By Sardar Khan Niazi

For months, Western leaders have framed the war in Gaza around a singular objective: stabilizing the enclave. Conferences are held, day-after plans debated, and donor countries asked to pledge billions for reconstruction. Gaza is treated as the perennial crisis needing external management — a place whose future must be engineered from the outside, preferably through security arrangements palatable to Israel. Yet this framing ignores an increasingly obvious truth: it is Israel, not Gaza that is in urgent need of stabilization. It is a state losing its internal compass. Israel today is governed by the most far-right coalition in its history — a bloc that, even within Israeli society, is viewed as an existential threat to democratic norms. Senior ministers openly advocate permanent occupation of Gaza, mass population transfers, and the rejection of any Palestinian political horizon. The cabinet is paralyzed by ideological divisions, while the prime minister, politically weakened and facing corruption trials, survives by appeasing extremist partners. This is not the posture of a stable state. It is the behavior of one drifting into ideological militancy, unmoored from accountability. For decades, Israel’s claim to exceptional security competence formed a key pillar of its international legitimacy. A security doctrine that had imploded later this doctrine collapsed on October 7. The country has since oscillated between maximalist war aims and the absence of any credible post-war plan. The leadership insists on total victory in Gaza even as military officials concede that such an outcome is unattainable. The resulting cycle — overwhelming force, followed by renewed insurgency, followed by more force — demonstrates not strategic clarity but strategic exhaustion. It is a diplomatic Isolation, not triumph. Israel’s standing abroad is equally shaky. Traditional allies have issued unprecedented criticisms of its conduct in Gaza; human rights organizations have accused it of violations that carry serious legal implications. Tel Aviv’s diplomatic bandwidth is now spent not on regional integration but on damage control. At the UN, resolutions condemning Israeli actions have gained overwhelming support; European public opinion has turned sharply; and even Washington has publicly questioned Israel’s military trajectory. A country unable to command trust, even among its closest friends, is not a stable actor in the international system. The Gaza mirage is quite visible now. Meanwhile, the notion that Gaza can be stabilized without stabilizing Israel is delusional. The enclave’s destruction is not the outcome of inherent Palestinian dysfunction but of decisions taken in Tel Aviv. No reconstruction plan — Arab-led, Western-funded, or UN-supervised — will succeed if Israel’s political leadership remains committed to indefinite control, punitive blockade policies, and the exclusion of any legitimate Palestinian representation. Gaza is not unstable in a vacuum; it is destabilized by an occupying power undergoing its own crisis of direction. However, the region cannot wait. The Middle East has long been shaped by the imbalance between a stateless, fragmented Palestinian polity and a militarily dominant Israel. Today, however, the more dangerous instability is emerging from within the stronger party. A polarized Israeli society, an ideologically extreme leadership, and a collapsing security doctrine present a combustible mix with regional implications. Stabilization, therefore, cannot mean only rebuilding Gaza’s homes and institutions. It must involve re-anchoring Israel to international norms, re-establishing political accountability, and reconstructing a peace framework abandoned for decades. In conclusion, one can say that the world cannot treat Gaza as a perpetual emergency while ignoring the deeper political emergency unfolding in Israel. If the international community is serious about preventing future cycles of violence, it must acknowledge where the center of instability truly lies. Stability is not achieved by managing the rubble of Gaza. It begins by confronting the crisis inside Israel.