this doesn't pass the smell test for me. first, we're talking about powerful vs. not so let's not use area as a proxy for power; that's not appropriate.
given that, history is rife with examples of powerful nations basically looking the other way when other countries not in their playpen get "bullied". these large international bodies e.g. League of Nations, UN have all failed generally when powerful entities decide they want to shake things up. individuals countries, obligated by treaty, also failed when e.g. Germany decided it wanted to chow down on "certain" parts of Europe. consider pre-WW2, Israel, what the US has done post-WW2, China/Xinjiang, etc. etc.
What about Israel?
Israel isn't expanding, all lands it conquered were in wars it didn't initiate. when a chance for peace came, it gave these lands back.
Did you see a map recently? Do you grasp the size of Israel vs it's neighbors? (The Sinai desert, which Israel gave back to Egypt as part of the peace agreement is x3 larger than Israel)
You can't clamp together imperialists like US Germany and China with Israel defense strategy, that's just weird.
Now don't get me wrong, some israeli leaders did/do crappy things, but never at the scale of China US or Germany, or for that matter any colonial country. It's a whole different scale.
> Israel isn't expanding, all lands it conquered were in wars it didn't initiate.
That's not strictly true. You're forgetting the 1947–1949 Palestine war, the first part of which was effectively a civil war where there's ample evidence of Jewish militias, with premeditation, taking part in land grabs every bit as much as the Arab militias.
In the West and especially in America this aspect is overlooked and even denied, as it doesn't fit the narrative of Israel as the underdog. Conversely, in the Muslim world this is pretty much the only aspect they want to discuss, for similarly self-serving reasons.
That's not really accurate.
Israel accepted the division plan the British offered where part of the land was to be Israel and the other Palestine.
The Palestinians didn't accept it, and 5 Arab armies attacked the newly founded Israel while calling for driving all the jews to the sea. (Mean while Ben Gurion asked the local Arab population to stay and promised equal rights in the new country. Both right wing and left wing Israeli leaders of that time talked about equal rights, while the Arab leaders talked about annihilation, and asked the local Arabs to leave while the clean the land from jews)
Israel fought back, and got territorial gains. Of course there were Jewish militias, Jews in British Mandate era were constantly being attacked by local arabs.
Anyway, even with all the complications of this era and our ability to form a tidy nerrative, the comparison of Israel to American and Chinese empirialism is just crazy talk. This stays true even if you totally accept the Arab narrative.
> these large international bodies e.g. League of Nations, UN have all failed generally when large, powerful entities decide they want to shake things up.
The UNSC is actually a pretty successful institution, all things considered. It gives "shakeups" a reasonable chance of being defused, and that's good enough most of the time. Enlightened self interest has to do the rest, of course - so failures will occur, but they ought to be rare. And Nazi Germany, the PRC in Xinjang etc. aren't exactly models of the rule of law!
given that, history is rife with examples of powerful nations basically looking the other way when other countries not in their playpen get "bullied". these large international bodies e.g. League of Nations, UN have all failed generally when powerful entities decide they want to shake things up. individuals countries, obligated by treaty, also failed when e.g. Germany decided it wanted to chow down on "certain" parts of Europe. consider pre-WW2, Israel, what the US has done post-WW2, China/Xinjiang, etc. etc.