“First of all let us rid ourselves of the foolish error that with the Army alone we can maintain the security of the State,” warned Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, in 1951. “Security rests on a foreign policy of peace: a sincere intention to be at peace with our neighbours, and with all the nations.”

Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, once heeded his predecessor’s warning. Though Netanyahu was always a hawk, he was a cautious one. He undermined the Oslo Accords; he did not abandon them. In the past, when he waged wars, they were short ones, designed to “mow the grass”, not to eradicate the lawn. His most significant achievement was the 2020 Abraham Accords, establishing formal diplomatic relations with several Arab states, and he aspired to extend that rapprochement to Saudi Arabia.

All of that changed on October 7, 2023, when a Hamas terrorist attack resulted in the worst single-day loss of Jewish lives since the Holocaust. Israelis were traumatised and radicalised to seek absolute security and total vengeance. Since then, Israel has undertaken military action in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Iraq and Yemen. Instead of seeking to deter and degrade Israel’s enemies, Netanyahu has talked of “obliterating” them. He has vowed to change “the face of the Middle East” and to “redraw” the map of the region.

Netanyahu’s desire to lash out in all directions after such a devastating sneak attack — Israel’s version of 9/11 — is perfectly understandable, but it is backfiring. In pursuit of absolute security, he is undermining Israel’s long-term interests. He is overextending Israel’s military and turning the state into a global pariah. He is also making Israel more dependent than ever on US protection even as his country’s unpopularity in America rises.

Israel’s continuing conflict with Iran shows how difficult it is for such a small state, even when working hand in glove with a superpower, to achieve its objectives. Last June, after 12 days of airstrikes against Iran, Netanyahu proclaimed “a historic victory, which will stand for generations”.

Yet only eight months later, he led Israel, in league with America, into another, far more ambitious conflict with Iran. This one was designed to destroy its nuclear and missile programmes and to change its regime. None of those objectives has been achieved, and Iran has responded by closing the Strait of Hormuz.

Netanyahu lobbied for the war, but he has lost control of it. His ally, President Donald Trump, has sidelined Netanyahu from peace negotiations and tries to humiliate the proud prime minister by saying: “He’ll do whatever I want him to do.” Last month, Trump forced Israel to accept a ceasefire in Lebanon that Netanyahu plainly did not want. A new US-Iran deal is likely to bring a reprise.

Yet Netanyahu has no choice but to grin and bear it because — in violation of the old Zionist mantra of self-reliance: “We will defend ourselves by ourselves” — he has made Israel dangerously dependent on the United States.

The Post last week reported that the US military expended “far more high-end munitions defending Israel amid hostilities with Iran than Israeli forces used themselves”. The article quoted an administration official as saying: “Israel is not capable of fighting and winning wars on its own, but nobody actually knows this, because they never see the back end.”

That’s a big, long-term problem in Israel, because its support in the US is cratering, partly because of rising anti-Semitism but also because of all the negative reporting about civilian casualties in Gaza. Gallup reports that, for the first time, Americans sympathise more with Palestinians than with Israel. The Pew Research Centre finds that 60 per cent of Americans have an unfavourable view of Israel, up from 42 per cent in 2022.

It sometime seems as if Netanyahu’s government goes out of its way to court international opprobrium. Last week, Israeli security forces led by the far-right minister Itamar Ben-Gvir zip-tied and taunted international activists who were part of a “peace flotilla” trying to challenge Israel’s blockade of Gaza. Even the US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, called Ben-Gvir’s actions “despicable”. Netanyahu himself acknowledged online that “the way that Minister Ben Gvir dealt with the flotilla activists is not in line with Israel’s values and norms”. Yet Ben-Gvir remains in the cabinet.

Incurring widespread enmity might be worth it if Israel were actually achieving the absolute security that Netanyahu seeks. But it isn’t. Israel has occupied more than half the Gaza Strip, but Hamas still controls nearly all the population. Israel carried out a brilliant operation in 2024 using exploding pagers and airstrikes to eliminate much of the Hezbollah leadership, but the terrorist group remains a potent threat. Israeli troops are now mired in what appears to be a long-term occupation of southern Lebanon that is leaving them vulnerable to Hezbollah drone strikes. And CNN reports that, following more than a month of Israeli-American airstrikes, “Iran’s military is reconstituting much faster than initially estimated”.

Meanwhile, the strain on Israel’s overstretched military continues to grow. In March, the military chief of staff, Lieutenant-General Eyal Zamir, told the security cabinet that he was “raising ten red flags” and that the army is “collapsing in on itself” because of the burden of nonstop combat since October 7, 2023.

I miss the old Netanyahu, who recognised Israel’s limits. A nation of about ten million people, no matter how strong, cannot dominate a region of more than 500 million people. Trying to achieve that chimerical objective will simply sap Israel’s strength and security.

• Max Boot is Washington Post columnist and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations