Not at the Table: The Sociology of Israel’s Own War
Being inside a field and sitting at the table where that field’s rules get written are not the same thing. Bourdieu’s distinction is simple but easy to lose sight of, an actor can be inside a field, affected by its outcomes, even fighting for it, and still have no place in the question of who writes its rules. Last week, through Golda Meir’s hesitation in 1973, I wrote about Israel’s dependency on the US, institutionalized since 1967, as a heteronomous structure, one whose rules are set by the tolerance of an outside actor. The Iran memorandum signed in June 2026 shows the next stage of that same heteronomy. Israel isn’t only inside a field someone else governs anymore. It isn’t at the table where the rules get written either.
The starkest sign of this came in how a war ended up getting learned about. On the night of June 14, Netanyahu was with his security cabinet in a bunker, bracing against a possible Iranian missile strike. Trump called, informing him the war they’d waged together was effectively over, the memorandum about to be signed. The detail matters, because it says something semiotic, the side that started the war together receives its ending as news. The gap between deciding and being informed is a quiet instance of what Bourdieu called symbolic violence. The violence here works not through force but through the normalization of exclusion, Israel’s absence from the memorandum is so unremarkable that no one even feels the need to explain it.
An earlier version of this same scene played out in the 1991 Gulf War. As Einat Wilf recounts in her book, while Iraq launched Scud missiles at Israel, the US asked Israel not to retaliate so as not to fracture the Arab coalition, and Israel complied. Even then, the power guaranteeing Israel’s security was also the power that took away its right to exercise that security. Thirty-five years later the same structure repeats, not only in the decision to hold fire but in the terms on which a war ends. The scope has widened. In 1991, all that was asked of Israel was silence. In 2026, an entire negotiation process runs without Israel’s knowledge, then gets reported to it afterward.
Israel was absent at every stage of the framework agreement signed the next day. But what’s more interesting than the absence itself is how it got compensated for. On June 11, Netanyahu announced he’d received a commitment on four elements of the final agreement, removal of the enriched material, dismantling the infrastructure, limits on missiles, an end to support for proxies. His office framed this not as a negotiated term but explicitly as “President Trump’s commitment,” noting in the same breath that Israel wasn’t a party to the memorandum.
It’s worth looking at how four different kinds of capital were distributed here. Military capital sat with Israel, it had carried out the February strikes jointly with the US, no deficit there. Economic capital was largely there too, its own arms industry, its own intelligence capacity. But institutional capital, the right to sit at the table, to set the agenda, to have a say over the draft, wasn’t there at all. What was left was only symbolic capital, a promise out of Trump’s mouth, unrecorded, unverifiable, revocable. That an actor this strong in military and economic capital could be left this bare of institutional capital is close to a textbook definition of a heteronomous field. Strength alone doesn’t change the field, because what determines a field’s rules isn’t the amount of power an actor holds, it’s who sits at the table.
And it was revoked, or more accurately, never really granted. The document actually signed in mid-June delivered none of the four elements in full. The uranium stockpile stayed in Iran, to be down-blended on-site under IAEA supervision rather than removed. The missile program and proxy forces were pushed to a later stage. This shows the structural weakness of symbolic capital, a promise with no institutional guarantee behind it can be reinterpreted however suits the one who made it. Newsweek read the document as “a peace between equals,” precisely the framing Israel had spent months trying to avoid, because a peace between equals conceals an asymmetry in which one side isn’t even at the other’s table. Trump’s own words stated that asymmetry without needing any theoretical framework at all, calling Israel the “very small partner” next to America’s “big partner.”
The field’s heteronomous structure applied to Iran too, but in a different form. Iran’s negotiating behavior was a weak actor’s strategy for appearing strong. Leaving the fate of its 440 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 percent deliberately vague, demanding transit tolls in the Strait of Hormuz that international law doesn’t recognize, giving contradictory accounts of what IAEA inspectors could access, all of it served the same function, concealing real weakness. That weakness was real, according to a poll its own government commissioned, 60 percent of the public said they couldn’t get by financially, 70 percent wanted the government changed. But Israel’s position was different in kind. Iran could compensate for its weakness with strategic ambiguity because it still made its own decisions, it was only hiding how it presented them. Israel’s weakness touched the decision itself, its very capacity to decide.
This difference shows up in Netanyahu’s own position by late May. He wanted to keep fighting, and was skeptical of the negotiations. But he couldn’t do it alone, a long campaign against Iran wasn’t sustainable without America’s logistical backing. The gap between what he wanted and what he could actually do is the definition of being in a heteronomous field, an actor’s own preferences have to stay within the tolerance of whoever sets the field’s rules. As a US official told Axios, Netanyahu “seemed to recognize he couldn’t stop Trump from signing it.” That he barely mentioned the deal in an eight-minute opening statement hours after it was announced was the verbal form of that same acceptance.
Netanyahu’s own coalition partners didn’t read it any differently. Smotrich and Ben Gvir called the deal dangerous and said Israel wouldn’t be bound by it, Bennett called it a dangerous turn for security, Eisenkot called it a miserable result. What’s notable here isn’t the content of the objection, it’s that the objection still targets the outcome, not the process. No one is asking why Israel wasn’t at the table. Everyone is asking why the result that came from not being at the table is bad. This shows how the heteronomy reproduces itself, the exclusion itself has stopped being up for debate, only its consequences are.
The exclusion didn’t stop at the bilateral table either, which shows that this heteronomy belongs to a field structure, not a single relationship. The declaration from the NATO summit in Ankara on July 7-8 put a direct call for Iran to respect freedom of navigation through Hormuz into its text, the very issue Israel had fought over. Israel isn’t among the thirty-two allies who signed it, isn’t a member to begin with. A separate coalition led by France and the UK is providing minesweeping support in the strait, and it’s the European states that stood furthest from the fighting, not the one that waged it, inside that security arrangement.
This point is worth pausing on, because it says something counterintuitive. If the field belonged to a single hegemon, Israel’s exclusion might be fixable by repairing one relationship, a better deal with Washington, a tighter alliance. But when the field stretches out to a thirty-two member alliance, a separate European coalition, Pakistani mediation, when it moves from unipolar to multipolar, Israel’s position doesn’t improve. If anything, every new actor inherits the habit of leaving Israel out while building its own table. Heteronomy here stops being loyalty to a single patron and becomes a rule built into the field itself, whoever holds power, whoever builds the table, the excluded side stays the same.
Golda Meir’s heteronomy in 1973 took the form of deciding while keeping an eye on Washington, the decision was still hers, an outside factor just entered the calculation. Today’s heteronomy is categorically different, the decision-making process itself now happens in a different field, and what falls to Israel is only learning the outcome. That shift in capital, from economic and military capital to institutional capital, to access to the decision-making process itself, is a form of exclusion Israel has never lived quite this openly before.
For a field to be heteronomous means that even its strongest actor can’t write its rules, only live with their consequences. That’s what Israel has learned over the last six months. Power on its own doesn’t guarantee a seat. What guarantees a seat is who built the table in the first place.
