They probably thought the world would applaud. The Israeli planners behind one of the most spectacular intelligence actions in the country’s history – targeting thousands of Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon and beyond by exploding the pagers in their pockets – would certainly have expected an ovation for the sheer audaciousness of it.

A plan years in the making, seemingly involving a fake manufacturing company that secured the contract to supply communication devices to Hezbollah before discreetly modifying them into remote-controlled grenades – it’s the stuff of Hollywood. But I suspect the Mossad wanted to be praised for more than its ingenuity and technical prowess.

First, the target was not a Palestinian group but Hezbollah, a proxy of the Iranian theocracy. It does not sit in territory occupied by Israel, but rather in Lebanon, where it exerts serious power. What’s more, Hezbollah has hardly been minding its own business this last year. Since 7 October, it has been bombarding northern Israel, raining daily fire on the communities across the border, turning them into ghost towns and forcing more than 60,000 Israelis from their homes.

Above all, it would have expected plaudits for what one British intelligence expert described to me as an “amazingly precise” strike, “in the sense that the only people carrying those pagers are going to be Hezbollah members and operatives.” (The fact that the Iranian ambassador to Beirut had one of the devices only confirms how closely Tehran and Hezbollah are militarily entwined.) In this view, and even allowing for several civilian casualties, what happened on Wednesday was “about as discriminate as you can get given the scale of the operation”.

But if the Mossad and its political masters thought that position would be universal, they will have been disappointed. Instead, the attack has been branded indiscriminate in Europe and elsewhere because, inevitably, not every Hezbollah operative was alone when their pager exploded – some were close to civilians, including children – and because the fear it’s left behind in Lebanon does not discriminate. Ordinary people doing ordinary things in Beirut or Sidon now contend with a new anxiety, nervous around anyone with an electronic device who might just be a member of Hezbollah. Which is why the deputy prime minister of Belgium called Israel’s move a “terror attack”.

Plenty in Israel will shrug off that talk, concluding that, in some quarters at least, the war in Gaza this last year has drained all goodwill and understanding towards the country so that Israel is condemned even when it targets enemy combatants quite tightly. Others will say – are already saying – that there was never any such understanding in the first place, that much of the world is hostile to Israel and its need for self-defence, and that Israel will be damned whatever it does.

That mindset is important, because it points to the wider and deeper problem of which this week’s deadly attack is merely a symptom. You could glimpse it in the objections made to the pager operation inside Israel and among its friends.

Those critics readily conceded that it was a tactical masterstroke. But what, they asked, was the strategy. When I spoke to Israel’s foremost military analyst, Amos Harel of the Haaretz newspaper, he said it was a “James Bond operation – but where is it leading us? What is its strategic value?” That question only becomes sharper when you learn that the reason Israel pressed the button this week was its fear that the Mossad’s trick with the pagers had been rumbled, that Hezbollah had begun to suspect its devices had been compromised. As a basis for strategic decisions that could lead to all-out war, “use it or lose it” is pretty thin.

Some wonder if the goal both of the exploding pagers and the heavy wave of Israeli airstrikes on Thursday night is not to trigger a larger confrontation with Hezbollah but, on the contrary, to pressure the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, into reducing or ending the attacks on northern Israel: escalate to de-escalate. If that’s the thinking, there’s no immediate sign it’s working. Friday morning saw Hezbollah intensify its rocket fire across the border.

The same critique that applies to the conflict in the north applies to the south. Israel’s confrontation with Hamas is marked by a similarly gaping hole where a strategy should be. Tactically, the Israeli military has done much in Gaza to degrade Hamas’s capacity. But it might not be long before it finds itself playing a game of Whac-A-Mole, driving the enemy underground in one place only for it to pop up somewhere else.

What, the US, UK and other allies ask, along with many Israelis, is the long- or even medium-term strategy? What is Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan for the “day after”? Given that his own defence chiefs tell him that the official goal of “total victory” over, and the eradication of, Hamas is impossible, who will govern Gaza when the fighting finally eases? What exactly is the plan for how Israel and the Strip will exist alongside each other?

You can go wider, asking the question a senior former US commander told me he had put to Israeli decision-makers soon after 7 October. What is the strategy to make ordinary Gazans, and indeed citizens of the broader region, less susceptible to the message of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis of Yemen and the rest of Iran’s so-called axis of resistance, and more amenable to coexistence with Israel?

The answer Israel has given to that question for much of its 76-year history has centred on force. The idea was that Israel, surrounded by hostile neighbours, would become so strong militarily that the region would eventually conclude that it could never be dislodged by arms. While it would never be welcomed, it could at least be grudgingly accepted as a fact of life.

But that doctrine has taken a toll on Israel’s ability to see clearly. To a man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail – and Israel has become that man. It cannot see there might be another way.

The alternative route is diplomacy. Say that to most Israelis, and they’ll laugh in your face. “What, you want to do a deal with Nasrallah or Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas butcher of 7 October? Good luck.” Press them further and they’ll say that they tried compromise before, whether in the 1993 Oslo accords or the 2005 pull-out from Gaza, and look how that worked out.

But that is to miss an opening that has been there all along, one vividly demonstrated just a few months ago. In April, when Iran launched a drone and missile attack against Israel, it was thwarted not by Israel alone but a coalition that included Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan, an arc of states united in their opposition to Iran.

A place alongside those allies, centred on normalisation with Saudi Arabia, is still available to Israel, if it chooses to take it. Joe Biden has put his name to it. The price will be Israel embarking on what the diplomats call a credible pathway to a Palestinian state, whose eventual creation is not only Palestinians’ obvious right but the essential precondition of Israel’s own long-term survival.

Netanyahu will not make that move. He remains fixated on his own grip on power, living from hour to hour. But one day an Israeli leader will have to do it. And when they do, that will be the most audacious security operation of all.

• Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

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