The return of Trump diplomacy, and a reckoning with the ICC: What does 2025 have in store for Israel?
The Jewish state is at a pivotal point in its history — here are 3 predictions for how things might unfold
What awaits Israel in 2025? We have some guesses. Photo by Jack Guez/AFP/Eva Marie Uzcategui/Pierre Crom/Getty Images
Columnist Dan Perry January 2, 2025
“The future is open,” wrote the philosopher Karl Popper. “It is not predetermined and thus cannot be predicted.”
He had a serious point. Our world is an unruly beast, seldom tamed by the sharpest minds or most careful calculations. But, in full knowledge of the folly of my endeavor, here are my predictions for Israel in 2025.
1. The Middle East wars will wind down, thanks to a new U.S. administration
The regional mayhem sparked by Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 invasion of Israel has set in motion tangled conflicts across the Middle East. The disaster in Gaza is ongoing; so is the insanity of the Houthis in Yemen firing rockets and drones at Israel. The war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon is paused following a ceasefire, and Israel has thrashed the Iran-backed militant group, but a conflict could reignite at the end of the 60-day truce on Jan. 27.
Yet all this may finally wind down, largely due to the unorthodox and transactional diplomacy of President-elect Donald Trump.
Trump’s determination to end these conflicts may actually bear fruit. That is largely because it is the Gaza war that keeps all the other fronts percolating, and Trump has enormous leverage on the one person who can end it: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Israel’s military says Hamas’ military wing has been eviscerated and is no longer a threat. But Netanyahu has blocked any effort to bring about an end game in Gaza, which will necessarily involve engineering a different government for the strip. He uses that fact — that if Israel were to pull out today, Hamas would still likely maintain power in the strip — as his excuse for prolonging the war.
A complete Israeli pullout in exchange for the hostages — a deal that Hamas has offered, and which more than 70% of Israelis desire — is opposed by the Israeli far right, which threatens to bring down Netanyahu’s government. This is why Netanyahu has swatted aside all the proposals from President Joe Biden’s administration for an end to the war that might also bring with it a normalization deal with Saudi Arabia.
Expect Trump to adopt these proposals, claim credit for them, and rope in Netanyahu. The cynical Israeli leader will have a much tougher time ignoring Trump, who is much admired in Israel partly because of Netanyahu’s own lionization campaign on behalf of the erratic and mercurial incoming president.
My prediction is that, by the end of 2025, the Middle East will be host to fewer active conflicts than today. But the early part of the year could well see an escalation. Netanyahu may need to boast of some more gains — perhaps the death of the (unofficial) new Hamas leader in Gaza, after Israel killed Oct. 7 mastermind Yahya Sinwar in September — before he’s amenable to peace. And 2025 could well be the year that Israel decides to try to take out Iran’s nuclear program; all doing so will take may be the green light from Trump.
2. Israelis will stop tolerating Haredi draft evasion
For decades, the issue of Haredi draft evasion has been a simmering source of resentment in Israeli society. That community’s exemption from mandatory military service — based on their mania about religious study at the expense of all else — has escalated into genuine rage, now that many non-Haredi Israelis are doing reserve stints of 200 days a year, and more, on account of the wars.
The informal exemptions, which at Israel’s founding applied to only some 400 men, will soon apply to about a quarter of potential conscripts.
2025 could mark a tipping point. Economic pressures, demographic shifts, and growing public impatience may coalesce into a reckoning. The 2023 protests against the government’s “judicial reforms” — a plan to turn Israel into an authoritarian state — showed Israelis’ capacity to mobilize en masse when they feel threatened. A similar groundswell could emerge to demand that Haredim share the national burden.
At the same time, the Haredi parties — which also control the fate of Netanyahu’s coalition — are trying to force through a law that would formalize the evasion. Indeed, Netanyahu promised such legislation in late 2022 in order to bring them into his fold. Expect Netanyahu to try some trickery, perhaps by arranging for a small number of Haredim to continue to receive conscription notices as part of a promised “process” to bring in more.
Some Haredi lawmakers acknowledge this imbalance: “I can’t look them in the eye,” Yitzhak Pindrus, a Haredi lawmaker, said of Israeli soldiers. But he added that religious Jews who do serve in the military, and become part of wider society, “pay a price in abandoning religion,” and that is the reason why he cannot support conscription.
This may not end without a very big fight, and this issue has the potential to cause Netanyahu’s destructive government to fall apart — because the Haredim and Netanyahu’s Likud base deeply differ on it. A reflection of that growing rift came on Jan. 1, when ousted defense minister and Likud lawmaker Yoav Gallant announced he was resigning from the Knesset, saying he could not support any law that fell short of drafting the Haredim.
3. The International Criminal Court will back down on Netanyahu and Gallant
The ICC’s decision, three months ago, to issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant was always controversial. Critics have argued that the move risks undermining the ICC’s credibility, as it appears both politically motivated and potentially unenforceable, since any country can grant immunity at will. (Many countries have pledged to enforce the warrants; but a notable few have refused to explicitly do so.)
Sometime in 2025, probably when the war ends, I expect the ICC to find a face-saving way to back down from these warrants. That could happen as a result of the establishment of an Israeli commission of inquiry into Israel’s tactics in Gaza, headed by a judge. Netanyahu, who is also facing broad demands from Israelis for an inquiry into the failures of Oct. 7, currently opposes this option, arguing essentially that the justice system is predisposed against him. But there is a tradition of establishing such commissions in the wake of disasters.
A quiet shelving of the warrants would also help the court with the incoming Trump administration. The U.S. is not a part of the ICC, and Trump has lambasted the warrants and has previously pushed for sanctions against ICC officials. Countries, including U.S. allies, that might collaborate with the Israel arrest warrants may also feel the pressure.
Will these forecasts for 2025 come to pass? As various thinkers have noted, the best way to predict the future is to create it. I won’t deny that I would welcome any concrete action to make the above predictions come true.
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