Cognipresent
July 19, 2026
In July 2026, Haaretz published one of the most extraordinary investigations in the history of Israeli national security journalism. Drawing on interviews with more than thirty senior sources across the political leadership, the defense establishment, and foreign governments, the paper reconstructed the anatomy of “Operation Puss in Boots”—Israel’s failed attempt, executed in early 2026, to topple the Islamic Republic of Iran and install a handpicked successor at its head.
The details read like satire. The successor Israel selected was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—the former Iranian president, someone they labeled a Holocaust denier, and the man who spent nearly a decade serving as the global face of eliminationist rhetoric against Israel. The ground force was to be roughly 16,000 Kurdish militiamen armed with weapons captured from Hezbollah, invading a country of 90 million under Israeli air cover. The intellectual inspiration was the collapse of Bashar Assad’s Syria—a comparison Israel’s own intelligence officers found so detached from reality that one likened it to trying to demolish a building with a pen.
And the decision to proceed was made, in the end, by one man. Benjamin Netanyahu never brought the plan to a formal vote in any statutory body. He did not brief the Knesset’s intelligence subcommittee. He overrode the written assessments of Military Intelligence, ignored the withdrawal of his own national security adviser—who dismissed the scheme as “science fiction”—and pressed forward even after his chief of staff demanded a halt three days before H-hour, upon discovering that the entire plan hinged on assassinating Ali Khamenei. The Americans were blunter still: the secretary of state reportedly called the plan “bullshit,” and the CIA director laughed it off as a “farce.”
The war happened anyway. Khamenei was killed. Ahmadinejad’s guards were bombed to free him from house arrest. And then—nothing. The Kurds never crossed the border. The minorities never revolted. The bazaar never rose on cue. The Mossad director quietly stopped attending situation assessments, and the grand design evaporated, leaving behind a decapitated but surviving regime, a victory narrative for Tehran, and a former Mossad chief’s verdict that anyone claiming credit for regime collapse “simply doesn’t know what they’re talking about.”
It would be a mistake to read this episode as an aberration—a one-off fever dream born of post-October 7 hubris. It is better understood as the most ambitious expression yet of a pattern that has defined Israeli strategy for half a century: the cultivation, funding, and empowerment of the most extreme available actors in the region, followed by the invocation of those same actors as the existential threats that justify perpetual military action.
The Pattern: Build the Monster, Then Fight It
Hamas: The Openly Acknowledged Case
The clearest and best-documented instance is Hamas itself. In the late 1970s and 1980s, when the secular-nationalist PLO was Israel’s principal adversary, the Israeli military administration in Gaza took a permissive—at times actively supportive—posture toward the Islamist movement that would become Hamas. In 1979, Israel granted official registration to Sheikh Ahmed Yassin’s Mujama al-Islamiya, the charitable and religious network from which Hamas emerged in 1987. Israeli officials of the era have said so plainly. Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, the Israeli military governor of Gaza in the early 1980s, acknowledged helping finance the Islamist movement as a counterweight to the PLO and the communists. Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official in Gaza, put it more bluntly years later: Hamas, to his great regret, was Israel’s creation.
The logic was divide and rule: an Islamist rival would fracture Palestinian nationalism and discredit the demand for statehood. The logic persisted long after Hamas turned its guns on Israel. In 2019, Netanyahu was reported to have told a meeting of Likud lawmakers that those who oppose a Palestinian state should support the transfer of funds to Hamas—because strengthening Hamas in Gaza while weakening the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank kept the Palestinians divided and made a unified negotiating partner impossible. For years, suitcases of Qatari cash flowed into Gaza with Israeli approval and facilitation. The policy was not a secret; it was a strategy. Hamas’s rule in Gaza served as the standing proof that “there is no partner”—until October 7, 2023, when the monster Israel had helped incubate and then deliberately propped up provided the justification for the most destructive war in the region’s modern history.
The Haaretz investigation itself notes this history in passing, observing that Israeli efforts to weaken the Palestinian Authority helped pave the way for Hamas’s rise as a military force. What it describes next completes the circle: during the Gaza war, Israel armed and backed a new militia under Yasser Abu Shabab—a figure widely reported to have led a criminal gang involved in looting aid convoys—as its chosen instrument against Hamas. He died of wounds from clashes with rival militiamen in December 2025. The instinct, even amid the wreckage of the last proxy experiment, was to reach for another armed extreme.
Lebanon: The Original Template
Before Gaza, there was Lebanon. In 1982, Israel invaded with the explicit aim of installing a client president—Bachir Gemayel, leader of the Phalange, a Maronite militia with a well-documented record of sectarian massacre. Gemayel was elected under Israeli guns and assassinated within weeks; his Phalangist followers, admitted by the IDF into the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, carried out one of the most infamous massacres of the twentieth century while Israeli forces ringed the perimeter. Israel then spent eighteen years sustaining the South Lebanon Army, a proxy militia that ran the notorious Khiam prison, before its overnight collapse in 2000. And it was the 1982 invasion itself—undertaken to destroy the PLO—that created the conditions for the birth of Hezbollah, the enemy that would define Israel’s northern front for the next four decades.
The Haaretz sources understood this genealogy perfectly well. Military Intelligence, searching for a single successful precedent of externally installed regime change in the region, came up empty. Lebanon was the cautionary tale they cited first. Netanyahu proceeded anyway.
Syria and the Ideology of Useful Chaos
The investigation reveals something even more telling about the strategic mind at work: Netanyahu’s inspiration for the Iran operation was Abu Mohammad al-Julani—the former al-Qaida affiliate commander whose jihadist coalition toppled Assad and who then rebranded himself as President Ahmad al-Sharaa. The Israeli prime minister watched a designated terrorist organization seize a state and concluded not that this was a danger but that it was a model. If a few thousand jihadists could snowball into a conquering army in Syria, why couldn’t Kurdish militias do the same in Iran?
Reported throughout the Syrian civil war, meanwhile, were Israel’s own quiet accommodations with armed factions along the Golan frontier—medical treatment, supplies, and tacit coordination with rebel groups including hardline Islamist ones—justified as border management, but consistent with the same doctrine: any armed extreme is acceptable, even desirable, so long as it bleeds the designated enemy.
Ahmadinejad: The Pattern Perfected
Which brings us to the most surreal element of the entire affair. For the better part of two decades, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the single most valuable rhetorical asset Israel possessed. His Holocaust denial conferences, his “wipe Israel off the map” sloganeering, his apocalyptic posturing—these were cited in every Israeli speech at the UN, every AIPAC address, every argument for sanctions and every case for preemptive strikes. Ahmadinejad was the face that made the threat legible to Western publics. He was, in the fullest sense, the justifying enemy.
And then, when he became useful in a different way, the Mossad recruited him. The Haaretz investigation describes agents pursuing his recruitment even as the October 7 attacks were unfolding, the Mossad director skipping consultations with the prime minister to manage the relationship personally, and cabinet ministers—forced to sign confidentiality agreements before being told—sitting in stunned silence as they learned that the man who had vowed Israel’s destruction was now Israel’s chosen successor for the Iranian state. One minister asked the obvious question: why bother changing the regime if the alternative is just as bad?
The question answers itself once the pattern is visible. The alternative being “just as bad” is not a bug. An extreme, compromised, or discredited successor is precisely what the doctrine requires, because the point has never been to produce stable, legitimate, independent governance in neighboring states. Stable and legitimate neighbors make demands, build coalitions, and acquire international standing. Fractured, extreme, or client regimes do two things instead: they remain dependent, and they remain frightening. The dependence makes them usable; the frightfulness makes them citable. Either way, the argument for the next war writes itself.
The Engine of Perpetual War
Strip away the operational details and the Haaretz investigation describes a decision-making machine optimized for war and structurally incapable of producing anything else.
Consider the sequence. The Mossad tells the inner cabinet in January 2025 that meaningful influence inside Iran would take about three years to build. Netanyahu compresses it to months. Military Intelligence produces formal written assessments that the plan has little chance of success; its research chief authors an entire document questioning the operation. The national security adviser walks out, calling it fantasy. The chief of staff orders everything stopped three days before launch. The American vice president is skeptical, the secretary of state is contemptuous, the CIA director is amused. Veteran Mossad directors—Dagan, Pardo—had rejected the entire concept as beyond Israel’s capabilities for two decades.
None of it mattered. The Haaretz sources describe senior officers joking privately that the Kurds were headed into a “shooting gallery”—asking when it would open—while saying nothing in the meetings, because no one wanted to stand up to the prime minister. This is how a state goes to war in the twenty-first century: not through deliberation but through momentum, with dissent privatized into gallows humor and responsibility concentrated in a single office. The security cabinet’s broad wartime authorization was stretched to cover an unprecedented covert regime-change operation without a vote. One man decided.
And the incentives that drove that one man are named in the investigation itself: a prime minister emerging from the shame of October 7, presiding over a stalemated war in Gaza, “searching for an achievement that would dwarf the stalemate.” Regime change in Tehran was not the conclusion of an intelligence assessment. It was the answer to a political need. The intelligence was then commissioned, contested, and finally overridden to fit it.
This is the deeper function of the pattern. The cultivated enemies and the fantasized proxies are not incidental to the perpetual-war posture; they are its raw material. Hamas justified the sieges and the wars in Gaza. Hezbollah—itself the offspring of the 1982 invasion—justified the wars in Lebanon. Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric justified two decades of escalation against Iran. And when the moment came to act on the grandest scale, Israel’s plan was not to foster an organic Iranian alternative over the fifteen years its own veterans said such work requires, but to bolt together a coalition of armed minorities and a recycled demagogue in a few months, launch the war before the plan existed, and trust that the bombing would sort out the politics.
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The Most Revolutionary Act 