Israel’s ‘campaign between the wars’ against Iran hurts US Ties

June 27, 2026
Amy McAuliffe
(The Conversation) – A lot hangs on whether the United States can compel Israel to cease operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon. After all, an end to the Israeli military offensive was a key provision of the broad U.S.-Iran agreement setting out a road map to end the Iran war.
And even though Israel did not sign the deal, policymakers in Washington will continue to press Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to abide by the truce.

Yet there’s a larger and more vexing issue for the Trump administration and its Arab allies in the Middle East that has received little attention: Israel’s long-standing “campaign between the wars” strategy and whether it threatens the prospect for long-term peace in the region.
The policy, known as “Mivtsa Bein Milchamot” in Hebrew and shortened to “Mabam,” has become a widely accepted facet of Israel’s national security. Its purpose is to degrade the capabilities of Iran and its key regional allies in any interwar period.
As the former assistant director of CIA for Weapons and Counterproliferation, I have watched Israel wage Mabam in an increasingly bold manner and widening geographic scope over the past seven years. Israel has broadened both the targets of the strategy and the instruments it uses to strike them, heightening the risk of escalation.
Save any unexpected abandonment of the policy, Israel will almost certainly continue launching limited military strikes, covert action and cyberattacks across the Middle East, regardless of any U.S. deal with Iran. This will likely take the form of degrading the capabilities of Iran’s partner Hezbollah, Iranian-backed Shiite militants in Iraq and even Tehran’s unreliable ally the Houthis in Yemen. And Israel will remain willing to take military actions short of full-scale war in Iran itself.
But such outcomes will pose serious challenges for the U.S., which seems intent on avoiding a renewed war with Tehran. In fact, Israel’s “campaign between the wars” risks widening the split with Washington and restarting war with Iran and its allies over the long term.
 
Origins of Mabam
Israel codified the Mabam strategy in a 2015 Israeli Defense Forces document. Its history, however, predates the official adoption of the policy, with the IDF executing “campaign between the wars” operations in the early 2010s.
Most scholars and Israeli military officials acknowledge that the strategy evolved from cross-border “reprisal operations” against Jordan, Egypt, Syria and the Palestinian Liberation Organization in Lebanon in the 1950s and ’60s .
The logic behind Mabam is that by using targeted operations to consistently downgrade the capabilities of Iran and its allies, Israel will be better prepared for future wars by maintaining a qualitative military advantage. Israel’s goal is to avoid escalation by taking actions that it judges Iran and its proxies will view as below the threshold for significant retaliation.
As the former chief of the Israeli general staff and architect of Mabam, Lt. Gen Gadi Eisenkot, explained in 2019: “Deviating from the binary approach of either preparing for war or openly waging it, the [campaign between the wars policy] strives for proactive, offensive actions based on extremely high-quality intelligence and clandestine efforts.”
 
Expanding beyond Syria
In the early 2010s, the Israeli military focused Mabam on Hezbollah in Syria, where the group lacked the advanced military capabilities it possessed in Lebanon and therefore posed a less significant risk of escalation.
Jerusalem placed a premium on degrading Hezbollah’s advanced weapons, supplied by its ally and sponsor Iran, and “preventing the entrenchment of terror infrastructures on the Golan Heights border,” in the words of Israeli military strategist Eran Ortal.
To achieve this, Israel employed airstrikes, cyberattacks, interdictions of weapons and covert action to impede Iran’s ability to resupply Hezbollah’s existing arsenal and supply it with more advanced weapons. Israel’s targets included Iranian facilities and missile warehouses in Syria, convoys and shipments of weapons, and Hezbollah and Islamic Revolutionary Guard personnel in Syria.
Later in the decade, Israel broadened its objectives to include pressuring the Assad regime in Syria and undercutting the long-standing Iranian-Syrian relationship.
Encouraged by the success of its strategy in Syria, Israel began to take action against Iranian-backed groups in Iraq and Lebanon as well.
In summer 2019, Israel reportedly struck the weapons depots of Iranian-back Shiite militant groups in Iraq. Explosive-laden drones that experts trace to Israel targeted equipment linked to Hezbollah’s precision-guided missile program.
With these actions, Israel almost certainly delayed and degraded some adversary capabilities, especially those of Hezbollah. In particular, it stopped or delayed Iranian transfers of precision-guided missiles and the guidance kits that Hezbollah could use to enable such capability, limiting the size of the Lebanese group’s arsenal.
 
An imperfect strategy
However, the size and capabilities of Hezbollah’s missile and rocket force show the limits of Israeli effectiveness. The group possessed an estimated 100,000 to 200,000 missiles and rockets prior to the resumption of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah in 2026. Israeli officials and pro-Israeli think tanks would make the counterfactual argument that Hezbollah’s arsenal, especially of advanced weapons, would have been much larger without Mabam operations.
Israeli officials refrain from directly connecting the country’s covert action in Iran since the late 2010s to Mabam. But explosions at nuclear, missile and drone facilities and assassinations of scientists outside the direct conflicts of June 2025 and from February 2026 clearly map to the goal of degrading Iranian military capabilities in between wars.
To use one prominent example, an explosion in July 2020 widely linked to Israel disabled a key Iranian advanced centrifuge assembly facility, destroying more than half of the facility.
But the attack had unexpected consequences. Iran was able to rebuild the capability in a matter of months, concentrating on locating future centrifuge assembly capabilities at sites buried deep underground.
 
A risk to US objectives
In an early 2026 graduation speech for military cadets, Netanyahu declared that Israel would move beyond Mabam to even more actively confront threats. “There is no more containment of threats. There is no more Mabam,” he said after decades of supporting the strategy.
But even a force that conducts a high number of military operations like the IDF needs a strategy short of full-scale war.
And since most in the Israeli security establishment view the Mabam strategy as generally successful in diminishing Iran’s capabilities and those of its partners and proxies, it will likely remain a prominent feature of Israeli strategy even if updated to reflect current perceived threats. This will be the case whether Israel is led by Netanyahu or another leader.
While a central aspect of Mabam is avoiding escalation, this balancing act will be increasingly difficult in today’s Middle East.
To retain U.S. support for Israel’s overall Iran strategy, expanded coordination with Washington will be crucial. Israel has sometimes, but not always, coordinated relevant actions with the U.S. For instance, it allowed the U.S. Central Command to review strikes it planned to launch from near the Al Tanf Base in Syria that hosted U.S. troops until February 2026.
Israel believes it has valid reasons for sometimes conducting military action on its own: Israeli officials view Iran developing a nuclear weapon as an “existential” threat and Hezbollah having a large arsenal of precision-guided missiles as a “strategic threat” to the state of Israel.
However, Washington is likely to ask for wider coordination with Israel in the aftermath of the Iran war. That war ever more tightly connected U.S. security interests to those of Israel, but the ongoing negotiations to end the conflict have shown a rare degree of distance between the two countries. Coordinating its operations short of war will be a bitter pill for Israeli leaders intent on acting as they desire. It also has the potential to further strain Israel-U.S. relations in the years ahead.
 

“The Lip you Press:” FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám 1:47

Juan Cole
Quatrain no. 47 in the first edition of Edward FitzGerald’s translation of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám conveys the realism of the original poems, which dispute the notion of any life after death but uphold the dignity and pleasure of our momentary lives nevertheless. Here, the Persian poetry departs most starkly from Islamic (and Christian and Zoroastrian) ideals, anticipating the Existentialist school of philosophy of the twentieth century. How it came about that agnosticism flourished in some sections of medieval Iranian (and Muslim Indian) society, probably among artisans as well as some intellectuals, is not clear. The poetry attributed to Khayyam bears witness to this medieval skepticism, however.
 

XLVII.

 And if the Wine you drink, the Lip you press,

End in the Nothing all Things end in – Yes —

     Then fancy while Thou art, Thou art but what

Thou shalt be – Nothing — Thou shalt not be less.

 
A. J. Arberry identified the original as no. 102 in the Bodleian manuscript; it is also found here on the web.

خیام اگر ز باده مستی خوش باش

با ماهرخی اگر نشستی خوش باش

چون عاقبت کار جهان نیستی اَست

انگار که نیستی چو هستی خوش باش

 
In literal prose, the first two lines say,

“Khayyam, if you are drunk with wine be glad

and if you are sitting with a moon-faced sweetheart, be glad.”

“Moon-faced” means beautiful, and implies fair skin. Since Iran was often conquered by pastoralists from Central Asia, the fairer skin of Mongols and Turks had cachet, since they ended up in palaces.
I translated the last two lines as blank verse this way in my rendering of the Rubáiyát :

“For you will be as nothing in the end;

Imagine that, while you exist — be glad.”

 
FitzGerald’s translation is close to the original, which is remarkable since it begins with the tropes of love poetry and wine parties, but then turns dark and urges us to be clear-eyed about our impending deaths, challenging us to find satisfaction even in that — in the whole cycle of our lives into final nothingness.
 
As I have mentioned before, one of the predecessors for the skeptical verse attributed to Khayyam was the blind Arab poet of northern Syria, Abu al-A’la al-Ma’arri (973-1057), who wrote:

Now this religion happens to prevail

Until by that religion overthrown,–

Because man dare not live with men alone,

But always with another fairy-tale.

and also

“I think our world is not a place to rest,

But where a man may take his little ease,

Until the landlord whom he never sees

Gives that apartment to another guest.”

He also said,

 “The people of the earth fall into two sorts: Those with an intellect but no religion, and those with religion but no intellect.”

 
But al-Ma’arri was sour in his pessimism, became something of an ascetic, and advised everyone against having children since it did them no favors to be brought into such a world. The mood of his poetry is very different from that of the Omarian verse, which accepts the limited time span of human beings and the often unpleasant and bewildering character of the life to which they have been fated, but is quite sure that we can find beauty, love and enjoyment during our abbreviated sojourn here. The first two lines above, about taking delight when you find someone pretty in your lap, is the las thing al-Ma’arri would ever say.
Then there was the Iranian physician and philosopher Abu Bakr al-Razi (Rhazes), who died in 925 CE, in Rayy (near today’s Tehran).
 
Peter Adamson explains that the Ismail thinker Abu Hatim reported of al-Razi,

“He says that in face-to-face debate, al-Rāzī argued against prophecy on the grounds that it would be unjust to single out only some people for knowledge that is useful by everyone. Furthermore, appointing only a certain few as religious leaders (imāms) would lead to dissension between their followers (Abū Ḥātim, AHR: 1). Followers of religious law are guilty of the cardinal intellectual sin of the Islamic world, taqlīd, which means uncritically adopting beliefs on the basis of authority (AHR: 24). Instead, al-Rāzī argues, God gives reason (ʿaql) to everyone, and in this respect everyone is created equal, able to determine for themselves what goals they should be pursuing . . . Furthermore, Abū Ḥātim tells us about a range of more specific religious teachings rejected by al-Rāzī in his book against prophecy, such as . . . the possibility of miracles . . .” – Adamson, Peter, “Abu Bakr al-Razi”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2025 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2025/entries/abu-bakr-al-razi.

But Abu Hatim may have been slamming al-Razi for not accepting some Ismaili Shi’i doctrines and may have painted him as more of an atheist than he was. Still, it seems likely that he departed from medieval Muslim orthodoxy regarding reason and revelation.
 
The editors who collected anonymous unconventional quatrains and attributed them to Omar Khayyam, however, do not use verses that criticize prophets. They seem more agnostic than militantly atheist. They just don’t think heaven and hell sound like plausible stories and are convinced that once you’re dead, you’re dead. They do seem to deny divine providence, the idea that God is always looking after us. Indeed, he is sometimes depicted as a trickster figure, more Loki than Odin. There is a good-humored resignation and a mischievous joy in life in the Omarian verses rather than a dour atheism. It is like, we’re stuck here for a little bit, we don’t know why, so let’s make out before they call the undertaker on us– because that is game over.
 
For more commentaries on FitzGerald’s translations of the Rubáiyát, see
FitzGerald’s Rubáiyátof Omar Khayyám: Commentary by Juan Cole with Original Persian