Binyamin Netanyahu has brought about a big shift in its defence doctrine

Since the attacks of October 7th 2023 Israel has fought devastating and prolonged campaigns in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran. It has abandoned a long-standing national-security doctrine favouring short decisive wars. Instead, Israel has blundered, wreaking havoc and inflicting appalling suffering while sapping its own resources and damaging crucial alliances.

Mr Trump is no peacenik. Nevertheless, he has tired of the open-endedness of Israel’s recent wars and the disruption they have caused. Arguably, the American president recognises what Israel—both its government and many of its citizens—refuses to acknowledge: that Israel’s current wars are failures. “They dragged on without a clear diplomatic purpose or outcome,” says Jeremy Issacharoff, a former Israeli ambassador who has also been in charge of strategic affairs at the foreign ministry. “The ceasefires are a positive development, but having them dictated to us by America harms Israel’s deterrence and makes it a client state.”

In Gaza and Lebanon Israel launched massive air strikes and ground campaigns in response to attacks by Hamas, militants in Gaza, and Hizbullah. It did huge damage to both groups and killed their leaders. But it also killed tens of thousands of civilians, levelling much of Gaza and destroying entire towns and villages in Lebanon. In both places ceasefires were agreed but then collapsed. Israel captured swathes of territory as “security zones”, to be held indefinitely. But Hamas and Hizbullah, though weakened, remained entrenched. Mr Netanyahu promised “total victory” but instead was forced by Mr Trump to end (or at least pause) Israel’s campaigns without removing the threat on its borders.

Likewise, after the end of the war against Iran last June the Israeli prime minister assured his people that the “existential threats” of Iran’s nuclear programme and ballistic missiles had been “removed” in “a historic victory which will stand for generations”. Instead, eight months later, Israel was at war with Iran again. This time Mr Netanyahu added another war aim, to “crush the regime in Iran” and prepare the ground for an uprising by the Iranian people. Instead, the regime in Tehran persists and Mr Trump is now intent on reaching a deal with it.

The old doctrine’s essence was that a tiny country with a small population, in a hostile region, could not afford to frequently wage long wars. It needed to wield overwhelming military power to deter its enemies, to be capable of detecting when they were planning an attack and to be able to act quickly, ideally pre-emptively, to secure victory in its enemies’ territory. And, importantly, Israel could not rely only on its army alone, wrote Ben-Gurion: “a foreign-policy of peace” was, he wrote. a “fundamental component of security”. Israel needed alliances and international legitimacy to secure its future.

Israel’s current leaders have abandoned many of those principles. Hundreds of thousands of reservists have spent many months fighting in Gaza and Lebanon and enforcing Israel’s increasingly brutal occupation of the West Bank. The devastation of Gaza, where Israel has killed over 70,000 people and where the population was brought close to starvation, has greatly eroded Israel’s international legitimacy and support even among its traditional allies.

And neither Israel’s leaders nor its people seem to have learnt anything from Gaza. Israel has resorted to similar tactics in Lebanon, uprooting civilians and destroying villages, despite Israel’s generals admitting that their campaign would not be sufficient to disarm Hizbullah or even prevent it from firing missiles.

“The Israeli public doesn’t want to hear now that you can’t just destroy Hamas or Hizbullah, or topple the regime in a massive country like Iran,” says Dan Meridor, a former minister from Mr Netanyahu’s Likud party who in 2006 had the task of revising Israel’s national-security doctrine. “They want to hear that the IDF is omnipotent. But as long as the aims are unrealistic and the only solutions are solely military, we’re bound to fail.”

You can read a copy of the full article here, in case you need it for whatever reason.

See also:

• Israeli army reservist kills 2 Palestinians, including a 14-year-old, in the occupied West Bank (Associated Press)
• US turns to Ukrainian counter-drone tech after Iran attacks, sources say (Reuters)
• Allies are done waiting for America to grow up • From gold reserves to arms contracts, Europe is systematically reducing its exposure to US capriciousness. (Lowy Institute)