this caution.
First, Israel understood the limits of military power. It could destroy an air force, occupy territory, eliminate a military commander or destroy a nuclear reactor. It was much harder to control the political consequences that followed. The experience in Lebanon was particularly instructive. Military superiority did not translate easily into an ability to construct a favorable political order.
Second, Israeli leaders were historically skeptical that regime change would necessarily produce governments more favorable to Israel. This distinguished Israel, at times, from the United States. American policy could be informed by an expectation that democratization would eventually produce more moderate or pro-Western governments. Israelis had less reason for such confidence. Public opinion across much of the Arab world was often more hostile toward Israel than the governments ruling it. For example, an Arab Barometer poll from May 2026 shows that 95% of Egyptians oppose normalization with Israel. This, in the 47th year of an Israeli-Egyptian peace accord that was signed in 1979. In Jordan, 67% of people polled in May 2026, opposed normalization with Israel even if it recognizes a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital. Jordan had maintained secret ties with the Jewish state even before the latter was created in 1948, and has a formal peace agreement with it since 1994.
From an Israeli perspective, the fall of an adversarial dictator could therefore produce not peace, but a more representative and perhaps more hostile government.
There was also a broader strategic culture at work. Israel’s traditional security doctrine was essentially defensive in its political objectives, even when highly offensive in its military means. The purpose of force was to protect the state, deter adversaries and periodically reduce threats. It was not to transform the Middle East. Transformation, according to the Iron Wall approach, will occur in response to internal dynamics in the Arab world, following a repeated Arab failure to beach Israel’s defensive posture.
The events since October 7, 2023 have weakened this assumption.
The most important change is the declining Israeli faith in containment. For years, Israel attempted to manage hostile actors behind borders, fences, walls, missile defenses and deterrence. Hamas could be contained in Gaza. Hezbollah could be deterred across the Lebanese border. Iran could be kept at a distance through covert operations, sanctions, attacks on weapons shipments and strikes against its regional network. Indeed, Prime Minister Netanayahu even supported limited financial assistance from Qatar to Hamas in Gaza as a way to contain the greater political threat he saw, the one of Pelstanin state.
October 7 delivered a blow to this way of thinking. The lesson many Israelis drew was not simply that intelligence had failed or that the Gaza border had been insufficiently defended. A broader conclusion emerged: an enemy committed to Israel’s destruction cannot safely be left on the other side of a wall and periodically deterred.
This logic gradually expanded beyond Hamas. It is mostly manifested in developing buffers in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria. But the gre\atest threat was seen from Iran. If the threat from Iran is ultimately generated by the nature and ideology of the Islamic Republic, goes the logic, then destroying missiles or delaying the nuclear program addresses only part of the problem. Iran can rebuild missiles. Nuclear infrastructure can be reconstructed. Hezbollah and other proxies can eventually be rearmed. From this perspective, the source of the problem is in Tehran. These ideas were floated for years, including by former Prime Minister Bennet as well as by former senior security officials such as Gen, (Ret.) Yossi Kupperwasser in this journal.
The killing of Iran’s senior leadership in the opening hours of the 2026 war represented the most dramatic expression of this new logic. Israel had long practiced targeted killing against leaders of on-state armed groups as well military commanders including Iranian military figures. But killing the Supreme Leader together with much of the senior military-security leadership of a sovereign state was qualitatively different. It blurred the line between attacking the capabilities of an enemy regime and attacking the regime itself.
There is a second difference between Iran and Israel’s traditional Arab adversaries. Israelis increasingly believe that the Iranian regime does not represent the preferences of much of the Iranian population. This matters strategically. As noted, one of the traditional arguments against Israeli involvement in regime change was that removing an authoritarian ruler could empower a public even more hostile toward Israel. Iran appears different. Years of demonstrations against the Islamic Republic culminating in the events of January 2026, widespread dissatisfaction with the regime, and a possible gap between Iranian nationalism and the revolutionary ideology of the state have probably encouraged a belief in Israel that political change in Iran could actually produce a less hostile relationship.A milder version of this appeared in Israeli statements once it became clear that regime is not happening. Israel then suggested that its goal was weakening the regime to create the conditions for its fall by the hands of the Iranian public.
A third change is the role of the United States. Israeli leaders historically understood that attempts to transform the regional order without American backing could end badly. The memory of 1956 is especially important in this regard. In 2026, however, Israel did not confront Iran alone. American participation radically altered the strategic equation. It expanded the military capabilities available against Iran, reduced Israel’s international isolation and, perhaps most importantly, made objectives that once seemed beyond Israeli power appear at least conceivable. Indeed, with the Iran case, Israel had relied on a great power alliance in two out of the three efforts it made for regime change.
Finally, the experience of the previous two and a half years has also changed Israel’s appetite for risk. Since the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack, Israel has repeatedly undertaken actions that before the war would have been considered dangerously escalatory. It fought Hezbollah directly and killed its leader, struck Iran, operated extensively in Syria, attacked targets in Yemen and demonstrated a much greater willingness to eliminate the senior leadership of its enemies
There is, however, a risk in the new approach.
The old Israeli reluctance to pursue regime change was not simply timidity. It reflected lessons accumulated over decades. Military power is better at destroying political orders than creating new ones. Regimes that appear fragile can survive enormous pressure. Populations that dislike their rulers do not necessarily welcome foreign states bombing their country. And even when a hostile regime collapses, what replaces it may be weaker, more violent or more dangerous.
Iran magnifies all these uncertainties. It is a large country with strong national traditions, powerful institutions and a long history of suspicion toward outside intervention. Israel can contribute to weakening the Islamic Republic. It has far less control over what comes next.
The important change in 2026, therefore, is not simply that Israel wants a different regime in Tehran. Israel has wanted many favorable developments in the region that it did not believe it could produce. The real change is that Israeli leaders became willing to employ power in ways intended to help bring such a political outcome about.
That represents a deeper transformation in Israeli strategic thinking: a movement from deterrence and containment toward political transformation.
October 7 explains much of this shift. The trauma of containment’s failure created a powerful demand to remove threats rather than merely manage them. The weakening of Iran’s regional network, the perceived estrangement between the Iranian regime and much of its population, American military support, and Israel’s greater willingness to accept escalation all made the new approach appear possible.
But the old questions remain. Israel has demonstrated an extraordinary capacity to penetrate Iran and to eliminate even its most senior leaders. That is a military achievement. Whether such capabilities can produce a preferred political order is an entirely different question.
Israel learned that distinction in 1956 and, much more painfully, in Lebanon after 1982. The great strategic experiment of 2026 is whether Iran will prove different.
